Table of contents for October 2022 in APC

Apple plans to bring in more ad revenue in different iPhone and iPad apps by expanding the scope of advertisements seen in the App Store and in Apple Maps, Apple Books, and more, according to a new report. In his latest Power On newsletter, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman stated Apple will be significantly expanding its advertising business over time. The reliable analyst believes the Cupertino tech giant will bring search ads to Apple Maps, as it’s reportedly already been explored. It would allow businesses to pay to be more prominent in search results. Apple Books and Apple Podcasts could also be getting the advertisement treatment, letting publishers pay to have their work appear more in searches and throughout the app. Using ads throughout apps isn’t anything new, as users already see…

Winamp, perhaps the best MP3 player ever, is back in active development. In fact, it’s one of my all-time favorite PC apps. It was synonymous with the MP3 revolution and it was omnipresent on all of my systems for well over ten years. Before the days of music streaming, the MP3 reigned supreme. In the late 1990’s, Winamp became an essential tool as users discovered the convenience of MP3s. Who could forget those days in late 1999 when you could search Napster and find music from every genre? All of the songs I downloaded were played in Winamp. Afterwards I migrated over to eMule for my music fixes. During all of those years, Winamp was my player of choice. Winamp wasn’t all about playing pirated songs. I ripped most of…

It seems that every day we read about pollution around the world. Like the growing horror of microplastics: small chunks of plastic officially defined as being smaller than five millimetres in diameter. Now I read that microplastics are being found inside living creatures. The pollution problem is getting worse in our own world of computing and the internet, except here it is mostly related to a tidal wave of advertising material. Some of it is obvious, with websites that are often more advert than content a particular bête noir of mine. Other adverts are more insidious, such as those injected into video streams on YouTube. I understand the need for advertising revenue, and that I can pay the monthly YouTube fee to get rid of the inserted adverts, but this…

1 LENOVO LEGION 5/5I PRO Simply the best gaming laptop for most people, Lenovo’s machine perfectly balances power, features, and price. The main attraction is the huge 16-inch 16:10 165Hz G-Sync display, which is fantastic for gaming and work, while also fitting into a 15-inch chassis. It also has four-zone RGB lighting and superior internal cooling, and it’s dead easy to upgrade RAM and storage. From$2,295, www.lenovo.com 2 RAZER BLADE 15/17 Razer’s gaming laptops are still the sleekest around, thanks to their gorgeous CNC-milled aluminum chassis and lightweight 2.2kg body (on the 15-inch model, at least). The newest models rock Intel’s 12th Gen processors, although it could be worth looking at the 11th Gen models if you find them on sale. That’s because the one thing Razer laptops…

From $1,899 | apple.com/au Apple hasn’t ever been too concerned about challenging consumer expectations of its products and the new MacBook Air is a great example of this. Not only is the Air range now more expensive than the new MacBook Pro 13 offerings, it’s also got a bigger, brighter screen and offers a raft of updated features that the M2 MacBook Pro 13 misses out on. "The M2 processor isn’t quite as revolutionary as the jump to M1, but it still puts the processor ahead of Intel’s i7-1260P on the units we’ve tested so far." Apple is going to continue to sell the $1,499 late-2020 MacBook Air with an M1 processor alongside the new MacBook Air for those that are super price sensitive. This has allowed Apple to do…

$2,899 | acer.com Acer’s range of professional ultraportable laptops have been some of APC’s top rated devices over the last few years, primarily because they offered excellent performance in a package that you wouldn’t obviously distinguish from the top end devices even though it cost hundreds (sometimes thousands) less. This doesn’t seem to be the direction Acer has taken the 2022 Swift 5 in. Whether it’s the CNC-machined aluminium chassis with anodised gold trim, the OceanGlass touchpad and fingerprint reader, or the 12-core 12th Gen Intel processor , it’s clear that this year’s Swift 5 is trying to compete with Apple, Dell and Microsoft for the most desirable premium professional ultrabook around. By throwing its hat in the ultra-premium ring, it’s no surprise that the 2022 Swift 5 is $500…

$459 | www.prismplus.com.au The monitor market is a crowded one. There are dozens of brands to choose from. One of the lesser known names in the Australian market is Prism+. Though the name might be a new one to many Australian readers, the specs of some Prism monitors are a match for anything on the market. Prism sent over its C315 Max for review. It’s a 31.5-inch curved VA monitor with a 4K resolution. Prism is targeting productivity-oriented users with the C315 Max. As it’s a 60Hz panel with a 4ms GTG response time, that would bear out, though it does have Freesync support so it will moonlight as a gaming screen after hours. Assembling the unit is straightforward. You remove the small back panel, attach the base to it…

WHAT YOU CAN DO • Skip ads and sponsored messages in videos • Stop YouTube playing videos automatically • Hide recommendations based on your viewing • Add download buttons to YouTube videos • Adjust playback speed to watch videos faster • Bookmark specific moments in videos • Increase your default video resolution to 4K • Switch to a tracker-free version of YouTube More than 30 million people visit YouTube every day to watch clips of TV shows, music videos, the latest ‘viral’ content and much more, making it the second most popular website in the world (after Google Search). Sadly, we suspect that many visitors have recently reached the same conclusion we have: YouTube is getting worse. From unskippable ads and sponsored messages before almost every video to irrelevant ‘recommendations’…

YOU WILL NEED Rainmeter Download this free tool from www.rainmeter.net. Cairo Visit https://cairoshell.com to download this handy app.WinDynamic Desktop Grab this gratis tool from https://github.com/t1m0thyj/WinDynamicDesktop. Are you bored with your Windows desktop? Perhaps the new Windows 11 refresh doesn’t quite grab you, or maybe you’ve decided to cut loose after years of making do with various shades of grey. The good news is that your desktop doesn’t have to remain staid and stale, and we’ve got all the tips and techniques you need to not only make it more attractive but more functional, too. We open with a simple facelift using Windows’ own tools – a wallpaper change, a colour scheme update, and a look at combining all your customisations into a single theme. Not radical enough? Check out the…

Since their introduction over three decades ago, tablets have delivered the best touch-screen and stylus experience bar none. Whether you’re an aspiring artist or a scribbling student, tablets have been built from the screen up to optimise non-keyboard interactions, while weighing little more than a hardcover book. But when it comes to getting actual work done, tablets have struggled to match the mighty laptop. Poor performance and lackluster connectivity has limited them to the role of a secondary plaything in our modern arsenal of devices. But things are changing. Apple’s vaunted M1 laptop CPU has shaken things up in a big way, and now resides in the heart of its premium tablets. Meanwhile Samsung has crammed an octa-core 3GHz Snapdragon SM8450 beast into its top-shelf Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra. Throw…

After the success of Windows 7, Microsoft was always at long-odds to achieve the same popularity with its follow-up. Windows 8 was superseded inside three years by the release of Windows 10, nevertheless, this last single-digit release is reportedly still plugging away on as many as four percent of systems worldwide seven years later. Now, Microsoft is pulling down the shutters on its old OS, with security updates to cease on 10 January 2023. We look at your options, the risks and the costs. Not again…? The thought of upgrading will either provide the excuse to buy yourself some new kit, or fill you with dread at having to change from years of well-worn habits. Not everyone enjoys the task of upgrading and although its Windows 8 today, Windows 10…

$41.95 | PC, PS4/5 | stray.game The early novelty of playing as a cat in Stray soon gives way to a striking realisation – we often behave like cats in games anyway. Particularly in platform-puzzlers like this, our first inclination is to explore, looking for unorthodox routes up the sides of buildings, say, or jumping on furniture and seeing which objects we can manipulate. Stray simply makes such activities more natural, giving us the perfect form for the job. The feel of your moggy is crucial here, and it’s instantly evident how much observational work has gone into her animation. The slender ginger tabby is one of a small feline colony living in a disused industrial district long since reclaimed by nature. As the game opens, your gang waits out…

In March 2022, Dmitry Cherepanov learned of the damage caused by yet another Russian bomb in Mariupol, Ukraine – the city under fire since the early days of the invasion a month before. By that point, more than 2,000 civilians had been killed. Power, running water and gas supplies had been lost, a ceasefire had collapsed and food was scarce. But now Cherepanov discovered that the retro computer museum he curated, It8bit Club, had also gone, obliterating a popular attraction that housed more than 120 computers from the 1950s to the early 2000s, along with dozens more artefacts. “I’m very upset. It’s been a hobby of my life,” the 45-year-old told NPR in the wake of the strike. And, while the damage may seem trivial in comparison to other events…

1 ASHAMPOO BACKUP PRO 15 Backup solution to create and restore files and entire disk partitions. Ashampoo Backup Pro 15 is Windows-based a comprehensive backup solution to back up or restore any file, partition or bootable operating system. Archives can easily be restored in the event of hardware issues or system malware infections. Backups can be created fully automatically thanks to smart background technology that does not interfere with normal PC operation. For that, Ashampoo Backup Pro 15 monitors the system load and only becomes active when enough resources are available. Four selectable compression methods and strong encryption ensure space-efficient and secure backup archives. Download link: www.apcmag.com/exclusives 2 ASCOMP CLEANING SUITE System cleaning and Tuning for Windows. A total of six helpers analyse your system and enable deep…

Micron announced that it has begun shipping 232-layer TLC NAND. The new NAND will certainly be finding its way into the fastest SSDs on the market, including Micron’s Crucial branded SSDs. The new NAND delivers 100 percent higher write bandwidth, more than 75 percent higher read bandwidth, a 50 percent increase in transfer rate and a 28 percent package size reduction. According to Micron via Digitimes this means these cutting-edge NAND dies are smaller, faster and denser than anything else on the market. They are suited for everything from high end consumer SSDs, to mobile and data centre applications. We can expect this NAND to be used in upcoming PCIe 5.0 SSDs, though not immediately. Western Digital and Samsung will use their own in-house NAND, but future drives with the…

Intel created the HEDT space with socket LGA1366 in November 2008, and for a while the Core i7-920 was one of the best enthusiast processors. It was the first consumer four-core/eight-thread CPU, running at 2.66GHz base and 2.8GHz boost. The thing is, you could crank the voltage up a bit and set the BCLK to 190/191MHz and suddenly you had a chip running at 4GHz. From 2009 until 2017, Intel didn’t bother selling mainstream desktop CPUs with more than four cores to the masses. If you wanted something better, you had to move up to HEDT. There were six-core Gulftown CPUs in 2010, Sandy Bridge-E and Ivy Bridge-E stayed with six cores but moved to quad-channel DDR3 memory controllers, and Haswell-E increased the core count to eight in 2014, swapping…

Augmented reality has had a rough take off – perhaps not a surprise for a technology launched into the public consciousness by Google with skydivers. Almost a decade ago, Google Glass was unveiled at the company’s I/O conference by people leaping out of a plane wearing the smart glasses and landing at the Moscone conference hall. Despite the flashy entrance, Google Glass stalled, held back by privacy concerns and a failure to meet user expectations; rather than letting us view the world with a snazzy sci-fi overlay of information, Glass was like trying to read Twitter from a TV on the other side of the room. Other AR headsets followed, from Microsoft’s HoloLens to Magic Leap. And none found real success in the consumer market, though Glass and HoloLens are…

WORDPRESS | WordPress Free $free, WordPress Personal $5/month | www.wordpress.com WIX | Wix Combo $15/month, Wix Unlimited $23/month, Wix Pro $30/month | www.wix.com Publishing a personal website was once costly and complicated. But not any longer. User-friendly platforms such as WordPress and Wix enable you to publish online for free – you might not even need to pay for hosting. They give you everything you need to design and populate your site, maintain it, and interact with visitors. It’s estimated that nearly half a billion sites are built on WordPress, while upward of 200 million people use Wix. If you want to get started for free, WordPress enables you to host a site as a subdomain of WordPress.com, which means you don’t need to worry about configuring databases or keeping…

From $3,499 | rog.asus.com/au The Asus Rog Zephyrus G14 and G15s have regularly been at the top of our best gaming laptop roundups due to their great performance and reasonable price tags. This market dominance has given the company a bit of cash to splash on updating features like the 1,000-strong LED AniMatrix that can show battery life, audio amplitude animations, or even custom gaming visuals on the outside of the gaming shell. This new look isn’t the only thing this 14-inch gaming rig has going for it though, it’s also got a 6th gen AMD CPU and GPU combo, a larger touchpad and a faster screen. The entry-level Zephyrus G14 comes with a Ryzen 7 6800S CPU, a Radeon RX6700S GPU and 16GB of RAM that’ll set you back…

$1,349 | www.acer.com The thing with luxuries is that, once you’ve experienced them, it can be difficult to go back to the mundane. This monitor has everything going for it. It’s a 4K display with an IPS panel, a huge 32-inch screen, a 144Hz refresh rate, and support for both AMD FreeSync and Nvidia G-sync. Those stats make it a dream monitor for gamers, offering the most premium of experiences short of an 8K television or an OLED monitor. The Predator XB323QK also has lots of worthwhile extras and features, including two HDMI 2.1 ports, allowing you to connect both an Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 simultaneously while taking advantage of their 4K 120Hz variable refresh rate signals. There’s also a USB-C port with 65W power delivery, meaning you…

$68 | www.bequiet.com There’s no doubt that AIO liquid cooling is becoming nearly essential to keep high TDP processors cool. But we can’t forget there are a lot of 65W class CPUs out there that simply don’t require an expensive liquid cooler. Air cooling is here to stay! The Be Quiet Pure Rock 2 FX is an affordable single tower cooler that can dissipate up to 150W, which means that any recent non-K Intel CPU and all AM4 CPUs are within the capabilities of the Pure Rock 2 FX. German manufacturer Be Quiet’s cooling products usually perform well in these pages. As you’d guess by the name, its cases and coolers are designed with quiet computing in mind, and who out there doesn’t appreciate that? But Be Quiet isn’t ignoring…

$1,199 | https://www.synology.com/en-au Synology has finally released its long-awaited five-bay drive. This is a size that’s considered a sweet spot for enthusiasts thanks to its ability to start-off with a high capacity yet provide some future-proofing headroom. However, a few design decisions have raised eyebrows, so is it the desirable NAS that we hoped it would be? But, first let’s remind ourselves of the ease of set-up. Even if you’ve never touched a NAS, it’s hard to see how populating the drives and formatting them could be any simpler. You simply flip open the (lockable) hot-swap drive bays, insert the drives into cages with their quick-fit, tool-less, rubber-grommet-dampened design (you can screw them in for added rigidity), plug the device into your router and turn it on. From this point…

This brilliant open-source program is the best way to read and manage ebooks on your computer without being tied to a single service such as Amazon’s Kindle Store. It lets you convert ebooks easily from one format to another, edit their contents, download articles from the web, back up and share your library, and much more. Calibre 6 is the first big update for a year-and-a-half (the 6.1 refers to a few bug fixes implemented shortly after its release) and somehow finds space for even more features without making the interface overcrowded. The most significant is a full-text search tool, which indexes all the ebooks in your collection, so you can quickly find mentions of specific names, words and phrases. Before you can use this feature, you must click the…

LABS If the rumours and roadmaps are to be believed, the PC is about to enter a new golden age of innovation. Intel and AMD are prepping epic new processors, while Nvidia and AMD are tooling up to recalibrate expectations when it comes to generational performance increases with their next graphics cards. It’s going to be explosive. Yet there’s so much more to the PC than just CPUs and GPUs. The PC platform itself and the peripheral technologies around it are just as important. Imagine storage tech hadn’t advanced in the last 20 years. Or memory speeds. Or platform interlinks. Good luck gaming at 4K and 144Hz with that fancy GPU running over an AGP interface, your DDR memory chugging along at 100MHz, an 80GB magnetic HDD that…

IT WILL TAKE 30 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to use Craft to create beautiful notes, emails and essays YOU’LL NEED Craft (Free, IAPs), macOS 10.15 or later Craft combines creativity and organisation in one handy app. It’s a cross between a document creation tool like Pages, where much of the emphasis is on physical documents that you print, and a note-taking tool like Notes, where the emphasis is on capturing thoughts and ideas. The idea is that you should be able to capture say meeting notes, or ideas for a project, or even draft an email but still present it in a way that looks beautiful. At its heart, Craft is a rich text editor with support for Markdown and code blocks. And, of course, you can add images,…

Let’s have some fun with the Raspberry Pi Pico. We’re going to try a couple of basic projects and we’ll discuss how to install different types of firmware on the board, write a program to flash an LED and then discuss the configuration required to set up a board as a so-called rubber ducky device. We’ll configure our rubber ducky to enter simple keypresses. During this tutorial, we will discuss how to install different types of firmware on the board. Examples of firmware are micropython, CircuitPython, C/ C++ and the Arduino language and programming tools. Following firmware installation, we’ll write a program to flash an LED and then discuss the configuration required to set up our board as a rubber-ducky, style of device. In this example, we will configure the…

$59.99 | PC, XB1/S/X, PS4/5, Switch, Linux, Mac | twopointcampus.com Running a campus is expensive. The buildings and staff chip away at my bank balance regularly, and whenever I have a nice fat stack sitting in the vault, I know that all it’s going to take to burn through it is a request for a new supercomputer. You can’t do anything without plenty of cash, but the acquisition of wealth is not the ultimate goal of Two Point Campus. Each of the 12 missions has bespoke main objectives and then plenty of dynamic ones, but at their heart the goal is to create an efficient temple to academia that shits out happy, A+ students across a range of courses, from gastronomy to espionage. This is a doddle, at least initially.…

$TBA | PC, PS4/5 | bit.ly/3Bu0CHC Rollerdrome is a game about performance. There is combat, but it’s not about winning, as such. It’s about style. The attitude you bring to it. Efficiency is a byproduct of mastering its violent dance – really, you’re here to look good. In essence the game is pretty simple: you skate and shoot. The joy of it is that while it builds so much upon that foundation, it’s still great fun even if you only ever learn the basics. Coming from Roll7, the folks behind the joyous skateboarding series OlliOlli, that’s no surprise. Skating is simple – you simply steer and build momentum – but it feels great. There’s a real sense of speed that adds to all your actions, however many you master. With…

AMD has been secretly working on photonics technologies. While this is an expected development – photonics is one of the budding technological fields for both classical and quantum computing systems – it does represent a new venue for the company itself. The information comes from a recently published patent, which AMD originally filed in the United States back in 2020. In this patent, the company describes a system that would allow for photonics-based communications systems to be directly connected to a chip. Photonics takes advantage of the speed of light, which allows for much faster information transmission rates and increases energy efficiency (because there’s no loss to electrical resistance from the usual mediums, such as copper). AMD’s work in directly linking beams of light to a die would allow for…

While we’ve had 12th generation Intel based laptops trickling in since March, this month we got our hands on the first AMD Ryzen 6000 series laptop processor in the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (p35). We also just covered Apple’s 2022 MacBook Air running the company’s updated M2 processor on page 34. With all the major 2022 laptop processors now on the table we can finally take a look at them side-by-side to see what each of them do well and which one you may want in your next laptop. Gaming and workstation laptop CPUs In the gaming and workstation spaces we’ve had a chance to look at Intel’s i9-12900H and i7-12700H CPUs which both have 14 cores, 20 threads and have a 45W Thermal Design Power (TDP). Against this is…

You can read all about the future of the PC platform in our feature article on page 66, and the bottom line is an increase in bandwidth across the board. But the PC platform is not monolithic, instead, it’s bifurcated between Intel and AMD. And increasingly, it looks like AMD will have an advantage for some time. The issue involves PCIe connectivity, specifically PCIe connectivity for M.2 SSDs. As explained in the platform feature, Intel made it first to market with PCI Express 5.0 support with 12th Gen Alder Lake CPUs and the 600 series chipset. The catch is that it’s limited to 16 lanes, which means no native PCIe 5.0 for M.2 storage slots, with add-in cards required for most 600 series motherboards to support PCIe 5.0 SSDs. There…

$3,299 | dell.com/en-au Dell’s G15 gaming laptops have been a staple in the more affordable gaming laptop space for years now, but with a range that offers GPUs up to a Nvidia GeForce 3070 Ti, these units are playing in the high performance gaming laptop space too. Because there’s quite a span here the devices at one end are a bit of a different beast to ones at the other. Take for example the entry level $1,999 ($1,699 on sale) G15 which comes with an Intel Core i5-12500H CPU, a Nvidia 3050 GPU and a 15.6-inch 120Hz Full HD screen. At 2.7cm thick, it’s a chunky device that is way thicker than it needs to be considering the GPU power you’ll get from it. On sale it’s roughly the same…

$520 | www.hp.com Ask a gamer to describe their ideal gaming monitor, and they’re likely to say “4K”. The problem, of course, is that driving a 4K monitor requires a high-end graphics card that can add a significant amount to your budget. For most, a realistic sweet spot is a 1440p monitor that can be driven by a more modest GPU. HP’s X34 appears to hit this sweet spot while offering lots of additional features for a reasonable price. The headline feature is its 34-inch ultrawide display with a large amount of screen real estate. It also has a high 165Hz refresh rate and has a 1ms response time. All great things to have on a monitor not much over $500. The X34 makes a good first impression, with thin…

$749 | store.google.com Another new Google phone? Well, sort of. Arriving nine months after the rest of the Pixel 6 family, the 6a is positioned as an affordable alternative to the original phone, rather than a real update. The 6a has a few attractions besides price: with a smaller frame and weighing just 179g, the 6a is more comfortable to use in one hand. The 6a’s plastic rear feels cheaper than the glass of its siblings, even if it’s less likely to shatter when dropped. The phone also lacks a headphone jack socket – a shame, since that was a big selling point of last year’s 5a. And while the screen has the same 1,080 x 2,400 resolution, it uses a bog-standard 60Hz refresh rate rather than the 90Hz of…

$269 | rog.asus.com If there are any true mouse enthusiasts out there, then this is the rodent for you. This luxo-beast packs in everything you can think of, and more. The specs are ridiculous – the optical sensor can handle up to 36,000 DPI and a polling rate of up to 8,000Hz when connected via USB-C. That’s crazy numbers territory, and imbues the Chakram X with unmatched smooth precision. Wireless comes in either 2.4GHz or Bluetooth flavours, and you can expect around 150 hours per charge with the RGB effects off, but in testing it looked so damn fine at night we felt the need to keep it on. Wireless Qi charging is supported. The only downside is it needs the Armoury Crate app for full functionality, which is our…

"Having seen firsthand the work at MIT and Harvard, Pearcey is likely to have had a hand in radio propagation being replaced by electronic computing as the third research area." It’s fair to say that by August 1945, the previous six years of war had left the world physically and economically exhausted. Yet there remained hope amongst scientists that with war now over, many pre-war research efforts halted by war, along with new discoveries made during it, could now be researched in earnest and take humanity forward. And even if the money wasn’t always there, Australia’s scientific community was ready for the opportunity – and the challenges. A new start One of those scientists was a young Trevor Pearcey. Born in England in 1919, Pearcey graduated with honours from London’s…

Nvidia is in a bind. So impactful was the chip shortage of the past few years due to the Covid induced demand, major supply chain shortages and a crypto mining boom, that even while producing more GPUs than they ever had in history, Nvidia along with every other chip designer or manufacturer simply couldn’t satisfy the market. Unfortunately, we just had to accept a new reality where cards were hard to get and cost sometimes double what they should. "Nvidia seemingly didn’t learn from AMD’s oversupply mistake during the last crypto boom." Well, times are finally changing, and the graphics card market has fallen off a cliff with top end cards like the RTX 3090 Ti and RX 6900XT losing as much as $1,000 off their sales price in as…

As far as we’re concerned, the birth of live installable distributions remains the greatest watershed moment for the Linux ecosystem. You could quickly burn distributions on to a CD or DVD and boot into a functional Linux environment, without having to suffer through an installation and all that it entails. The only downside to this approach was the single-use nature of the CD/DVDs. But even this problem was overcome with USB drives, which you could wipe them clean and put in a new distribution at your pleasure. With Ventoy, you can easily create multi-boot USB drives in almost no time at all. You can also deploy Ventoy on to a SD card, or even SSD, NVMe drives. You can also configure persistent mode on your Ventoy device, meaning that any…

This month, we cover a historic pillar of personal computing. Alongside the Apple II and Tandy TRS-80, the Commodore PET is one of three major computers (aka The Holy Trinity) that are credited with starting the home computing revolution, and its architecture would later underpin Commodore’s most popular machines. As you might expect, the PET is full of quirks and can present some technical headaches to a modern user, so after taking you on a brief history tour that goes all the way back to the mid-1970s, allow us to guide you through emulating the Commodore PET. Development and launch The PET’s story begins in 1976. In an attempt to match rival Texas Instruments, which was making its own processors, Commodore acquired chip manufacturer MOS Technology – maker of the…

CHIP CHATJOEL BURGESS REPORTS ON THE UNUSUAL SIDE OF TECH NEWS Just as the USA unwinds abortion rights, modders are giving Sims characters the right to choose how at least one element of their highly monitored lives plays out. A modder that goes by the handle LittleMsSam released a Sims 4 patch called ‘Miscarrage Chance and Abortion’, which allows a Sim to go to the hospital for a $1,000 abortion operation if they are in the 1st or 2nd trimester. Undertaking this process causes the Sim to gain a ‘Feels Guilty’ buff unless they have the ‘Hates Children’ Trait, which then means they get the ‘Feels Relieved’ buff. RUSSIA IS RUNNING OUT OF KEYBOARDS Have you ever tried typing on the wrong keyboard layout? While international sanctions are preventing most…