Table of contents for December 2019 in TechLife

IF YOU’RE READING this magazine there is a very fine chance that you have a similar bad habit to me. Namely... you’re a gadget fiend. In which case, look, honestly, I am sorry. Because this issue is packed almost to the gills with cool gadgets. Gadgets that will help you work, and some gadgets that will help you play. Gadgets that will tidy your house, and gadgets that will tidy your lawn. Small gadgets, large gadgets, and every kind of gadget in between. In fact, we have over one hundred of them. Sure, only just, but it’s still one very large load of very cool tech. So... chances are after even a cursory glance you’ll be thinking that, yes, you cannot in fact live without ... *checks notes* a robotic…

NINTENDO’S NEW SWITCH LITE ALSO SUFFERS FROM JOY-CON DRIFT, GETS ADDED TO LAWSUIT THESE FAULTY CONTROLLERS ARE BUILT-IN. A number of original Nintendo Switch users have reported that, even when sitting idly in a neutral position, the analog sticks on their Joy-Con controllers would register a slight movement in one direction. This issue has been dubbed Joy-Con drift and has also been experienced by owners of the new Switch Lite, who have been officially added to a class-action lawsuit against Nintendo as a result. [HD] NSW TRAFFIC CAMS WILL DETECT – AND FINE – DRIVERS FOR USING THEIR PHONE 45 NEW CAMERAS BY DECEMBER. After conducting trials earlier in the year, Transport for NSW will begin rolling out a host of world-first cameras that are exclusively designed to catch drivers…

THE GROWING POPULARITY of the internet saw rise to a new form of shopping that doesn’t require leaving the house. In fact, now it’s unusual for a retailer not to have an online store available for perusing from the comfort of your own couch. And yet this convenience doesn’t always mean cheaper prices, that is unless you’re using eBay. Launching in the USA in 1995 and hitting Australian shores in 1999, eBay emerged as an online marketplace where people could sell and buy items over the web. Relying on an auction-based system, buyers were required to ‘bid’ on goods, with the highest bidder winning that product. While the first item to be sold on the site was a broken laser pointer, the offerings on eBay have expanded significantly, with goods…

WE REALLY WANTED TO TRY AND DOUBLE-DOWN ON ALLOWING PLAYERS TO EXPRESS THEMSELVES STRATEGICALLY AND FIND THEIR OWN WAY TO PLAY THE GAME. The Last of Us 2’s upgrade system will upgrade the upgrades from the original game. On top of giving every character a working heartbeat to make you feel even more like a monster, Naughty Dog is expanding the ways that you can shape your character’s growth to fit your playstyle. The incremental ability buffs from the first game, which could increase your health, reduce crafting time, and give other passive increases, will be joined or outright replaced by more dynamic tweaks to how you play. The Last of Us 2 co-director Anthony Newman explained how the game’s new approach to upgrades will work in an interview with…

Mario Kart Tour PEAK MONETISATION. Free with IAP THIS MONTH I had planned to dedicate all these reviews to some of my favourites from the recently launched Apple Arcade, a subscription game service that offers 100+ titles without any ads or in-app purchases. But as it would happen, on the day of its launch, Mario Kart Tour, Nintendo’s latest and most high-profile mobile effort since Super Mario Run, hit the app stores. Unfortunately for me, it was a perfect demonstration as to why Apple Arcade exists in the first place. Everything fun is hidden behind a paywall or subscription – handing over your hard-earned cash (or hard in-game grind) gives you a 1% chance of randomly selecting a driver you actually want to use, such as Mario or Bowser. Gliders,…

ON PAPER THE Apple Watch 5 is one of the most underwhelming upgrades Apple has ever unveiled. It’s essentially the Watch 4 – one of our best smartwatches, admittedly – with a compass, more cellular bands to call emergency services worldwide (a noble achievement, if not something people will rip it off the shelves for) and not much more. Oh – except the screen now never switches off, dimming to an ambient, always-on display when you’re not raising it to look straight at it. Apple has fixed one of the biggest bugbears about its smartwatch, and that’s by far the biggest feature of this new device. The always-on display is really useful, and we quickly got used to glancing at the Watch to see the time. It’s actually a little…

AFTER JAYBIRD ENTERED the true wireless market with the promising, but ultimately flawed, Run range of in-ears in 2017, we were eager to see the company have another crack. We’re pleased to say that the Vista has addressed every shortcoming of the Run to make for an excellent pair of rugged in-ears. The Jaybird Vista’s charging case is one of the most compact and lightweight we’ve come across, particularly in comparison to the Run’s, and still manages to squeeze in 10 hours of reserve charge. It’s coated in a rubberised plastic that looks and feels sleek and durable, and is the first of the range to upgrade to a USB-C port. The earbuds themselves are similarly sleek, light and hardy, with a much smaller profile when in the ear than…

[GAMING] Compatibility issue in Windows 10 An old game called Train Dispatcher doesn’t work properly on my Windows 10 laptop – nothing happens when I click Permits or Trains. Yet it works perfectly on my Windows 10 desktop. Can you help please? GERALD GIBSON We were unable to replicate the issue on any of our Windows 10 machines, suggesting that it’s an incredibly rare glitch. Instead, we offered Gerald the following workaround: set up a virtual machine running Windows 95. To do that, download and install VirtualBox (www. virtualbox.org) and then download the free Windows 95 virtual hard drive (https:// archive.org/details/windows_95_vdi). Open VirtualBox and choose Machine > New. Name it Windows 95, set its type to ‘Microsoft Windows’ and its version to ‘Windows 95’ and allocate it 256MB of RAM.…

YOU MAY BE wondering why you should bother with Apple’s Notes app on iOS when there are so many great alternatives on the App Store. Well, a key reason to use it in addition to them (not necessarily instead) is that Notes’ integration with the Lock screen means you’re at most just a tap and a swipe away from jotting down something important. If you’ve paired an Apple Pencil with your iPad, the process is even faster. Even better, what you write with it is made searchable using the command in our walkthrough’s final step. That said, we find Notes’ handwriting recognition less accurate than MyScript Nebo in particular, though you may have better success. In this situation, you can put Notes for iOS’s little–used stationery designs to good use.…

PHONE SPAM IS a plague. Far from slowing down in the age of the internet, the number of unwanted phone calls has only increased. That includes outright scam calls, but also political robocalls, cold marketing calls, pollsters and other forms of telephone spam. If you’ve reached your breaking point of calls telling you that there has been a problem detected with your computer, or that there’s a problem with your tax returns, or that there’s a great new opportunity to reduce your power bills, then there are some measures you can take. We’re not going to lie – there’s only so much you can do, especially for landlines. Phone companies and governments have been unwilling or unable to deal with unwanted phone calls, and there’s a limit to the effectiveness…

01 CREATE SHAPE Use the Ellipse tool (set to Shape in Options bar) to create an ellipse covering the area you want to dress with the pattern overlay. 02 APPLY PATTERN OVERLAY Click the layer palette’s fx button, choose Pattern Overlay. Set Blend Mode to Overlay. Pick the Tie Dye preset (or something else). Max out Opacity and Scale. Click OK. 03 ADJUST OPACITY/FILL Drop the shape layer’s fill to 0% (above Layers), leaving the layer style to stand on its own. To reduce, drop layer opacity (here set to 50%). 04 ADD MORE COLOUR Use Free Transform (Cmd/Ctrl-T) to reshape the colouring. Duplicate and transform to add more colouring. Try other patterns or even put Gradient Overlay to use.…

bFan THE IN-BED FAN YOU PROBABLY WON’T BE A FAN OF. US$159 | www.bfan.world Everyone’s had to suffer an evening so balmy that it disrupted their sleep, but for many taking the sheet off and cranking the fan is enough to solve the issue. Not for this particular Texan startup, though, which hopes to blow this problem out of the bedsheets by shoving a leaf blower under your bed to keep you cool under the covers. Not only will it whisk away your steamy surroundings, but it also doubles as a dutch oven exhaust fan propelling unwanted odors past your face and out into the open. And you can have it all for just four times the price of a regular fan, plus shipping... how great! Pegasi 2 LIGHT THERAPY…

REVERSE TRAGIC ERRORS RESPAWN DELETIONS WITH ASHAMPOO UNDELETER FULL VERSION WORTH $15 In our daily lives with computers small and big disasters can always happen. It is very annoying, if for example a beautiful picture, an important document or favourite MP3 is lost or accidentally deleted. In such a situation Ashampoo Undeleter is your salvation. With this program deleted files are recovered in next to no time. If you accidentally deleted your favourite song from your PC, this isn’t a disaster any more. Just use the effective search function of Ashampoo Undeleter and have the program generate a list of all deleted files. This shows whether the files can be recovered completely, partly or not at all. Then you can recover your favourite song in your desired location with just…

With the current ubiquity of social media, experts and companies alike have been looking into its potential negative impacts. One such area of concern is in the competitive nature of ‘counting likes’ and other such quantifiable interactions. So far, Instagram, the Facebook-owned photo- and video-sharing platform, has already disabled the counter to show how many ‘likes’ an individual post receives in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Ireland and Brazil. The social media giant has rolled out the same treatment to its primary Facebook platform, kicking things off in Australia with other regions likely to follow if it proves successful. Like with Instagram, users won’t be able to see the number of likes on other users’ content but they will be able to see it on their own posts. The same…

How you can stop seagulls stealing your food, according to science JUST THE KIND OF ADVICE WE AUSSIES NEED. Seagulls are a menace in most Australian cities, but science has figured out a way that can stop these thieving chip bludgers in their tracks (or so we hope). According to a new study from the University of Exeter, staring at the birds can keep them away... at least for a little while. The research showed that if a human stares at them, seagulls took 21 seconds longer to approach a bag of crisps compared to when they think they’re unobserved. “Gulls are often seen as aggressive and willing to take food from humans, so it was interesting to find that most wouldn’t even come near during our tests,” said Madeleine…

75,000 IS THE NUMBER OF CASSETTE TAPES PREDICTED TO BE SOLD BY THE END OF 2019, IN AN UNLIKELY UPTICK FOR THE DREADFUL OLD FORMAT. 50,000 WERE SOLD IN 2018, ACCOUNTING FOR 0.2 PERCENT OF ALBUM SALES. A RETURN TO SOFTWARE SALES ON CASSETTE REMAINS UNLIKELY, BUT WE’LL KEEP YOU POSTED. 60% OF NEW PASSWORDS ARE SECURE AGAINST GUESSING ATTACKS – MEANING IT WOULD TAKE AN ATTACKER OVER A HUNDRED MILLION GUESSES BEFORE IDENTIFYING THE CORRECT PASSWORD – ACCORDING TO FIGURES FROM GOOGLE PASSWORD CHECKER. 10 THE VERSION NUMBER OF THE LATEST RELEASE OF PHONE OPERATING SYSTEM ANDROID, DESPITE BEING THE 15TH NAMED VERSION SINCE THE OS CAME OUT OF BETA IN 2009. THE IDEA OF JUMPING TO 10 IS VERY POPULAR, WITH WINDOWS 10 BEING AROUND THE 19TH RELEASED…

DOES THE SIGHT of natural sponges, honeycomb cells, or the marketing images of the new iPhone 11 range make your skin crawl? You may be among thousands of people with trypophobia – an extreme aversion to clustered patterns of irregular holes or bumps. While viral images of lotus seed pods, pregnant Surinam toads and woodpeckers storing fruit in trees have triggered reactions from trypophobes online, the 2019 iPhone launch perhaps did more to raise awareness of the condition. Though anecdotally widespread, the phobia is not listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5), the diagnostic guide for mental disorders recognised by professional psychologists. THE BASICS: WHAT IS A PHOBIA? A phobia is a type of anxiety disorder that can trigger symptoms of nausea, dizziness, heart…

Malmal A COMMUNAL MURAL COMMUNITY. malmal.io There’s something warm and fuzzy about being able to contribute to a greater piece of art, and while it’s one thing to draw on a big piece of paper with some friends, it’s something entirely else to do so with all of the internet. Malmal isn’t the first to do this, but its approach is really quite tidy. You can contribute to several different communities, each of which has its own theme and rules (there’s some that are NSFW, but most are kept clean) and some global rules against random doodling and hate-speech are enforced. You can check out the gallery for new additions by users as they draw them, isolating their contribution to the greater piece, as well as see how many people…

As the Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan has offered up his thoughts on whether Super Smash Bros Ultimate could receive new fighters from the world of Blizzard’s multiplayer hero shooter. “To the Smash Bros team, [you can have] whatever character you want”, Kaplan revealed in a recent interview with IGN. “We love them all. They’re all our babies, you can have any single one of them. We have 31 to choose from.”…

My tiny Cessna light aircraft is barrelling down the terrifyingly short runway at Lukla, an airport nestled in the mountains of eastern Nepal that’s said to be one of the most dangerous in the world. The end of the runway approaches fast as I yank back on the yoke, but I’m not getting any lift. I resign myself to my fate, but half a second before I slam into the barrier separating Lukla from the misty void below, the little plane lurches into the air and suddenly I find myself soaring down a deep, vast Himalayan valley scattered with fluffy clouds. Ten minutes later I’m flying over New York City, a dense urban sprawl that stretches as far as the eye can see, sunlight glinting off the skyscrapers. Then I’m…

AH, THE LOOT box. Truly, the antithesis of genuine fun or any sense of real progression in games. Call them what you like –loot crates, booster packs, lock boxes, whatever –the principle is the same: Crack it open and receive in-game loot of varying rarity, typically falling at the common end of the scale. Most games let you steadily earn loot boxes through normal gameplay, but there’s always that option –come to the market, buy a whole bunch, and open them all at once! You know you want to. Loot boxes tap into what psychologists call a “compulsion loop,” a repeated activity that triggers the release of dopamine in the brain, granting mental satisfaction upon acquiring virtual rewards. Many games, by their very nature, utilise compulsion loops. If you’ve played…

LATER TO THE smart display market than Amazon, Google has taken a half-hearted approach to the category. Until recently, it’s let others take the lead with Google Assistant-powered smart displays. Perhaps frustrated by the fact that only Lenovo, JBL, and LG have done so, Google released the 7-inch Nest Hub last year, and is now following up with the larger Nest Hub Max ($229). In addition to a larger 10-inch screen, the Nest Hub Max also has a camera that can be used not just to make video calls, but doubles as a security camera. It also comes with a few new tricks, including facial recognition and the ability to track you as you move around the room. Reach to the back side and you’ll find a switch that disables…

LUMINAR 3 IS an app for anyone who has folders full of digital images on their PC, and wants to not only organise them, but also make small, non-destructive, edits to many of them quickly. In this way, it’s a close cousin of Adobe’s Lightroom app, but without the monthly subscription – Luminar can be bought for a one-off payment, and a free trial is available from https://skylum.com/luminar. Like Lightroom, there are two sides to Luminar: an image import and organisation side that enables you to assign ratings and labels to your images, as well as export them as new files post-editing; and there’s the side that edits your images. Not in a layered, special effects, Photoshop way (though there is a layers system) but rather for tweaking exposure, image…

PROFESSIONAL PRODUCT PHOTOGRAPHY is a deceptively complex genre. In order to create the image styles sought after by clients today while fulfilling the main functions of any product shot – to draw attention to and sell the featured product – lighting must be tightly controlled. In many cases product photography professionals utilise a multi-light setup, but where space is limited, or when working on a limited budget, a single strobe can suffice. In some cases a single light can be desirable to create a strong directional look, where using a second strobe would introduce too much light to the scene and add unnecessary complication to the photographer’s workflow. However, the main challenge with this approach is that one side of the product can appear underexposed, especially with dark, glossy materials.…

THE IPHONE 11 Pro Max is the largest and most powerful phone Apple’s ever created, taking the very best of its technology and combining it with an upgraded design that includes a new matte back, three cameras designed to rival the best from Google and Huawei, and an enhanced battery for greater endurance. However, it’s also one of the most expensive phones on the market. Digging deeper into the camera, we’re impressed most with the Night mode: the iPhone 11 Pro Max is capable of turning night almost into day, but doing so while preserving plenty of detail. We found the newly-added ultra-wide camera to be handy when you want to squeeze in more of a scene (although we didn’t find we needed it that often) and for improving the…

Finally, Microsoft has unveiled its latest devices and innovations at its much anticipated October 2 event. And, it rolled out novel products – like the Surface Neo, Surface Pro X and the Surface Buds – alongside expected follow ups like the Surface Pro 7 and, of course, the Surface Laptop 3, which brings a number of new things to the table – including a custom AMD Ryzen 5 or Ryzen 7 processor (CPU). The Surface Laptop 3 is now available in 13- and 15-inch models. And, as we speculated, Microsoft’s light and thin laptop will now boast the coveted 10nm Ice Lake chips, not to mention the all-but-necessary USB-C ports. But, that isn’t all. The 15-inch Surface Laptop 3 model will have configurations on offer touting a custom AMD Ryzen…

WHAT’S BETTER THAN a 4K screen on a professional ultrabook? One and a half 4K screens on a professional ultrabook. As you might have guessed, Asus’s latest brainchild, the Zenbook Pro Duo, has two screens: a 15.6-inch Full HD or 4K OLED panel in the usual spot, and a second half height 14-inch touchscreen that sits directly underneath it, just above the keyboard, with a resolution of 3840 x 1100. While it’s logical to think that Asus decided to take Apple’s idea of a touch bar and expand it into a full touchscreen, the catalyst for the ZenBook Pro Duo’s additional screen, we’ve been told, was actually just one of opportunity. Back on the first Zephyrus Asus relocated the trackpad to the bottom right of the device (where it doubled…

WE WERE EXCITED to see that the Medal Of Honor franchise expanded in September to include a game that was designed specifically for the VR platform – allowing you to take cover behind objects, pull out grenade pins with your teeth and use your hands to solve a broad range of immersive minigames. AR had a couple of big announcements this month, with the launch of a pair of Amazon audio AR glasses and the announcement of Facebook’s goal to build full-body avatars in 3D real-world maps accessed by a pair of lightweight glasses. Meanwhile, AI tackles privacy policies, radiology, fellatio, drone cinematography and job applications, this month, which is a more diverse skill set than we expected. AI outperform radiologists at image-based diagnoses LITERATURE REVIEW CONFIRMS COMPUTERS OUTPERFORM HUMANS…

TELL US WHAT SUPERPOSITION DOES. Superposition (https://superposition.design) is a free desktop app that parses the styling of a website and creates ‘design tokens’. These are things like the colours, fonts and spacing you use in your design. Once the design tokens are parsed, you can export them to code (CSS, SCSS or JavaScript) or use them directly in Adobe XD (Sketch and Figma are coming soon). You can also copy directly by clicking on them. WHY DID YOU CREATE IT? Design systems help improve the design process. Unfortunately they’re out of reach for most designers and developers. Design systems come with a relatively large upfront cost so, ironically, the people that would benefit most from using design systems – those with time and budget constraints – are the ones that…

$69 | PS4, PC, Xbox | https://borderlands.com BORDERLANDS 3 IS a very mixed bag of a game, a game with long, earnest quests about how darn good coffee is, punctuated by gore and gun violence. Borderlands 3 walks by dog poop, points at it, and laughs, and then sets it on fire. Borderlands 3 stays up until 11:30pm drinking Coke and googling crass Flash animations, taking detailed notes. It’s stuck in the late ‘00s, when surface level vulgarity was enough to qualify as edgy – Borderlands 3 is seriously obsessed with turds – and when the series was first conceived. It’s stuck in a time when memes lasted months rather than days, when referential humor was still a novelty and not exhausting, when you could point at something the slightest…

ApowerPDF IMPRESSIVELY POWERFUL FOR A FREE APP. HERE WE’RE RECOMMENDING the online version of ApowerPDF. The developer, Apowersoft, also makes a desktop PDF editor, but this is a premium tool, whereas the online version is free to use, but before you can use the online PDF editor, you’ll need to click ‘Launch online’ and download Apowersoft’s launcher – a browser add-on. This takes a little extra time, but the effort is well worth it. The PDF editor will open outside your current browser window. You can edit text – very unusual for a free PDF editor, and very handy. Text won’t always flow the way you’d like it to, so you may need to spend some time tweaking alignment and text box size, but it’s very impressive for a free…

REGARDLESS OF WHICH Mac you have, you always want to make sure that three specific areas are given your personal touch: the Dock, the desktop, and the menu bar. While the first two are relatively easy to organise, it’s a slightly more complicated affair to keep the icons at the right end of the menu bar under control. That area can get crowded pretty quickly, making things hard to find or notice. This is where Bartender 3 (US$15, macbartender.com) is useful. Its purpose is to declutter and rearrange the menu bar icons to your needs, providing you with the option to hide and reveal icons as and when you want. Let’s get down to giving your menu bar a slightly early spring clean! After you install the app, you’ll eventually…

IT’S OK. WE’VE all done it. Pretty much everybody has committed this one security sin at some point: using the same password for multiple websites. There are just too many sites, and no human could be expected to remember a unique set of random letters and numbers for every single service. But we’re grown up now. We use a password manager (don’t we?), and that allows us to maintain unique good passwords for every website, just as we should. But going through and changing all our existing passwords seems like a lot of effort, especially if we plan to do this every year. Thankfully, some password managers are here to help. A handful of password managers have a feature you might not be aware of: automated password updating. For selected…

FANCY CREATING AN intricate mix of colour and blended detail but lack a ton of hours to commit? Inspired by new-age mysticism and forged with key Photoshop features, this tutorial image will illuminate a method of rapidly self-blending fractal imagery in the quest to create a dazzling backdrop or even a stand-alone design that will draw viewers into its entrancing embrace. Here you’ll compose a vibrant representation of a meditative inner-journey. The power generated is so intense that the essence is forcefully projected outward from the fellow at the centre of it all. To form the colourful blends and undulating lines of energy, you’ll take some fractal images and apply a quick flip-’n’-blend to produce a series of symmetrical panes. Blend these together to form an increasingly complex metaphysical mélange.…