Índice para August 2021 em APC

Microsoft confirmed that Windows 10 will stop receiving support on October 14, 2025, giving the operating system another four years before users must transition to a new version of Windows. Breaking tradition, Microsoft revealed the end date for Windows 10 Home and Pro in a support document. The page previously contained vague phrasing, stating the date was for “when specific Windows 10 versions would leave support.” It now seems both major versions of Windows 10 will be retired in late 2025, paving the way for a new edition. This is not a surprise. Back when Windows 10 was new, Microsoft confirmed that it would continue its traditional 10 years of support for Windows 10.…

$499 | www.netgear.com Netgear’s Nighthawk range has historically impressed us with its powerful performance in the upper mid-range tier of the Wi-Fi world. Now here’s a new Wi-Fi 6 model and it’s got built-in 4G connectivity to boot. Will this mid-range maestro be the mainstream product to buy? No, is the answer. The Nighthawk LAX20 goes for the wedge-shaped spaceship approach to design. It’s not small, with its tapered front end widening to 29cm to form a not-inconsiderable derrière. This further extends to 37cm with the two antennae adding additional width like some ill-advised cowboy chaps on a ballgown at the Oscars. There are two sockets at the rear to add antennae for the 4G, but these aren’t included. All of this would be forgivable if size equated to performance,…

RRP $1,899 | www.msi.com MSI’s Gaming range used to be the flagship cards in MSI’s range, but that honour now goes to the Suprim series. The Gaming X still comes with the excellent TriFrozr cooler, but since it eschews some of the bells and whistles of the likes of the Suprim or the Aorus Master, the Gaming X offers good value for money (in the current market – that’s relative!) while keeping all the traits that have made MSI’s Gaming cards consistently highly regarded. The Gaming X is equipped with dual eight pin power connectors, which added to the 75W available from the PCIe slot, means the Gaming X is supplied with 375W of power supply capability. It features a 60MHz factory overclock with a rated boost clock of 1,830MHz,…

RRP $3,199 | www.gigabyte.com If you want a card to show off to the world, you won’t find many better options than the Aorus 3080 Ti Extreme. It takes up four slots, it’s fast, it dwarfs almost every other graphics card, it’s got RGB, an OLED screen, a PCB for overclocking and no less than six display outputs. It’s certainly a card with the lot. The Aorus 3080 Ti Extreme includes everything plus the kitchen sink. It needs to be held in your hand or compared to another 3080 Ti to get a gauge on how truly big this card is. It’s one of few cards to come with no less than six display outputs. These are 3x DP 1.4a, two HDMI 2.1 and a single HDMI 2.0 port. The…

Needs macOS 10.7 or later | US$49.99 | vivid-pix.com Thanks to our ever-present iPhone, it’s a quick and easy task to snap and share colourful, high-quality images of our daily activities with friends, family, and social media followers. However, many of us have collections of hard-copy photos that are lingering unseen between the pages of old albums or hidden in boxes in the basement. To help your old analogue photos compete with today’s pristine digital prints, you’ll need to boost their faded colours and restore washed-out contrast. Fortunately, apps such as Vivid-Pix Restore can give vintage prints a new lease of life on our social media feeds. Restore has a clean and simple workspace. After clicking on the Select Image button, you can choose a setting from the Restore Options…

After gazing into broad wells, we’ve scoured the skies, poked at the kabies (whatever those are), drunk plenty of coffee – in two flavours – then returned to our celestial beginnings with comets. And then there were rockets. If that’s as clear as mud, we’re talking about the past seven generations of Intel desktop processors, all of which have one thing in common: They’re manufactured using a variant of Intel’s 14nm process technology. Granted, today’s 11th-gen CPUs, aka Rocket Lake, have about as much in common with the 14nm lithography of Broadwell and Skylake as the latest SpaceX vehicles have in common with the space shuttle, but that’s a long time for a company that used to pride itself on alternating between new architectures and die shrinks every year. So,…

It’s fair to say that when physicist William Higinbotham started messing about with the trajectory-plotting features of the Donner Model 30 analog computer – a chunky block of metal covered in dials, designed for calculating the flight paths of ballistic missiles – he probably didn’t think he was birthing a medium that would eventually come to rival the film and music industries in terms of scale and worth. And yet, in 1958, at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York, that’s exactly what he did. His initial prototype took only a few hours to design and less than a month to implement, using an oscilloscope display to render a simple “ball” and lines, along with a pair of custom-made controllers, each with a single button and dial. Two players…

The esports world is a strange beast. Competition is so ingrained in human nature that competitive games have been around since the early days of Spacewar!, and real-world tournaments for arcade titles such as Street Fighter were popular across the US and Asia throughout the ’90s and the early 2000s. The huge success of StarCraft in South Korea saw major matches televised for increasingly significant cash prizes. Fighting games, shooters, and MOBAs (multiplayer online battle arenas, such as League of Legends) dominated the market, and still do. Only in the past decade, though, has the esports scene achieved widespread appeal. Major publishers started setting up their own events, while streaming platforms such as Twitch offered new routes into the competitive scene. The esports formula is something many developers have tried…

YOU’LL NEED PROJECT ONE • A breadboard • LED • 330 Ohm resistor (orange-orange-brown-gold) • Two male-to-female jumper wires PROJECT TWO • Adafruit MPR121 capacitive touch sensor (www. adafruit.com/product/4830) • Four female-to-female jumper wires • Two crocodile clips • Two pieces of fruit • StemmaQT to breadboard leads (www.adafruit. com/product/4209) All of the code, screenshots and diagrams can be downloaded from tinyurl.com/ APC496PI This month we take a look at CircuitPython, a programming language designed to simplify experimenting with low-cost boards. On a fresh install of Raspberry Pi OS we need to open a terminal and run a few commands to ensure our system is up to date and ready to install CircuitPython: Then we install/upgrade setuptools, a Python toolkit to manage Python package installations: Next we make sure we’re…

The Atari 800 series is often overlooked in retro computing, but this machine genuinely put the wind up companies such as Apple and Commodore, establishing an architecture that sold millions of units with a long production run. On its release, the 800 was ahead of its time and one of the most powerful computers around, bringing innovations such as specialised coprocessors to ease CPU load. Being an Atari machine, the 800 family features the classic Atari arcade library, but is also an essential experience for fans of ’80s micros. So, let’s take a brief history lesson before exploring how you can emulate the 800 line yourself at home. –John Knight Development and launch The 800 series was born when Atari realised its console hardware could be expanded upon with a…

$21.50 | PC, Linux, Mac | wadjeteyegames.com/games/strangeland Publisher Wadjet Eye has a reputation for great modern point-and-clicks, both developing its own titles and helping others’ projects to launch. Strangeland feels at home in that stable, but it struggles to live up to the company’s better efforts. Upon entering the carnival, you find a woman tearfully throwing herself down a well. Although your character’s memory is gone, he knows that she means something to him, and so the objective of the game is to save her. You’ll repeatedly see her jump in, each time unable to stop her, and as you progress she haunts your journey. Strangeland walks a darker path than you might typically expect from the genre, but it still follows certain rules. You have an inventory, you can…

$44.99 | PC, PS5, XB1, Switch Subnautica: Below Zero is almost as good as Subnautica. This may sound like damning with faint praise, but since Subnautica is, to my mind, the best survival game ever made, I’d argue the praise is pretty darned clear. Although less consistently brilliant, Below Zero shares the wild imagination, adventurous spirit, and richly tactile systems of its modern classic of a predecessor. Below Zero returns players to the marine planet 4546B, this time donning the flippers of a new protagonist named Robin Ayou. Robin is searching for her sister Sam, who according to Sam’s employer Alterra, was accidentally killed while on a research expedition to the planet’s arctic region. But Sam’s previously recorded messages to Robin tell a different story. Arriving alone with minimal supplies…

Free | PC | fallahn.itch.io Here’s a game about solving mazes, which takes place in the biggest garden this side of Babylon – so vast it’s split up into several procedurally generated levels. You’re there to meet your uncle – the inventor Professor Eustace – but first you have to fathom your way around his sprawling garden. From a top-down perspective, you’ll trudge through a series of mazes hitting dead ends and doubling back on yourself, before finally acquiring the key to each exit and moving on. This simple act of orienteering is soon expanded with NPCs, acquirable tools including hedge trimmers, and occasional minigames in a variety of genres. There’s bags of content here, and it’s all whimsical, giving off the vibe of a cosy old children’s novel set…

NortonLifeLock announced that it’s adding Ethereum mining to its Norton 360 antivirus software with an upcoming feature, Norton Crypto, that “select Norton 360 customers in Norton’s early adopter program” are invited to test. Let’s make this clear from the start: Enthusiasts will probably be better off learning how to mine Ethereum themselves instead of relying on Norton Crypto. The feature is likely intended for the kind of person who’s never heard of a hash rate, shopped for the best mining GPU, or wondered how to optimise their GPU for Ethereum mining. It’s worth considering how Norton Crypto is presented to those people. Naturally, Norton positions Norton Crypto – and the accompanying Norton Crypto Wallet – as the solution to those concerns. The former is a mining tool built into antivirus…

Along with its Omen gaming range, HP can now call HyperX home, after the US$425 million acquisition was wrapped up last month. HyperX was formerly a brand under Kingston, and includes memory products and gaming peripherals, including the highly-regarded Cloud headphone series. Kingston, in turn, announced on the same day the launch of a new gamer and enthusiasm performance memory brand under its wings: ‘Kingston Fury’. Unlike the HyperX brand, which had a diverse collection of products, Kingston Fury will concentrate solely on memory products, at least for now. Expect three tiers of Fury memory: Renegade for enthusiasts, Beast covering “high-performance, cost-effective upgrades”, and Impact SO-DIMM products for laptops and NUCS.…

They say time makes fools of us all, but that hasn’t stopped Xiaomi from working around the clock on a totally redesigned Mi Watch. Does its newest timepiece earn a place on your wrist? Tick tock, only this teardown can tell. Major tech specs • 1.39-inch (35mm) circular AMOLED display with 454x454 resolution • 11.8mm thickness at 32g • Wireless charging • Accelerometer, gyro, heart rate, barometer, compass, SpO2 (blood oxygen testing) • Water-resistant to five atmospheres • Bluetooth 5.0 Key findings • We’re not seeing major changes in terms of hardware components over last year’s square Chinese version of the Mi Watch, but the new design direction is evident. This watch even grew another button, perhaps to keep up with Samsung. Maybe there are only so many ways to…

$3,499 | gigabyte.com Gigabyte is good at being first in our review door when a new processor lands, but the 15P YD arrived alongside Intel’s own (non-finalised) reference model, which is pretty amazing for a ready-to-buy gaming laptop. It means it’ll be APC’s first laptop with one of Intel’s 11th generation Core H-series processors. The 15P YD features an i7-11800H CPU, which will likely be the most commonly adopted processor among gaming laptops. If we compare this new processor with 16GB of RAM to an Aorus 15P we tested in March, with an i7-10870H and 32GB of RAM, you’ll see raw performance gains of between 12 and 15 percent, a number we’ve become pretty used to seeing in generational updates. This puts it pretty much perfectly on par with AMD’s…

$1,299 | acer.com Acer’s got a new range of Predator monitors that cater to a few different gaming preferences, but if you’ve got a need for speed the 24.5-inch, Full HD Predator X25 is going to be your beast of choice. To put it bluntly, unless you’re a pro gamer, or you’re finding yourself often facing-off against Twitch streamers, then you really don’t need a monitor with a 360Hz refresh rate. There are a heap of 144Hz and even some 240Hz monitors that go for less than half what it’ll set you back for the full 360Hz. That said, if you’re already at the top of your game and you’re looking for that extra competitive edge, there’s arguably no better way to do it than to get the fastest monitor…

$1,699 | www.gigabyte.com We recently reviewed the big, beautiful (and expensive) Asus ROG Swift PG32UQX and declared it the perfect monitor. Now, Gigabyte’s Aorus gaming brand has said, ‘Hold my beer’ and delivered a colossal, 43-inch gaming monitor. But is it too big? Sitting up close to this monster initially feels like you’re a naughty two-year-old staring at the TV from way-too-close. For office work, especially, you’ll need to be turning your head side to side and up and down to see from one end to the other. The 3,840 x 2,160 resolution is just sharp enough for clear office work, but only just. The lower-than-normal pixel density means you can see pixilation in lettering where you shouldn’t, if you don’t get your Windows zoom settings right. To be frank,…

RRP $959 | www.nvidia.com Though the top dog 3080 Ti gets most of the attention, the RTX 3070 Ti is arguably the more important release of the two. It’s a lot more affordable and it’s a compelling upgrade for users coming from older generation cards. Even with street prices that are grossly inflated, it offers 2080 Ti-beating performance at 2080 Ti-like prices. Can we interpret that as a small win in the current market? The card itself is visually identical to the RTX 3070. For a card with a 290W TDP, it’s very compact and its two-slot design will appeal to builders of compact systems. The cooler can be considered a hybrid of a blower and axial fan designs, and it’s clear that Nvidia really put a lot of effort…

RRP $1,920 | www.nvidia.com Founders Edition cards can’t be considered your basic reference card any longer. Nvidia has really put a lot of effort into FE cards and it shows with its unique heatsink and fan design. We can mostly ignore the semiprofessional Titan-like 3090. The 3080 Ti FE is Nvidia’s gaming flagship and its purpose is to answer to the threat posed by AMD’s 6900 XTXH variants. Should you consider a Founders Edition? One of the major benefits of the 3080 Ti FE is its size. The card takes up only two slots and its height doesn’t protrude much above the PCIe bracket. This keeps it widely compatible with a lot of cases. It comes with the standard three DP 1.4a ports and a single HDMI 2.1 port. It…

RRP $2,999 | www.zotac.com Zotac is a brand that doesn’t get a lot of attention in Australia but it does see limited distribution and its cards are sold though a handful of major retailers. The Zotac RTX 3080 Ti Amp Holo is currently Zotac’s flagship 3080 Ti. Its 1,710MHz boost clock is a decent bump over the 1,665MHz of the Founders Edition. The 3080 Ti AMP Holo is a three-slot card but it’s one of the few 3080 Ti’s that isn’t too tall which helps it with case compatibility. If you’re a fan of RGB, you’ll love it thanks to its bright and vibrant lighting and attractive backplate. Surprisingly for a 350w card, there are just two 8-pin PCIe power connectors. This means you won’t get all that much OC…

Needs iOS 14 or later | $10.99 | readkit.app When it comes to aggregating RSS newsfeeds with ‘read later’ services like Instapaper, ReadKit has been our go-to desktop app for some time. With support for favourite services, smart playlists, and custom reading controls, there’s a lot to love. Over the years, however, our reading habits have shifted away from the desktop and onto mobile devices like iPhone and iPad, where ReadKit was unavailable – until now. Available on iOS and iPadOS at last, ReadKit is every bit as remarkable as on macOS. That’s particularly true on iPad, where the larger display mimics the Mac’s three-column layout with subscribed feeds on the left, reader view on the right, and a list of article previews in between. “On iOS and iPadOS, ReadKit…

What originally started out as a rough scale of transistor density and process technology capabilities has morphed into a marketing term as much as anything. Intel has (rightly) noted in the past that its 14nm technology was “better” than many of the competing solutions. TSMC also ended up on the wrong side of the fence with its 16nm node, which it later renamed to 12nm just to look better (with some minor refinements). Looking forward, there are numerous manufacturing nodes coming from a variety of companies. Intel has SuperFIN and Enhanced SuperFIN 10nm nodes that are supposed to compete with the 7nm nodes from Samsung and TSMC. The problem is determining which 7nm node we’re actually talking about. Samsung’s 10nm node lands between Intel’s 14nm and 10nm nodes. It’s also…

The console gaming industry has expanded for years alongside PC gaming. We’re all familiar with titans such as Nintendo and Sony, but no matter what number comes after the new PlayStation, we’re actually currently in the ninth generation of home consoles. The first console to officially hit the market was the Magnavox Odyssey, which loaded games from “cards,” which were essentially PCB cutouts, years before cartridges or disks would become the norm. The Odyssey was only capable of displaying a monochrome line and three dots, and had a total of 28 games, 12 of which were bundled with the system. Many early home consoles were effectively limited microcomputers using dedicated controllers, rather than keyboards. The Atari 2600 ran with a simple joystick, while the ill-fated Fairchild Channel F used a…

Few things are more frustrating. You’re in the middle of working on a project, reaching a major milestone in a game or maybe just booting up your Windows 10 computer and, just like that, the entire OS crashes and presents you with a Blue Screen of Death, usually for no immediately apparent reason. In Windows-speak, the term “Blue Screen of Death” is usually abbreviated as BSOD. It describes an error of some kind that hits the operating system hard enough that it’s forced to quit. Microsoft itself labels such errors with “stopcodes.” Thus these errors may also be generically named “stop errors.” There’s an example that shows what a BSOD sometimes looks like above. Understanding the BSOD screen The screen starts with an old-fashioned unhappy face emoticon “ :( “…

All applications and graphical environments are now easily available for just about all Linux distributions. In those instances when they’re not offered out of the box, the distribution provides easy mechanisms to install them using software repositories. This is why there’s little to differentiate between any two distributions. However, the one area where distributions still fiercely compete with one another is performance: the optimum use of available system resources to boot you to the desktop in the least amount of time possible. Almost all major Linux distributions now use systemd as the underlying init system. Unlike its peers such as System V, systemd is a software suite comprising various daemons and other system components and utilities. These include systemctl, which can be used to start/stop or enable/ disable a service…

STALKER 2: HEART OF CHERNOBYL What is it? A post-apocalyptic horror FPS, and sequel to the first game that came out over 12 years ago. When’s it out? April 28, 2022. What did we see at E3? A new trailer with both cinematic sequences and gameplay. There’s not a lot to go on, but there’s plenty of banter between fellow fireside campers which shows the game’s humorous streak, lots of industrial shootouts, and a look at a bloodsucker, and an interesting piece of new hardware. A bit too much shooting for Stalker honestly. AGE OF EMPIRES 4 What is it? The return of an RTS classic to warm our hearts. When’s it out? October 28. What did we see at E3? A cinematic with Joan of Arc, and some gameplay…

Free | PC, Linux, Mac | bit.ly/oceanwork The world of Oceanwork is an incredibly bleak one. As the perpetrator of an unspecified crime, you’re rocketed onto a watery planet to rinse it of its natural resources. When you’ve mined enough metals – and then banked them in exchange for cash – you can buy your freedom for the very reasonable price of 30 million credits. Oh, it’s a joke number at first, as you dive into the ocean again and again, chipping bits of copper in exchange for chump change. But as you exchange that change for upgrades – a bigger air supply here, a sharper pickaxe there – you can delve deeper into the ocean, where the rarer, more valuable minerals lie. If all that sounds eerily familiar, then…

Charlie bit my finger removed from web and sold as NFT YouTube clip with 882 million views taken offline and sold to highest bidder. While it’s probably fair to say that everyone who really needed to see the “Charlie bit my finger” viral YouTube clip from 2007, has already done so, there’s something inherently upsetting about the concept of forcibly removing it from the internet so it can be sold to one individual for a private collection. Yet this is the fate for many pieces of web culture as the NFT boom continues to expand into unexpected places. If this seems ridiculous, we’re with you, but 11 active bidders scrambled for the video that eventually sold for US$760,999. DIY Arduino Alt Tab contraption For Alt Tabbing when your hands are…

APC is Australia’s oldest consumer technology magazine – having been consistently in print for forty years, since our first issue way back in May 1980 – and we take that heritage and responsibility very seriously. While our focus is obviously on the personal computer the very definition of the PC has changed and shifted markedly since the early 1980s. As such, we touch on many other areas of tech, too, from smartphones and apps to peripherals, accessories, and beyond. We have two goals: to find the best modern tech and to help you make the most of it. We’re also an open church in terms of platforms. We know most people aren’t wed to a single brand’s products and use a variety of devices. And, like you, APC’s journalists want…

In a new report, Jon Peddie Research sheds some insight on the impact that cryptocurrency mining has had on AIB (add-in board) sales for the start of this year. Needless to say, AMD, Nvidia and their AIB partners have profited hugely from the high demand on the best graphics cards. The consulting firm estimated that 25 percent of the graphics cards shipped in the first quarter of 2021 went into the waiting grubby hands of cryptocurrency miners and speculators. That’s roughly 700,000 high-end and midrange gaming graphics cards. In monetary terms, we’re looking at a hefty sum in the range of US$650 million. “Cryptocurrency miners aren’t the only reason for the drastic inflation in graphics card pricing. The pandemic also played a big role in this situation since it forced…

$TBC | ikea.com Symfonisk Picture Frame WiFi Speaker “Looks like music. Sounds Like art.” Smart speakers are making it pretty commonplace to have speakers in every room and while some speakers are nice to look at, sometimes you wish that you could have good quality audio without actually needing to put bulky speakers in every corner. Thanks to a collaboration between multi-room audio veteran Sonos and everyone’s favourite Swedish furniture company, now your ‘art’ can now be the speaker in your room. Ikea’s Symfonsik is available in the US in a range of different styles, with local availability on the way. The only way it could be better is if you could customise the artworks. US$60 | otterbox.com Otterbox Xbox Power Swap Controller Batteries The closest thing to a permanently…

$699 | www.asus.com/au Regular readers will know how we’re big fans of the Wi-Fi industry’s, two-node, ‘mega-mesh’ routers, which see one node plugged into your modem and the other placed at the far side of your premises. They connect via a dedicated, wireless backhaul channel which offers dramatically better performance than regular mesh systems. Asus practically invented the technology but it’s since been emulated by (a farcically priced) Netgear and an under-performing TP-Link rival. So, what does the XD6 bring to the mix? First is the slightly more refined design. The new, diminutive, white nodes have a lightly brushed exterior with a subtle, pearl lustre that wins the industry’s catwalk competition. But, with a slightly smaller chassis than Asus’ own XT8 sibling and a significantly smaller surface area than Netgear’s…

$799 (4TB), $409 (2TB), $219 (1TB), $199 (500GB) | crucial.com With the X6, Crucial has delivered a solid external solid state drive for those looking for a suitably small storage device with an attractive price tag, Type-C connectivity and a larger-than-average capacity to boot. It is a no-frill portable SSD that has mass appeal but will leave those with a need for speed and wanting something faster, either based on USB 3.2 Gen 2 or Thunderbolt 3. The X6 doesn’t come with any software or a Type-A to Type-C cable – you are only provided with a Type-C to Type-C cable. Crucial quotes read speeds up to 540MBps via the USB 3.1 Gen-2 Type-C interface. Our benchmark tests show that the Crucial X6 hitting 464MB/s and 432MB/s on read/write speeds.…

Headset only: $1,299 (requires separate purchase of controllers and base stations) | vive.com/au/product/vive-pro2 The high-end PC VR market is currently a two horse race. The excellent Valve Index has the edge in tracking quality, controllers and 144Hz refresh rate. But it’s falling behind with a 1,440 x 1,600 per-eye resolution. The equally excellent HP Reverb G2 is the leader on visual fidelity, with 2,160 x 2,160 pixels per-eye resolution delivering utterly amazing visuals. But its 90Hz refresh rate is starting to look a bit pedestrian and its inside-out tracking system can be a bit hit and miss. With HTC’s launch of the Vive Pro2 headset a third horse has entered the race, and it is gunning for top spot. On paper the Pro2 looks impressive, boasting a 5K (2,448 x…

RRP $1,999 | www.gigabyte.com The Aorus Master 3070 Ti is a big card. This four-slot card is big, bright, beefy and brawny. If you want a GPU that draws attention to itself as much as what it shows on your monitor, then this is a card for you. As if you had any doubt after a glance, it’s Gigabyte’s flagship 3070 Ti. It comes with a 1,875MHz boost clock, a very nice 105MHz increase over the FE. It’s got a bigger cooler, more power and more features. If you’re looking for the best 3070 Ti you can get your hands on, the Aorus Master is going to be tough to beat. The Aorus Master has several characteristics that set it apart from a basic 3070 Ti. This first is no…

RRP $3,299 | ]www.asus.com Asus’ TUF range of graphics cards have carved out a niche for themselves thanks to their quality coolers, which offer a combination of low temperatures and low noise levels. We really liked the TUF 6800 XT, and if the 3080 Ti version is as good, it could be a 3080 Ti to consider if you’re a fan of gaming in silence. The TUF brand, with its focus on reliability as well as its minimalistic design theme is a welcome option for users who aren’t impressed by RGB. Its aluminum shroud, solid build quality, custom PCB and its sheer size all point towards a card that’s designed to crank out high frame rates, while staying out of sight and out of earshot. The custom PCB is powered…

Before each of the streaming sites starts throwing punches, we need to take a step back to 2011, when the way we consume music began to change. This was when Spotify was widely released and gave the world a new way to experience music consumption. Users could search for and listen to any song that was on Spotify’s online library. As a whole, we no longer physically own music; we stream it. Spotify was one of the key founders to push and innovate this new audio age, in which music streaming is a very common household service. For the full packages, you pay a monthly subscription instead of outright physically owning the music – we will dig deeper into this a little later. Since creating this advance in audio listening,…

Linux | www.digi77.com/linux-kodachi The previous major release of Linux Kodachi saw off competition from its more popular security-oriented peers such as Tails and Whonix. With the latest release, Kodachi further raises the bar with a useful new custom tool that substantially lowers the barrier of entry for the distro and makes it a lot more approachable. The latest 8.x branch received a few quick updates before settling at v8.3. The 8.x series is based on the Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS release and its biggest feature is the inclusion of a new dashboard tool. The release also adds a host of new significant tweaks, and critical functions like VPN and Tor have been made more accessible, while useful features like panic room take on new useful functions. The distro still boots into…

“The Rift was a revelation for the VR industry. Improved tracking, a wider field of view, and better eye displays meant that it was a serious piece of hardware, prompting a huge resurgence in public interest in VR.” Proponents of VR like to claim that it is here to revolutionise gaming, but the technology has actually been kicking around since the ’70s, initially used for military and flight training purposes. The first VR headsets designed for gaming emerged in the early ’90s, when Sega announced a headset for its Mega Drive console. Unfortunately, Sega VR never made it into consumers’ homes, with only a half-baked arcade version ever seeing the light of day. A handful of other manufacturers attempted to develop similar technologies, but the gaming public remained indifferent until…

IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to save web pages so you can read them at a more convenient time YOU’LL NEED Safari, macOS 11 or later; Pocket and Instapaper optional Apple’s macOS Big Sur offers plenty of ways to save interesting content for later. For example, you can highlight text on a web page and drag it to a document, which can then be saved to read anywhere. That is fine, but Safari offers better options. Many of these methods are built right into the browser. Reading List lets you save any article to a library for later reading. By default, your saved articles require an internet connection to view, but you can save them for offline consumption. Safari extensions like Pocket and Instapaper (both free)…

In case you’ve missed it, podcasts have exploded in popularity over the last year or so. Got a particular interest? Chances are there’s now a podcast for it. But while podcasting’s popularity goes up, it seems the cost of the tech to create it has gone up, too. However, there’s also been a boom in low-cost audio recording technology, with plenty of budget microphones and mixers now on offer. The big question for me was does any of this stuff work with my phone? Bigger than Ben Hur Even recording a podcast just between two people can often seem like a huge production if you watch some YouTube videos. PCs, mixing desks, pricey microphones – it’s a lot of gear, which is fine if you’re in an office or fixed…

$54.95 | PC, PS4, XB1, Switch | bit.ly/2RZmBlo Like so much Warhammer spawn, Storm Guard’s lore and fine writing flatter a flawed game that clumsily combines tactical turn-based combat with an odd roguelike metagame. You start each battle with a single hero unit. As you amass ‘Power’ over the turns you can call in subsequent units using cards that you earn over a campaign-run by completing missions and looting chests in battle. Storm Ground’s three factions cater to different playstyles. You have your straightforward Stormcast Eternals – humans donning heavy armour and divine judgement. The Nighthaunt are a ghostly faction of low-armour, fast-moving swarmers, whose hero can throw down healing wisps each turn to heal allies and summon pyres all over the battlefield to act as spawn points. Then there…

Free | PC, Mac, Linux | motvind-studios.itch.io In this affecting adventure game, you play as a woman returning to her home town in Sweden, a year after the death of her childhood friend. The place hasn’t changed, and it’s with bitterness rather than nostalgia that she wanders the streets, chatting to the locals as she tries to understand what happened. The mystery is dangled in your face before being deconstructed at the close of the game. While it has the atmosphere of a Twin Peaks-style mystery – as you explore a quiet, rural town impacted by a shocking event – it’s a subtler story than I was expecting, offering no neat resolution to your friend’s sudden death. The ending is devastating, and without relying on violence. A few carefully chosen…

$35.95 | PC | kingofseas.net Here’s a pirate simulator that makes being horrible on the high seas really fun. If all you want is something that lets you wander around being pirate-y, this will serve you very well indeed. Controls are nice and simple. Speed is dictated by how many of your three sails you have unfurled, which means taking a few down for tight turns, which can come in handy during combat. Speaking of which, to begin with, you’ll rely on your cannons. Shooting to the left or right of your ship, positioning and awareness of range is important, as is timing; they take a few seconds to reload each time There’s a huge number of upgrades to find, loot and buy. Aspects such as hull, crew, and sails…