Table of contents for April 2018 in APC

NBN Co is trying to standardise the 50Mbps speed tier instead, promoting it in a campaign called “Focus on 50”. The promotion, which saw the wholesale price of the 50Mbps drop with an additional 50% extra bandwidth offered for free to the service providers (ISP/RSP). The promotion was due to end in April 2018, but the national broadband service has announced that the promotional period will be extended ‘til October to enable RSPs to prepare for the switch to a permanent price once the promotion has ended. In a bid to get more end users on the higher speed plans, some resellers, like TPG, have dropped the 25Mbps plans altogether. Telstra is also upgrading all its customers on the slow plan to the 50Mbps tier for free. While NBN tries…

AMD CPU $235 | WWW.AMD.COM Before Ryzen, AMD was best known for its incredibly affordable Athlon APUs. Many of these system-on- a-chip units, combining processor cores with onboard graphics, went into affordable gaming PCs and home theatre PCs. So when we went a complete year without any Ryzen-based APUs, we were a bit disappointed. Thankfully, AMD is finally delivering the goods with APUs not only based on Ryzen, but also featuring AMD Vega graphics built right into chip, led by the APC award-winning AMD Ryzen 5 2400G. These aren’t your run-of-the-mill integrated graphics either. Rather, the company is calling the onboard Vega GPU ‘discrete-class graphics’. We’ve taken AMD’s claims to the task and came away amazed by the chip’s ability to game at 4K and high-quality settings without…

GRAPHICS CARD $4,699 | WWW.NVIDIA.COM Nvidia’s Titan series of graphics cards has always been more about status than practicality, and waiting a few months could usually net you nearly the same level of performance for about half the price. This time, rumours are swirling about Volta, suggesting we might not even see GeForce variations, and instead will get Ampere GPUs later this year. That’s not really a problem, assuming Ampere is to the GV100 what the GP104 was to the GP100. The problem is that GV100, for all its performance, has a lot of extra design elements that simply aren’t ideal for graphics workloads. Take the 64 CUDA cores per SM (streaming multiprocessor), with 32 FP64 (floating point) cores, and the ability to do twice as many packed…

ULTRABOOK FROM $2,099; AS TESTED, $2,899 | WWW.DELL.COM.AU Since it was introduced around 4 years ago, Dell’s XPS 13 has had many competitors try to topple it, but despite its ageing design, it has managed to remain the slim-and-light Windows laptop to beat. With this latest 2018 refresh (also known as the XPS 13 9370), Dell wisely isn’t messin’ with what ain’t broken — it’s tweaked that design slightly to make it slightly sleeker and lighter. The biggest physical change is that the body width has been reduced by about 20% — when closed, it’s shrunk from 15mm at its widest point to 11.6mm. That’s resulted in a bunch of other changes which are a bit of a mixed bag. One of the more controversial aspects is that…

INKJET PRINTER $499 | WWW.EPSON.COM.AU When it comes to printing photos at home, Epson has long been a popular name. More often than not, the company offers excellent results — as long as your creative ambitions don’t stretch too far beyond a standard page size. That’s no longer a limitation with Epson’s Expression Photo HD XP-15000, which is capable of producing vibrant, wide-format borderless prints up to A3+ in size. Handily, you can print wirelessly from mobile devices as easily as you can from your desktop PC, but unfortunately, there’s no EcoTank support (which is a newer Epson technology that eliminates costly ink cartridge replacements). You can print larger, full-colour pages in about two minutes; standard document printing speeds average nine pages per minute in black and white…

KEYBOARD $299 | LOGITECH.COM/EN-AU Logitech’s latest wireless keyboard is one of the best we’ve ever used, but when you can score premium mechanical workhorses for significantly less, you have to ask is it worth the heavy outlay? The Craft sports a similar sleek chic minimalism that does so well for Apple, and with construction this sturdy, there’s no doubt (aesthetically or ergonomically) that this is a premium device. Although it’s not adjustable, the ‘board’s slight angle makes for comfortable typing, and the low-profile keys with circular indents are the most pleasant membrane caps we’ve ever danced our fingers across. Logitech Flow is also included, allowing you to switch to one of three paired Bluetooth devices with a single button press. The battery is rechargeable via USB-C and offers…

LIQUID COOLER $259 | WWW.CORSAIR.COM When it comes to thermal dissipation for clean builds, ridiculous efficiency and noise reduction, AIOs are the way forward. Those early teething days are long gone. That said, maximum core counts have almost doubled in the last year alone, so the need for more powerful cooling solutions has grown, and although this isn’t the first time we’ve seen a triple-rad AIO, it’s the first we’ve seen from Corsair, and one that isn’t based around Asetek’s rather aggressive patenting at that. Aesthetically, the Hydro H150i Pro RGB is a whole different beast from the now-legendary ‘old-school’ H100i we used to know and love. The design, bezel, fans, lighting have all been redeveloped from the ground up around the industry’s obsession with RGB. Not that…

When it comes to outright speed, your PC never seems to have enough of it. Or to put it another way, it doesn’t matter how smoothly it’s running, your PC could always do with being that bit faster. Armed with the right know-how, you can fine-tune your PC to squeeze more performance from it, but the effort involved can be more than it’s worth. Which is where we come in. In this feature, we’ve dug out 20 of the finest free tools we know that can help speed up your PC. We’ll open by revealing lightweight alternatives to the bloated apps you’ve been using, and then we’ll move on to reveal our favourite tools for fine-tuning your system. Your hardware could use some optimisation too, so we’ve collected the best…

While there’s no substitute for hardware upgrades to deliver the ultimate performance fillip, the fact remains it’s likely that various components in your PC aren’t being pushed to their absolute limits. By default, many components are configured in a conservative fashion, but armed with the right tools, you can start squeezing them that little bit further. It’s worth noting that overclocking — the process for speeding up your processor, RAM and graphics — will ultimately shorten the lifespan of these components, particularly if their core temperature rises. Thankfully, our recommended tools have built-in fail-safes and monitoring mechanisms so you can check that your tweaks aren’t going to bring your PC to its knees. You’ll also find out how to speed up other hardware areas, too — this time without introducing…

Once Windows has been reinstalled, open Windows Update to bring Windows fully up to date — don’t be surprised if there are hundreds of updates still to apply in the case of Windows 7 and 8.1. Once it’s fully up to date, consider reinstalling Macrium Reflect Free (back over the page) and taking your first drive image — a vanilla backup you can restore in future instead of reinstalling the OS. If you followed the advice on the previous page, you should now be able to reinstall your core apps using CloneApp from your PC’s data drive. If you click the Restore button, every program setting you backed up will be restored — if there are any backup settings you don’t want to restore, select Options to locate the backup…

Plan your next trip Whether you need help with travel, days out, hotels or things to do while on holiday, the TripAdvisor app (free, Microsoft Store) has you covered. Not only can you find what you’re looking for, but you can book directly through the app too, comparing prices to get the best possible deal. Look out for the ‘areas of interest’ section, giving you ideas for your next break. Faster, easier web browsing All web browsers are pretty much the same, aren’t they? Not really. Opera (www.opera.com) has made a striking bid for uniqueness with a sleek, simple interface and the ability to sync your settings between multiple devices. Also, recent updates have introduced native ad-blocking, VPN for secure browsing and power-saving for laptops and tablets. Listen to audiobooks…

All computers slow down over time, for a whole variety of reasons. In recent issues of APC, we’ve shown you how to address some of these reasons, decluttering your Mac to detox it, for example (APC #447), and speeding up performance on old Macs by switching to the free and open-source elementary OS (APC #442). In an upcoming issue, we’ll tackle some common causes of slowdowns in High Sierra, particularly those relating to preferences and the configuration of your system. But first, let’s look at probably the most common cause of poor performance in any version of macOS: your apps. Don’t panic! Of course, the whole point of having a computer is to do things with it. But when your Mac seems sluggish, this is often because of apps running…

You don’t have to be careless to lose your laptop, but that doesn’t mean you should just accept the fact that your machine is gone forever. Prey helps recover your stolen devices by enabling you to track and control them remotely, and make them unusable to anyone who’s got them. Prey helps you keep an eye on the perpetrator, and how they’re using your machine and collate all kinds of information that will come in handy when you report the theft to the authorities. Prey installs an agent on your device that runs in the background and periodically sends an HTTP request to check in with its online headquarters whether it should gather information and perform any action, or stay asleep. When you lose a device, you mark it as…

This month’s tutorial will be a guide to growing healthy, hydroponic (or organic hydroponic) food with the aid of a Raspberry Pi. Hydroponics has many advantages compared to other, more conventional methods of food harvesting, including faster rates of growth and improved water conservation. Because plants take up their 17 essential nutrients in liquid form, going down the hydroponics route enables gardeners to apply a precise diet to their crop, while using a sterile medium for the root zone that’s free of pathogens such as E. coli and salmonella. Now, some of you may be wondering what the hell a Raspberry Pi has to do with all this. Well, it’s such a useful device that it’ll carry out two tasks: monitor the garden remotely via a webcam, and detect moisture…

You can think of smartphones as ‘never enough’ devices — there’s usually never enough battery life, never enough performance and almost always never enough storage. With new models pushing barriers into high-speed Full-HD and 4K video capture, we’re fast reaching the point where too much storage isn’t enough. As fewer phones arrive with a user-removable battery, external storage through microSD cards is one of the last options for bulking up most existing devices. But it’s not without pitfalls. NEW ‘ADOPTABLE’ STORAGE Android 6.0/Marshmallow’s arrival heralded new options for phones with a microSD slot. Google calls it ‘adoptable storage’ (tinyurl.com/ya7k9kyk) and it triggers on most devices when Android 6.0 or later first detects a new card, offering you the option to ‘adopt’ the storage as internal or use it as ordinary…

Oculus Rift users who logged into their computers on March 7th, 2018, for some virtual reality shenanigans were met instead with a dialogue box warning of a runtime error. Turns out, devs at Oculus VR had forgotten to renew a crucial app permission within its Oculus Runtime Service for Windows 10 PCs. Users from around the world cited the problem on the Oculus VR forum in a thread that was six pages long at the time of writing. As one Oculus VR forum user put it, “Someone has neglected his responsibility... now we have to wait and mess around with Windows clock... a simple message from Oculus on this yesterday would have been so nice.” Oculus VR, however, released a statement on the same forum, saying, “We are aware of…

Until February of this year, Australian businesses could still choose to keep quiet if they’d been the victim of a serious data breach that had compromised customer data. Traditionally, when a company lost your data — whether that was via robbery, technical fault or bumbling incompetence — you likely wouldn’t even know about it unless you were specifically informed. However, thanks to the introduction of a Privacy Act amendment called Notifiable Data Breaches (NDB), it’s illegal for Australian companies not to tell you. And it’s not just obviously important bits of data, like credit card numbers, that requires disclosure: the new law covers any data that could render a person “reasonably identifiable”, a deliberately flexible term which can account for a whole range of data types. “The NDB scheme introduced…

AMD CPU $139 | WWW.AMD.COM If you’re looking to build a PC as affordably and small as possible, an APU — an AMD processor equipped with onboard integrated graphics — is the best way to do it. At the very bottom of AMD’s APU stack, the company has introduced the AMD Ryzen 3 2200G, a quad-core processor with serious ‘discrete graphics’ that altogether costs less than the cheapest graphics card. In our book, it’s the ultimate choice for PC gaming on a budget. Just $139 is none too shabby for a quad-core, four thread processor, further backed up by eight graphics compute units and a 1100MHz max GPU clock. The 2200G is a noticeably more affordable proposition than the $169 Intel Core i3-8100, which packs as much computing…

GAMING LAPTOP FROM $1,698; AS TESTED, $1,998 | WWW.ASUS.COM/AU The only PC category that’s still seeing substantial growth seems to be 2-in-1s, with detachables and convertibles continuing to steal a lot of customers from the shrinking tablet market. From a consumer perspective, we guess it makes some sense to put a bit of extra money into a laptop to gain the ability to also use it as a tablet — and in some cases, also net you a faster SSD, a more powerful CPU or even, in some cases, a dedicated GPU for better gaming. ASUS’s 1.4kg ZenBook Flip UX461U, is perhaps not quite as comfortable to use in tablet mode as a detachable or a straight-up slate, but for people who will only use the tablet form…

STYLUS $50 | ADONIT.NET Adonit’s Pro 3 is a passive stylus, requiring no Bluetooth and no batteries. The stylus has a very fine point; to persuade your tablet of choice to recognise this, it’s attached by a ball joint to a fingertip-sized plastic disc, which skates across the screen. It looks weird — but it works brilliantly, and is transparent, so you needn’t worry about it obscuring what’s on the screen. After a few moments of use, you forget the disc and use the Pro 3 like a ballpoint. The body is slim (at 9mm in dimeter), maybe too slim for big hands, but it’s beautifully made. The lid snaps on over the tip with a satisfying magnetic clunk, connecting in the same way to the other end…

KEYBOARD $210 | WWW.MICROSOFT.COM Microsoft has been producing keyboards and mice for decades, but now that it’s expanded into the PC-making business, it’s become important for the company to maintain a design consistency with its Surface products — particularly the Surface Studio, which Microsoft’s new Modern Keyboard with Fingerprint ID seems destined to accompany. With its sleek aluminium frame and flat, squared keys, the new Modern Keyboard is about as classy as keyboards get. Though the keys themselves are quite close to the metal they’re sitting on, there’s a nice travel distance, making the Modern quite satisfying to type on. They also have a matte finish, avoiding the cheap, shiny look that many other keyboards tend to have. However, the real reason you’d probably pick this one up…

MECHANICAL GAMING KEYBOARD BLUE SWITCHES, $189; SILVER SWITCHES, $199 | THERMALTAKE.COM.AU Thermaltake has been quietly beavering away making affordable and genuinely great gaming keyboards for a long time now — the Poseidon Z is a particularly fine example — so in unboxing the more premium-priced X1, we were expecting great things. Out of the box, the first thing that struck us is just how heavy the X1. Weighing a cookie under 1.6kg and at 46 x 17cm, this is a robust slab of key-bejewelled metal that takes a commanding amount of real estate on the desk, even without the wrist rest. The X1 comes in two Cherry mecahnical switch flavour options; Blue or Silver (which costs 10 bucks more). Our review unit was fitted with the latter —…

One of the downsides of the rapidly evolving computer market is that specifications have improved so fast that application makers have rarely felt the need to streamline their programs. Why spend time cutting back the fat when next year’s PC will likely be twice as fast anyway? That’s fine if you’ve just bought a shiny new PC, but most of us like to keep our machines running for several years. Or perhaps you bought an entry- level laptop or 2-in-1 only to find 1GB RAM doesn’t go half as far as it used to. Before you know it, opening Office or running your image editor seems to sap your PC of its strength, leaving it sluggish and barely responsive. In this first section, we’ve identified five key apps that can…

When you next come to reinstall Windows, it pays to take precautions before you begin in the form of various backups — File History is essential for your personal data, but what about your program settings and how about a fail-safe backup in the event of a botched reinstall or forgotten file? The reinstall process is also a good excuse to make changes to the way you organise data on your PC’s main internal and external drives, while you’ll also want to make sure that you have the latest versions of the Windows installation files to save you a lengthy post-install update process. All these potential problems are covered by our favourite reinstall tools. You’ll find the best drive backup tool in the business rubs shoulders with our favourite free…

WINDOWS RECOVER DATA AND SETTINGS FROM BACKUP I’ve backed my computer up with Macrium in order to fix my non-booting PC, but can you tell me how I recover data from the fail-safe Macrium drive image I took, please? Anthony Parsons First, reinstall Macrium Reflect Free. Then follow the step-by-step guide to recover files from your image — when done, right-click the drive icon in File Explorer under This PC and choose ‘Macrium Reflect > Unmount Macrium Image’. Open drive image: Browse to the folder containing your fail-safe drive image. You should see that it’s marked as a ‘Disk Partition image’ with a blue drive icon. Simply double-click the drive image and click Yes when you’re prompted to open it with Macrium Reflect Free. The Backup Selection window will open.…

Y oink began life as a desktop utility, and quickly gained cult status among veteran Mac users. The idea behind the app is simple: Yoink acts as a temporary virtual shelf or ‘parking space’ for items that you want to drag and drop between locations, sort of like a universal clipboard for your digital content. In other words, it makes life easier on your fingers, letting you navigate more comfortably to the destination of an item you’re moving. Yoink’s popularity on Mac meant it was only a matter of time before it made the jump to iOS, and fortunately, the basic premise of Yoink on iPhone and iPad ($4.49) remains the same. In this short tutorial, we’ll guide you through the functionality of Yoink for iOS and show you how…

Forget fair microtransaction models and the magic formula for a successful esports game — these are but flash-in-the-pan challenges the games industry currently faces. For a much longer time, 3D designers were stumped by a far more prosaic problem: how to draw curved and diagonal lines without them appearing like a blocky staircase of pixels. Aliased polygonal edges — or jaggies, as you say in today’s parlance, with your low-slung jeans and dangerous, new ideas — were a simple fact of 3D graphics for over a decade. It was only in the mid-2000s that antialiasing (AA) became sophisticated enough to smooth out those lines until they appeared realistic, and it still takes a lot of computational power to do so. In this smoother-edged age, though, new problems have emerged. What…

PC, PS4, XO | FROM $69.95 | OUTCASTTHEGAME.COM Sequels and remakes are the backbone of the modern game industry, the boughs from which the fruits of original creative endeavours can hang. And they have another important function—making great games from the past accessible to those who don’t have Windows 98 installed anymore. 17 or so years ago, Outcast was cutting-edge, running on an engine that flitted between raycasting for the ground and textured polygons for objects. An enhanced version, Outcast 1.1, was released in 2014, but it stuck with the CPU rendering of the original, and was on the blurry side, which is an accusation you can’t make of Second Contact. It looks superb, every texture beautifully displayed, every face animating in time to its spoken lines, and…

PC | US$30 | WWW.CIVILIZATION.COM Continuing the last couple of Civ games’ predilection for ‘unstacking’, Civilization VI: Rise and Fall has peeled apart more of the series’ fundamental systems. This time, it’s the march through history itself. It’s more dynamic and messy, with civs rising and falling as they enter new eras and experience Golden and Dark Ages. Yet Civilization has rarely felt this structured or cohesive. Eras divide Civilization, representing a civ’s technological and cultural level. In Rise and Fall, the system has been spun out into two types of era: player eras and game eras. Player eras are the mark of a civ’s individual progress, while game eras start and end at predetermined moments and affect every civ. The result is that you’ll still be rewarded…

Musk’s Boring flamethrowers sell out Fundraising prank brings in serious money. Mid December last year, Elon Musk — our saviour and future overlord — was busy selling US$20 baseball caps in an effort to raise money for the “soul-destroying traffic”-avoiding tunnel business he spontaneously created in 2016: The Boring Company. And since this is Elon Musk we’re talking about, he promised to then start selling flamethrowers if all 50,000 hats were sold, which they inevitably were. In a promotional video, Musk said, “I want to be clear that a flamethrower is a super terrible idea. Definitely don’t buy one. Unless you like fun.” And because Americans and the internet exist, it’s no surprise that the whole 20,000 stock of Boring Company flamethrowers (at US$500 a piece) were sold out, netting…

304 PAGES THE LENGTH OF AN EU-SUPPRESSED STUDY THAT FOUND THERE TO BE NO EVIDENCE OF PIRACY HARMING SALES After spending €360,000 ($565,750) on a 2015 study that investigated the impacts of piracy on the sale of copyrighted movies, video games, music and books, the European Commission apparently never shared the 304-page document or its findings. Almost three years after it was originally submitted, that report has now been legally obtained from the EU by a member of the German Pirate Party. Among its other findings, it clearly states that “the results do not show robust statistical evidence of displacement of sales by online copyright infringements”. 1.53 Mbps AVERAGE BANDWIDTH PER NBN USER CLIMBS AFTER DISCOUNTED RATES COAX ISPS TO BUY UP After NBN Co discounted its Connectivity Virtual Circuit…

“If we were to presume you come from some alternate reality where you didn’t have a network at home, we’d have two choices. The awkwardness of Ethernet is trumped by mesh’s flexibility; mesh’s expense is beaten by Ethernet’s upgradeability.” A functioning network isn’t just a luxury — it’s one of life’s essentials. Heat, water and delicious broadband piped through the home. But there’s a lot to choose from, both in terms of standards and individually within those brackets. We’re not here to pick out specific hardware, but if you’re looking to renovate your network, you’ll need to make the right choice. Will it be good old Wi-Fi? Perhaps its close cousin, mesh? Or do the reliable wires of Ethernet make the most sense? Read on, and choose what works for…

INTEL CPU $169 | WWW.INTEL.COM.AU There were lots of reasons to get excited about Intel’s eighth-generation (Coffee Lake) Core processors, but for this reviewer, it was the promise of this particular chip that produced the excitement. The reason is straightforward enough — it potentially offers the best bang for your buck of any of the new chips. The good news (if slightly premature in terms of this review), is that it delivers on that potential and, in fact, for many system builders, now becomes the go-to chip for most budgets, and even mainstream plans. We’ll get to the reason for this glowing preamble shortly, but before we do, it’s worth going over what your $169 gets you. The Core i3-8100 lacks Hyper-Threading and a Turbo boost, but it…

3.5-INCH HARD DRIVE $595 | WWW.SEAGATE.COM These days, storage is all about solid state. SSDs provide not only the fastest performance, they also offer the largest capacities — for a price. But if you want maximum storage density for the minimum possible price, then you’ll need an old-school magnetic hard drive. With that in mind, it’s no surprise to find that conventional hard drive technology marches on despite its relegation to a relatively small niche. A little over a year ago, the biggest mainstream hard drives weighed in at 10TB. Now we’re reviewing our first 12TB drive, the Seagate IronWolf. It’s closely related to the Seagate Barracuda Pro, but further optimised for NAS applications. In other words, if you’ve got a NAS box that’s set for a drive…

GAMING LAPTOP $4,800 | AU.MSI.COM What happens when you put the equivalent of a complete desktop into a notebook chassis, plus a bit of desk? MSI’s GT75VR 7RF Titan Pro answers that question. It’s gigantic. We’ve tested some large laptops over the years, but at more than 5.5cm thick, the Titan Pro is absolutely massive. A good portion of that is due to the cooling solution, with more than 10 heat pipes, dual exhausts, and twin super-large, 29-blade fans (more on those later). Adding to the heft is the SteelSeries mechanical keyboard, and while its removable keycaps are still chiclet in style, they have a satisfying click that feels great. The Titan’s insides are quite impressive as well. Computing duties are handled by an Intel Core i7-7820HK processor…

USB WEBCAM $159 | WWW.RAZERZONE.COM Razer has made a big, all-in splash in the streaming peripherals market, knowing well that, with the breathtaking rise of YouTube and Twitch video game celebrity culture, everyone’s going to want a piece of the action. The Razer Kiyo is a portable webcam which will play nice with both desktops and laptops, with its ability to be both clipped to the top of a monitor or mounted onto a camera stand. It captures crisp images with its 4MP, 2,688 x 1,520-pixel camera and comes with an in-built light (more on that later). The good news is, if you’re not a game streamer (the Kiyo’s undeniable target market), this is a very premium and super easy unit to use, and your distant relatives will…

Windows has been designed for maximum compatibility, which means that, while it’ll run on a wide range of PCs, it’s not been particularly optimised for any of them. This is where the selection of apps in this part of the feature come into play. They give you the tools required to speed up your PC in several different ways. As is usually the case with apps, less is more — there’s no point recommending 100 apps whose combined demands outweigh the benefits of using them in the first place, which is why we’ve pared this down to five apps. You’ll find our favourite tool for managing startup, enabling you to both monitor and improve the way Windows loads. If you’re frequently blighted by lockups, then Process Lasso will keep those…

Reinstalling Windows from scratch — namely, wiping your system drive completely clean to install a brand, spanking new (and fresh) version of Windows onto it — is the ultimate choice for anyone looking to revive a slow-running PC or resolve a major, non-hardware issue, such as those caused by malware or a clogged up computer, In this final section, we’ll step you through the entire process. Ideally, you should have a recent and full backup of your PC, created using either File History or the Windows Backup and Restore tool before you begin, that way you’ll lose the minimum of content. A full reinstall really is destructive — nothing left on your C: drive will exist once you’ve finished. You should ensure you have the latest installation media for your…

So in this world of hyperinflated memory prices, just how much DDR4 is enough for what you want to do? It’s tricky. A year or so ago, we would have happily sat here and recommended 64GB of DDR4 for any video editor or content creator out there. But, to be honest, given the ludicrous price increases (more on that later), that’s just not a practical or good use of your money in this day and age. 4GB If all you’re building is a home theater PC or a machine for low-end office work (we’re not talking 4,000-cell Excel files here), then arguably a single 4GB stick of low-spec DDR4 should be perfect for the job. Couple that with a low-end Pentium part, and you’re all set. For those keen miners…

The Action Centre in Windows 10 gives you quick and easy access to important tools and features of the operating system, as well as displaying recent notifications you may have missed. Since its debut with Windows 10 in 2015, Microsoft has continued to work on and evolve the Action Centre, and it is now more feature-packed than ever before, thanks to a range of improvements. You can also configure Action Centre so it works the way you want it to, and set ‘Quiet hours’ that stop notifications from popping up onscreen for set amounts of time, enabling you to work without interruption. In fact, there’s so much you can do with the Action Centre, that we’ve compiled this ultimate guide to its best features, as well as exploring the newest…

You won’t have missed the news about Meltdown and Spectre — two of the most widespread security vulnerabilities that affects millions of CPUs in use today. They were discovered independently by teams at including Google Project Zero and researchers at the Technical University of Graz in Austria, among others. Two things emerged once the dust settled on the implications, extent and severity of the vulnerabilities. One was the loud, unified criticism of how the disclosure about the vulnerabilities was communicated to the software stakeholders. The other was the stellar response by the Linux kernel community to mitigate the damage and contain the threats using software workarounds that compensate for the hardware vulnerability. With more than 25 million lines of code spread over 61,000 files contributed by over 4,300 developers, the…

Learning to code is rarely for coding’s sake. You learn because you want to write an app to solve a problem or achieve some result. One of the reasons I code is because I love to build stuff — skip back a few pages and you’ll see our Arduino Masterclass, where we’re always building stuff or looking at new gear and techniques. However, many of the ‘Arduino’-grade of maker boards require knowledge of programming based on the more complex C++ language. Still, they’re not the only option — jump aboard the BBC micro:bit and you can code your own gadgets using a basic form of Python 3. THE BBC MICRO:BIT The BBC micro:bit is a small circuit board designed by the British Broadcasting Corporation (yep, that BBC), aimed primarily at…

PC, XO (PS4, COMING SOON) | $27 | WWW.UNKNOWNWORLDS.COM/SUBNAUTICA The basic premise of Subnautica is that you have crash-landed on an alien planet. You can see the burning hull of your ship, the Aurora, from your life pod. You seem to be the sole survivour, and you have no idea what lurks beyond the shallows. The first order of business is basic survival, so you investigate the vibrant sea outside your pod, seeking out the resources your fabricator needs to craft food, water and essential tools. You’ll break open lumps of lime and sandstone to find deposits of titanium, silver, lead and more. A pillowy-looking fish is useful for water filtration, while others are good eatin’. There are gigantic coral tubes, shoals of boomerang fish, huddles of docile…