Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2018 i PC & Tech Authority

Gmail is getting a much-needed facelift. Google sent a message to G Suite administrators highlighting the changes, which includes a host of new features as well as a design refresh. According to the leak, the desktop version of Gmail will incorporate features from the mobile version, such as the artificial intelligence-generated auto responses, but there are also completely new features in the offing. Leaked screengrabs show tools such as a snooze function that will temporarily remove incoming messages when users are too busy to respond immediately. There will be options to make the message reappear an hour, day or week later, rather than being buried below newer messages. Google is expected to make space for Calendar and to-do lists within the interface. With privacy concerns becoming more prevalent, Google is…

It was a big moment when news broke in early May that Nvidia was once again selling its graphics cards on its own website at the original retail price in the US. Not because selling them online was new, but because it marked an important point where GPUs were suddenly back in stock after months of shortages. Both Nvidia and AMD have been posting record revenues of late due to the high demand for their products thanks to the crypto mining boom, and while they’ve been gracious and playing down the effect crypto mining has had on these numbers, make no mistake, it is most likely the primary reason. Both however are already forecasting that the next quarter or two will show drastically reduces sales figures. They can already see…

The ZX SPECTRUM was released on 23rd April 1982 with a choice of two memory sizes, 16KB and 48KB RAM and they were very highly respected indeed, with their splash of colour, soft-touch keys and compact size. Though an earlier model – the ZX81 – had been released in the previous year, the Spectrum offered colour graphics. The ZX Spectrum was designed by Sinclair’s industrial designer Rick Dickinson, and filled with hardware by Richard Altwasser. It had an RF connection, making it compatible with televisions, an image resolution of 256x192, and 8-bit graphics. IN THE BEGINNING Its predecessor, the ZX81, was available for mail order and home assembly, and was the first affordable home computer you could buy in the shops. It spawned many copycats soon after, but was not…

“THERE ARE THOSE WHO WOULD RATHER PUSH PIECES AROUND A BOARD THAN DISPATCH NAZIS IN CALL OF DUTY” I would love a digital detox,” says Jayson Brinkler, a photographer in his forties with an exhibition in Paris. Given he has a shade under 70,000 followers on Instagram, Brinkler is a surprising advocate for being less connected, as well as being a passionate advocate of film photography. “Film is a dying art,” he tells me. “Kodak went into liquidation, Agfa went, Polaroid went, all the big institutions that we know in photography that kept the industry going have disappeared.” In its place, disposable digital images, samey Instagram feeds and a constant demand to upload more. “It is exhausting,” said Brinkler. Six photographers are freezing and on a bi-monthly photowalk organised by…

I‘ll tell you why we usually bring in only top end motherboards when a new chipset comes out and we do a group test. Premium boards generally have a full suite of features, many – but not all – of which trickle down to lower-end boards. The thinking here is that if you are considering a lower-end board it’s quite possible the important aspects have been covered in our review, like the audio codec for example, and you can use that knowledge when you’re shopping for a budget board. That said, we know how popular premium motherboards are. And we get why, they’re hard to resist while being relatively easy to justify given you’re likely to hold onto it for at least a couple of years - Intel’s recent trend…

ASRock, perhaps undeservedly at times, has a reputation for being a value oriented brand. While there’s nothing wrong with that per se, it does a bit of a disservice to ASRock, which deserves credit for some outstanding products over the years as well as its willingness to take a few risks (X299 ITX board anyone?) Motherboards in this range are the bread and butter for ASRock though. The Fatal1ty B360 Gaming K4 is easily the cheapest board in the roundup, yet at the same time, its specification is as good as any board here. Straight up that makes it a strong contender in this market. One of the little things we like about ASRock is the way it packs its motherboards. Most boards come in an anti-static bag inside the…

While SATA drives remain popular, and will do for some time to come, NVMe drives are the future thanks to their far superior performance. Their weakness is still pricing though, something Intel has attempted to rectify, firstly with the 600p series, and now the updated 760p series. The competition is tough though, and 760p series drives need to offer both value and performance at their respective price points to compete in an increasingly cut throat marketplace. The 760p brings several major improvements over the popular 600p. 64-layer 3D TLC NAND Flash memory replaces the older 32-Layer NAND found in the 600p. The controller has been updated and impressively, power consumption has been cut in half. The key features you’d expect on a 2018 SSD are present including AES 256-bit encryption,…

Asus may be best known for sleek laptops and enthusiast motherboards, but over the past few years its ProArt monitors have carved out a designer niche. The name says it all: these colour-accurate displays are aimed at people who need realistic colours to make their living. The PA32U is Asus’ largest such monitor yet – and it’s stunning. Not only is the two-tone silver and black finish stylish, it’s the best-made monitor I’ve used. That dainty-looking pillar supports the hefty frame with ease and is incredibly flexible: you can pivot the screen in either direction, and it rotates slickly from side to side by up to 60°. The ProArt PA32U comes pre-tuned for sRGB and Adobe RGB profiles, with two A4 print-outs in the box that show how your display…

Asus’ ROG Zephyrus was one of the first notebooks that was designed to be svelte in size but a beast when it came to gaming. This black beauty, with its sharp lines and glowing details sure looks great, although having ‘Republic of Gamers’ branding all over it will make boardroom brethren suspicious. Opening the Zephyrus’ lid famously simultaneously opens up an exhaust port at the rear of the base for enhanced cooling. While this sounds cool, in reality a plastic flap opens to reveal a heatsink. If it doesn’t sit on flat surfaces it bends and distorts. But is this a gaming beast? The latest version comes with a Coffee Lake hexa-core, Core i7-8750H which offers a 2.2GHz stock speed, 3.9GHz Turbo Boost (which can push to 4.1GHz on a…

We’re used to Apple launching products in darkened halls, with the hush of an expectant crowd only broken by the generous distribution of adjectives. “Magical.” “Wonderful.” “Amazing.” “Cool.” By contrast, Apple’s keynote unveiling of the new iPad felt positively downbeat. The keynote wasn’t even in a glamorous location: Apple chose Lane Tech College Prep High School in Chicago. This signals a gear change for the iPad. Apple is clearly aware that it’s already reached the vast majority of home users and professionals who are going to buy tablets, and it’s switching its gaze to potentially the biggest market of all: schools. This is the first iPad to be aimed at students, and that’s reflected in a lower price plus further discounts for educational establishments. It’s a welcome development, but Apple…

The P20 Pro has no room for expandable storage, no wireless charging and no 3.5mm headphone jack. In the Pro’s defence, it comes with a hefty 128GB of internal storage and benefits from full IP67 dust and waterproofing. In terms of design, everything else is positive: this is one of the most beautiful phones I’ve seen. The plain black and blue options are nice enough, but the multicolour shimmering Twilight finish is simply gorgeous. Whichever colour you opt for, the P20 Pro is slim and stylish, with next to no bezel at all. While it does have an iPhone X-style notch, it’s substantially smaller than Apple’s and can be switched off in the settings, blacking out to become part of the bezel. When you do this, you can still use…

1 DOES IT MATTER IF I CHOOSE ALEXA OR GOOGLE? Right now there are two established smart speaker platforms – the Amazon Echo, with its virtual assistant Alexa, and the Google Home, which uses the Google Assistant. There’s also a third option in the recently released Apple HomePod, which uses Siri. All of these platforms work in the same way. You address them by saying “Alexa”, “Okay Google” or “Hey Siri”, then state what you want them to do. For example, “play me music by Imagine Dragons”, or “turn off the living room lights”. To an extent, therefore, it doesn’t matter which you choose. If you’re buying your first smart speaker, though, there are issues to consider. The first is compatibility: you need a smartphone to set up your smart…

Once you’ve checked the weather, and turned your lights on and off a few times, you might be wondering what else Alexa can do. Here are some of our favourite skills that really extend the usefulness of the Amazon Echo – and they can all be installed with a single, simple voice command. “ALEXA, ADD NATIONAL RAIL” This practical skill allows you to check upcoming departures from any station on the national network to any other. It’s a bit pedantic – you have to step through the process of naming your departure and destination stations – and you can’t easily ask it about future services. Still, it’s a convenient way to make sure that you’re not left hanging around on the platform. “ALEXA, ADD JUST EAT” Link Alexa to your…

The future of the internet is at a crossroads, with the direction set by regulators who are finally giving due weight to the importance of privacy. The most obvious sign? That US politicians alike are ready to slap down Facebook in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, summoning CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg to answer questions over the missteps made by the world’s dominant social network. “It’s a really big moment, a cultural awakening about what’s happening with our data,” said Laura Tribe, executive director at OpenMedia. “My biggest hope is… that we can have a conversation as a society about how we want this to go. It’s about trying to build something that’s better.” We can’t say if Facebook will exist in its current form in five years…

I do not want to be writing this review. I would much rather be playing Battletech, Harebrained Scheme’s tactical break into the more than 30-year-old universe of the same name, a game about giant walking mecha striding about the battlefield causing glorious mayhem in a universe that is as rich as it is far-fetched. And I would be playing it now, and far happier to be writing this review, but to date I have tested Battletech on three different PCs, and the damn thing just won’t run – and not in any comprehensively familiar pattern, either. My home PC crashes before launching the tutorial. My work PC managed the game for a few days, before it too mysteriously started refusing to launch, and a borrowed gaming laptop simply crashes out…

Dell’s new XPS 13 (review page 53) replaces last year’s Dell XPS 13 for our best premium laptop. This machine is a masterpiece and is the start of the laptop art. Apple’s new iPad (review page 58) has also demoted the iPad Pro and is our new most-loved tablet, while the iPad Pro is still one of our recommended alternatives. Also new, D-Link’s Covr mesh system replaces Google Wifi. PREMIUM LAPTOPS DELL XPS 13 9370 Ultraportable This 2018 update to the all-dominant Dell XPS 13 keeps tweaks to the minimum: slimmer bezels, eighth-generation Intel Core processors and the promise of even longer battery life are the key benefits. Just note that Dell has embraced USB-C ports at the expense of the old-fashioned Type-A. ALTERNATIVES MICROSOFT SURFACE BOOK 2 A unique…

This is pretty impressive-Microsoft has just announced a neat new controller designed to help gamers with limited mobility to play games with greater ease. The Xbox Adaptive Controller has been designed to work with many of the adaptive switches that many mobility impaired people may already own in an easy-to-use, plug-and-play manner. The controller was designed in partnership with a number of organisations, including The AbleGamers Charity, The Cerebral Palsy Foundation, and Warfighter Engaged. As well as working with adaptive switches, the controller also features two large buttons already built-in, which can be customised to act as any input from a standard controller. Microsoft’s Chief Accessibility Officer, Jenny Lay-Flurrie, said in a blog post: “Today we celebrate the seventh annual Global Accessibility Awareness Day and announce new technology and resources…

TURRIS MOX MODULAR ROUTER Do you find it annoying how the free router you get from your ISP is packed with features you will never use? Such as gigabit ethernet, GWAN (“G-WAN better uses CPU Cores to make the Internet of Things fly thousand times higher! (sic)”), micro-SD slot, USB 3.0 etc? Now here’s a router that’s modular. MOST WANTED: The Turris MOX can be built as simply or as feature-packed…edly as the user desires. Starting with an ultra-simple (and ultra-cheap) basic router, you can add Wi-Fi, Ethernet, a board that lets you plug in an LTE modem, SFP connector (we think that’s something to do with fibre optics), and an mPCIe slot. NOT WANTED: Despite all the talk about how the Turris MOX is all about not having too…

Everybody needs antivirus software.” That’s the message that’s been drilled into us for decades. And thanks to the odd high-profile incident – such as 2017’s WannaCry ransomware attack – most of us recognise that the risk is real, and take steps to protect our PCs. But is it still necessary to keep paying for protection? Today, the vast majority of security breaches rely on out-of-date vulnerabilities in Windows, for which patches have been released. The best thing you can do to protect your online security is to ensure that Windows Update runs regularly. That’s why, in Windows 10, the feature can’t be disabled. On top of that, Windows 10 contains an impressive set of built-in security functions – effectively there’s an entire security suite running under the bonnet – with…

Choosing a sound companion for our gaming marathon sessions can be tough, especially with the many brands offering a multitude of confusing options seemingly designed only to part us with our hard-earned cash. So, let’s cut through the mumbo-jumbo and get down to basics – what exactly makes a gaming headset a gaming headset? Is it the eye-watering RGB lighting? The futuristic yet often-times tacky “gamer aesthetic”? The booming over-emphasised bass intent on popping a vein in our forehead? Here’s a hint: it’s none of the above. At Razer, we’ve spent more than a decade working with top esports athletes around the world to define just what exactly gamers look for in a high-performance gaming headset. We think we’ve nailed it with our Kraken Pro series of headsets. In fact,…

For the new Z370 chipset, and thus new line of motherboards, Gigabyte has tweaked its tried-and-tested packaging to create a top-end edition that might be slightly different from what you expect. Previously, Gigabyte split its motherboard offerings in to Gaming and UD (for Ultra-Durable) lines. Higher-end gaming boards got a superior DAC, and a focus on overclocking and multi-GPU performance. The UD boards had more I/O options, new features like USB3.1 Gen2, and uprated components like capacitors. While the UD line lives on for Z370 it stops at a tier below this board. The Gaming 7 now carries the premium can for Gigabyte, as the top Z370 board in the lineup, for now. But as a high-end gaming motherboard, the Gaming 7 has been tweaked for a more mainstream market.…

The laptop pictured above is also available from Dell running Ubuntu, but for this review we’re looking at the Windows model. Battery life is excellent. A time of 10hrs 58mins is right up there with the best ultraportables I’ve tested, even if it doesn’t match Dell’s claims of 17hrs. To be fair, Dell’s results are based on low-level tasks, whereas ours involve playing a full-screen video until the battery gives up. That’s with Flight Mode switched on and the screen set to 170cd/m2 (about the 50% mark), but such excellent scores mean you can safely leave the tiny power supply at home if you’re heading out for a day’s work. This is a mean little machine when it gets going too. Each of the four cores inside Intel’s Core i7-8550U…

“it’s a seriously-impressive all-round ultraportable that excels at everything” There are solid notebooks and then there are Razer notebooks. The Blade Stealth is another solid-chassis stunner from Razer, only this one is an ultraportable that weighs less-than 1.4KG. The matte-black finish looks incredibly classy (despite being a fingerprint magnet) while the hard-to-flex lid displays a sense of sophistication thanks to the Razer logo and cultured contouring. Despite being an 13.3-inch notebook, it’s available with a whopping 3,200 x 1,800 resolution, which you’ll need to magnify with Windows unless you have the eyes of a hawk. It’s very glossy but it’s also a touchscreen. It gets impressively bright and colours pop. Under the hood, is Intel’s new Coffee Lake processor, the 1.8GHz quad-core, Core i7-8550U CPU. This is flanked by 16GB…

Physically, the Echo Spot looks like a bedside clock – and when dormant its circular 480 x 480 touchscreen shows a colourful clock face (there are 23 styles to choose from). Like the Show, it can also cycle through upcoming calendar entries, news alerts and so on – although, since the screen’s only 2.5in in diameter, it can be a little hard to read from across the room. The Spot isn’t exactly a small device, mind. A sizeable bezel surrounds the display, and the rounded casing bulges out behind it: the black model is a bit more slimming than the white, but whichever you choose the footprint is slightly larger than that of an Echo Dot. Happily, its sound quality is vastly better, thanks to a much larger 35mm driver.…

Libratone’s Zipp and Zipp Mini speakers take their names from the chunky fastener that secures their boldly coloured fabric covers. They also sport distinctive leather straps that encourage you to pick them up and go: with a claimed ten-hour battery life, these speakers don’t need to be chained to a mains socket. Unlike JBL and Ultimate Ears’ battery-powered speakers, however, they’re not waterproof. That’s not the only way in which Libratone’s characterful speakers differ from other contenders. Rather than being designed as smart speakers from the beginning, they’re regular Bluetooth speakers that have been retrofitted with updated firmware to work with Alexa – and, sad to say, it’s not a good fit. For a start, while both Zipp units have built-in microphones, they’re not designed for always-on operation. When Libratone…

The video of the Uber driverless car’s fatal crash is disturbing. The Arizona road is unnaturally dark, with the car’s headlights picking up the pedestrian and her bike fewer than two seconds before the crash. From another camera angle, the Uber safety driver is looking down, glancing up in horror as the car strikes and kills the woman, Elaine Herzberg. The March incident raises a host of questions, with investigations underway by the local Tempe, Arizona police department as well as Uber, which has pulled its driverless test cars from US roads. “The video from the Uber crash seems to point to a clear failure of the technology,” said Jack Stilgoe, senior lecturer at University College London, although he adds it’s unclear whether the problem was with the sensors or…

11 bit Studios, the same dev behind This War of Mine, is at it again with Frostpunk. Kinda. While both simulators, This War of Mine has a micro focus on its cast of characters and Frostpunk takes more of a macro approach. The setup is simple enough: the world has frozen over in an alternative history and it’s up to you to keep your people alive. Things start out chilled enough, but you’ll soon be met by threats that range from predictable to unexpected. There are times when past decisions came back to bite me in the arse, but by midgame, I was confidently able to roll with the punches. Admittedly, this was after a few false starts. Part of the early tension is about managing the unknown, so while…

Both of my big Synology installations have two SSD cache drives in them. These are standard SSD drives that you fit, but you then configure them to be cache rather than storage. Doing this is a piece of cake, and it should make things faster. Looking at the statistics, I get a pretty good set of cache hits from the SSD drives, so they’re clearly doing their job. When I configured both Synology NAS drives, I set up all the disks in one big volume. I prefer to have one big pool and then to share out access via shares. Others might disagree, saying it’s better to have pools of volumes, splitting the hard drive count into a number of selections. To be honest, when I initially set up both…

Who knows where the whole Cambridge Analytica mess will have ended up by the time you read this. One thing is certain, however: the knock-on impact on Facebook. Forget about the $40 billion wiped off its share value overnight, and the legal/regulatory action that might come from the revelation that 87 million user profiles were used without informed consent. The impact I’m talking about right now is both positive and negative. Positive, in so far as the story does appear to have finally alerted folk to the danger of taking part in those “What kind of animal am I?” and “What is my real political leaning?” type surveys that plague Facebook. Yet people who do know better still participate on the basis of “what harm will it do?” My answer…

Of the two invites to land in my in-tray in early 2018, I was sure that Tilburg wouldn’t be as interesting as Las Vegas. Despite an over-concentration of IT sector events in Sin City, it’s a reasonably safe bet that a small town in the middle of the Netherlands holds no secrets more intriguing than those on offer in America’s playground. Which just goes to show how wrong safe bets can be: Dell’s event in Tilburg was about as gritty and genuine to the mission as it gets. Also: huge. I’m writing this in the Hotel Last Resort in Germany, on the evening of the Dell site visit and tour, and my feet really hurt. It’s an enormous building. I think the only tour that punishes the feet as enthusiastically…

“it all adds up for an amazingly engaging gaming experience” It’s one of our all-time favourite games here at PC & Tech Authority, the editor plays it more than any other game and has been at it for years, and we’re here to share just why it’s so fantastic if you haven’t had a look before, or if it’s been a while since you last looked so we can help excite you about how far it’s come. WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT, THEN? Fighting in planes, tanks and ships, in short. In a massive multiplayer environment where there’s always huge numbers of players going at it, and all in beautifully structured game modes and maps that cater to raw beginners through to hardcore simheads. It all started as a flight combat…

Being a sponsor of the Australian E-Sports League’s (AEL) University Cup in its inaugural year, D-Link this month was invited to participate at the Intel Extreme Masters (IEM) event held at Qudos Bank Arena at Sydney Olympic Park, and I made some time to make sure I got along. Apart from being close to the oldest person in the venue, participating in this event opened my eyes even more to the E-Sports fraternity, and where it is heading. Whilst I’ve always considered myself a bit of a gamer, from the early games such as Doom and Quake, to strategy games such as Total Annihilation, Command & Conquer and its ilk, and now to Xbox games such as Rocket League and the FIFA football franchise, I was really interested to see…

Our reliance on gadgets is creating an unprecedented amount of data. Humans produce a staggering 16 zettabytes every year, which equates to 16 x 1021 bytes. And, last year, research group IDC predicted that we’ll be creating more than 160 zettabytes per year by 2025. Hard drives and silicon chips have served us well, but with all this data we’ll soon need more than they can offer. Faster. Bigger. Better. Researchers are looking for the next big thing, and one of the potential new materials is rather surprising: DNA. BETTER STORAGE Researchers have known for a long time DNA can be used for data storage. In 1961, Richard Feynman was talking about the potential for sub-microscopic computers, and the first attempt at using DNA for this purpose came in 1994…

When Coffee Lake processors launched back in October, the line-up was pretty thin on options with Z370 motherboards being the only ones to choose from. That’s all changed now that Intel has launched the budget oriented H370, H310 and B360 chipsets which finally puts Coffee Lake into the realms of mainstream affordability. For so long, Intel based systems aimed at budget users have seen incremental improvements. As we move well into 2018, it’s clear that users expect more from their computers. Gaming, Netflix, streaming, smartphone video conversions, video calls and so on. A dual core just doesn’t cut it anymore. A CPU like the Core i5-8400 with its 6 cores capable of 4GHz means that users can do more than ever, but until now, there haven’t been budget oriented chipsets…

Samsung has long been the market leader in the performance NVMe SSD market. It seems like an eternity since the 960 series launched in 2016, and it has remained largely unchallenged until now. The tech world never sits still though, and competing manufacturers are catching up. The Pro series has always sat atop the throne, a position that has come under some threat, which brings us to Samsung’s latest and greatest, the 970 Pro. We are pleased to have the 1TB model on hand for review, and when you have device with a performance pedigree like the Pro models have always had, our expectations are high. NOT YOUR TYPICAL NAND M.2 DRIVE The Samsung 970 Pro is a physically atypical NVMe M.2 2280 (80mm length) sized drive connected via a…

We’ve been impressed by mesh Wi-Fi systems for some time. Up to now, Google WiFi has arguably led the way thanks to its reasonable value and decent performance. But it’s been available for a year already and the price has dropped. With D-Link’s Covr system launching into a mature market with similar specs, does it offer enough to turn our heads? Like rivals, the Covr system sports slick design flourishes and comes in a fancy box to make you feel like you’ve bought something special. After years of testing utilitarian wireless routers, it’s refreshing to unbox something that apes Apple’s i-devices. It also reminds us that setting up a mesh system tends to be considerably easier than setting up a regular router. D-Link’s Covr makes things even simpler than we’ve…

In 1958 Ray Harryhausen vehicle, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, the evil magician, Sakura, tells of an “accursed island inhabited by wailing demons. Their screaming is heard over 100 leagues. Men hearing it are driven mad. They drive their ships onto the jagged rocks and are devoured by sea serpents.” This puts us in mind of the DreamMicro CryptoCurrency Mining HPC 6X. This is no traditional PC. The large, metal chassis is as Spartan on the outside as the inside. It is rack-mountable and houses three, server-grade fans which consistently run at over 3,500rpm. At full power they hit 83 decibels which only drops to 73 decibels with software and BIOS tweaks. It still hit 63 decibels when we unplugged two of them. The brute-force air cooling counters heat from…

“It’s no massive, gaming beast of yore” Gigabyte’s Aorus X5 fully-featured, gaming laptop has been around for a while now. This latest v8 refresh comes with Intel’s 8th generation, Core i7 Coffee Lake processor and promises to fly like never before. Our review unit came with the high-end, 2.6GHz Core i7-8850H CPU. All six cores Turbo Boost to 4GHz while one pushes to 4.3GHz. It’s flanked by 16GB RAM, a big-and-fast 500GB NVMe SSD plus there’s a 1TB mechanical drive for storage. Graphics come via Nvidia’s GTX 1070 GPU. Something to note about beefy machines like this is that performance will depend on temperature and cooling. When warm the fans ramp up noisily regardless of the task you’re preforming but especially so if gaming or, say, crypto-mining. This was an…

Want to turn an ultraportable laptop into a full-powered mining or gaming rig? Then check out Razer’s Core v2. This graphics-card-enclosure-cum-docking station is super solid, consisting of two, well-ventilated slabs of metal which slide apart to allow for the easy insertion of a full-sized, desktop graphics card. Even the longer, wider varieties like the Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti are compatible. The interior compartment, which holds the electronics, is unlocked with a gratuitously-large lever that gives everything a sense of blacksmith-hewn solidity. All connections are tool-less and plugging in a card is intuitive and takes seconds. “The connection can simultaneously charge your laptop” A kettle lead provides power to a built-in 500W PSU but almost everything else passes through the ThunderBolt 3 cable (note that the bundled one is very short).…

A voice-operated, digital home assistant is no longer the stuff of science-fiction – and it’s no fad. The Amazon Echo and Google Home devices are popular, practical and affordable additions to the switched-on home, and they’ve recently been joined by Apple’s extraordinary HomePod. While these devices work brilliantly as on-demand music players, they can do much more than that: you can make hands-free calls to friends and family, control your lights, appliances and other smart home devices – or just ask for information about anything from tomorrow’s weather to the bass player in The Strokes. There are a lot of options to choose from, though. First of all, there’s the question of whether Amazon’s Alexa is the right assistant for you, or whether you might get on better with Siri…

The tiny Google Home Mini is, self-evidently, the company’s answer to the Echo Dot. In fact, it looks rather classier than Amazon’s miniature device, with a (non-exchangeable) white, charcoal or coral fabric exterior. It sounds far better than the Dot, however, thanks to its 40mm full-range driver. To be clear, music lovers won’t swoon at the quality: the bass is quite rumbly and uncontrolled, and there’s little crispness to the treble. For background music, though, it’s vastly more listenable than its rival, and the maximum volume of 68dBA is louder than the Dot’s 62dBA. That said, the quality of the sound drops off as you dial up the volume, with an unpleasant harshness to the tone at full blast. While the Mini may appear entirely bereft of external features, a…

Sonos specialises in multiroom audio, and the One looks and feels like a mature bit of audio hardware. It sounds fantastic, too: at moderate volume, the bass is reassuringly weighty, yet wonderfully precise. The overall tone isn’t quite as excitable as the JBL Link 20’s, and the mid-range gets a bit oversaturated at maximum volume – but you’ll rarely want to turn it up that far, as the Sonos One goes up to a deafening 84dBA. The One also does a pretty good impression of an Amazon Echo. You can address it as “Alexa”, instruct it to stream music, control smart home devices, access skills and so on. As is usual with third-party products, however, you can’t change the wake word, and you can’t make calls to other people’s Echo…

Swarms of drones could soon take to the air to check farmers’ fields or be sent swimming in groups to monitor pollution, while robots already work together in distribution warehouses. But what happens if one gets hurt, breaking a rotor or arm? Dr Danesh Tarapore has been training robots to be more resilient, learning to compensate for faults or damage. Picture a dog with only three legs – it runs to chase after a thrown ball just fine, said Tarapore. Robots sent out in the real world need to learn to do the same. Here’s how Dr Tarapore is teaching broken robots new tricks. Where did the idea come from? When I was a postdoc researcher in Paris at the Pierre and Marie Curie University, [I was investigating how to]…

Fatshark pretty much came out of nowhere a couple of years ago with what is arguably one of the greatest PC games ever developed. It also had one of the silliest names when it came to overblown pomposity. Warhammer: The End Times: Vermintide. It was a tie-in to the End Times event that saw the Warhammer tabletop game morph fatally into Age of Sigmar, and a damn fine take on gameplay pioneered by Left 4 Dead. Four adventurers, hordes of the Skaven rat-men, and lush, challenging levels to negotiate from point A to point Z. Vermintide II - the Warhammer moniker is still there, but the End Times have now pretty much come and gone (look, the Warhammer timeline was always pretty damn fluid, but over the last ten years…

I continue to be impressed with the Netgear Arlo Go camera. I was one of the executors of a deceased in-law’s estate a few months back, and part of my duties involved looking after the house the person had lived in, prior to the estate being divided. When someone dies, one of the first things you have to do is notify their bank; they then promptly freeze the accounts, cancelling all their direct debits. When that happens, the various suppliers all get notified, so they in turn cancel their services. No phone, and so no broadband. And in many empty properties no electricity either. So how do you remotely monitor that the house is safe and secure? The Arlo Go in its Vodafone V-Camera guise turned out to be the…