Innehållsförteckning för January 2022 från APC

What an interesting proposition Intel’s 12th Gen has turned out to be! On one hand, it’s fantastic to have these tempting new CPUs to get excited about and weigh up compared to the alternatives – which not only include Ryzen choices – but also 10th and 11th Gen Intel chips, now that their pricing is so appealing. But on the flipside – gee Z690 motherboards are expensive… and if you want some DDR5 memory good luck finding any at interesting speeds, or at a price that’s competitive with going the DDR4 route. There’s a lot to think about, and we’re here to help. Following on from last month’s reviews of the launch 12900K and 12600K chips, we’ve expanded this month with a wider look at the whys and why-nots for…

For years, there has effectively been a GPU duopoly; Nvidia and AMD control roughly 80 and 20 percent of the market respectively. However, the growth of cloud services, AI, and other intensive HPC applications has fuelled a resurgence in GPU development. The most obvious new contender is Intel, which started developing its discrete graphics card business in 2017. AI, and other intensive HPC applications has fuelled a resurgence in GPU development. The most obvious new contender is Intel, which started developing its discrete graphics card business in 2017. Early next year, we will see the first fruits: the Arc Alchemist (the DG2 as was). There will be four variants, the beefiest being the DG-512EU – sporting 512 EUs, this is aimed squarely at GeForce RTX and Radeon RX territory. Intel…

On the outside, this iPhone looks like an incremental update, but we have a feeling there’s more lurking beneath the surface. Major tech specs • A15 Bionic SoC with a new 5-core GPU, 6-core CPU, and 16-core Neural Engine. • 6.1-inch (2532 × 1170 pixels) Super Retina XDR OLED display with ProMotion. • 12MP triple camera system with ultra-wide-angle (ƒ/1.8), wide-angle (ƒ/1.5), and 3x telephoto (ƒ/2.8) cameras, LiDAR module. • 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage (configurable up to 1TB). • Sub-6GHz 5G (and mmWave on US models), 4x4 MIMO LTE, 2x2 MIMO 802.11ax WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.0, Ultra Wideband, and NFC. • MagSafe 15W wireless charging. • IP68 water-resistance rating. Key findings From the outside, the iPhone 13 Pro looks swollen compared with last year’s model, but it’s…

$2,999 | consumer.huawei.com/au Dell’s XPS 13 hasn’t ever been pitched as a budget machine, but when you consider you could get a 13.4-inch 3.5K OLED display, 11th Gen i7, 16 GB of RAM and 512GB SSD for $2,299 on sale at the end of 2021, the MateBook X Pro’s $2,999 price tag makes the XPS range seem positively affordable. Putting aside the fact that Google was banned from selling its Android operating system to Huawei, which meant many consumers suddenly had an ultra premium phone with a stop-gap OS, it’s still not a particularly well-known brand in Australia, and Huawei would need a pretty astounding feature set to convince anyone to pay top dollar for one of its premium Ultrabooks. The asking price of the MateBook X Pro lines up…

The small compact design, with clean-cut lines, stylish colour picks, tempered glass, and a host of design features to enhance your building experience has cemented this case as a fantastic budget(ish) option for anyone looking to build a new system. $159 | nzxt.com We’re big fans of small cases here at APC. There’s just something about compact chassis that really hits home. For the vast majority who don’t hoard TBs of data and process vast simulations or render video footage, a compact machine like this is all you really need. Typically that means a small form factor, but ITX cases are difficult to work with, they require special considerations during the build process, and it does limit your ability to expand it later on. On top of that, micro-ATX rigs,…

$482 | www.tp-link.com/au There haven’t been too many innovations in the Wi-Fi world lately, so we were happy when TP-Link’s Deco Voice mesh kit turned up. It’s a two-node, Wi-Fi 6 mesh system with a unique feature… built-in Alexa speakers. We’ve seen Alexa compatibility before – D-Link especially likes to shout about it – but in those instances you’ll need a separate, powered speaker to make everything work. In a world full of wires (even if they’re mainly power cables) the more we can get rid of through integration, the better. The Voice’s nodes are similar to regular nodes but for a raised, blood-red plastic stand and an Alexa light ring at the top. To be frank, the stand will not be for everyone, but it’s different, so we approve.…

Decades ago it was Internet Explorer. Now, it’s Edge. Microsoft seems hell-bent on getting people to use its browsers, even by force. Microsoft recently explained why it prevents apps like EdgeDeflector from intercepting links that open Microsoft Edge. In addition to its statement not adequately justifying such a stance, it also fails to address a bigger issue – that people should be able to use their own default browser. Windows 11 uses edge:/protocol links in certain elements of the OS, such as the News widget. These links open in Microsoft Edge even if you have a different browser set as your default. Until recently, EdgeDeflector could intercept these types of links and redirect them to whichever browser people would like. Microsoft was apparently unhappy with this, as well as the…

$899 | www.aorus.com Gigabyte’s Aorus Master, like all other Z690 motherboards, are more expensive than their predecessors. If you don’t mind paying the price, the Aorus Master will deliver a whole lot of motherboard and one that’s still priced well below what the top-tier flagship boards cost. Boards at this price level are expected to feature a strong VRM and the Aorus is about as good as it gets. With its 19 phase 105A design, it will sail through heavily overclocked 12900K loads with ease. We’ve always liked Gigabyte’s finned heatsink design, which manages to combine function and form. There’s simply no substitute for surface area when it comes to heat dissipation. We recorded a temperature of 49 degrees after looping Cinebench for 20 minutes – that’s a very good…

For anyone still using these computers, the main task is usually writing. They provide simple text editing, without the clutter and noise of a modern OS. Some use their old-fashioned Lotus spreadsheets, or as Linux dumb terminals. Some of the more powerful devices here can be a way to play DOS games, or use OS/2 or Windows 3.x (or Windows 9.x with later machines) on real hardware. Of course, copying files between these machines and modern computers can be a challenge. If your old computer has a PCMCIA slot, you’re in luck: there are plenty of cheap adapters online for using Compact Flash or SD cards as a replacement hard drive. Simply remove the card when you’re not using it, then plug it into a modern PC.…

Most netbooks are too big to be called ultra-portable but are usually the first thing people mention when asked about tiny computers. While numerous products could claim to be the first netbook, the Asus Eee PC in 2007 kickstarted the category. The Eee PC was nine inches wide, with a 7-inch display and a decent keyboard. Costs and power consumption were cut by removing optical drives, and early models shipped with a custom version of Xandros Linux and a 4GB SSD. Response to the Eee PC was overwhelming, spawning many rivals, but most netbooks from this point shipped with standard mechanical hard drives and Windows XP. Most grew in size to between 10 and 14-inches. Netbooks were most popular with students: they fit easily into a backpack and could be…

Random BSODs I’m suffering from a weird problem that I hope you can help me fix. I am getting random blue screen errors when copying or moving files, and once in a while when I open too many browser tabs. I had one when I was syncing my Ancestry.com family tree to Family Tree Maker, when scanning a large downloaded file with McAfee, when trying to create an OS backup with Macrium Reflect Free and even while downloading a Linux ISO to create a live disc to boot from. This problem has existed since I built the PC in October 2020, starting when I copied files from the old computer’s drives to this one. It happens when copying files from external hard drives or flash drives to internal SSDs or…

The first exposure to an 8-bit Atari I had was the 65XE, owned by my mate Scott. Sitting down to play Millipede, we had a thoroughly good time. Atari’s 8-bit range of home computers dominated the US market but in Australia, as with the UK, the home computer wars were mostly fought between Sinclair, Amstrad and Commodore. Released in late 1979, the Atari 800 and other Atari 8-bit machines of the era were originally developed as a second generation of Atari’s popular VCS consoles. But Atari president Ray Kassar wanted to challenge Apple, who had the most popular home computers at the time. The Atari 800 was marketed as a “timeless computer”, driven by how well it could be expanded. The Atari 800’s MOS 6502 CPU ran at 1.79 MHz…

Running your own cloud storage server saves money, allows you to expand storage as necessary, and can be done with a device as small as a Raspberry Pi. Our previous guide to setting up a Nextcloud server on the Raspberry Pi (APC501) covered everything you need to know about installing and setting up NextCloudPi and the Nextcloud Ubuntu Appliance, as well as the manual installation of Nextcloud on Raspberry Pi OS. But with the software installed and connected to your network, the job is only half-done. You still need to configure it for your specific use-case, enable external storage to reduce wear and tear on the Pi’s SD card, and make the Nextcloud server accessible from beyond your home network. The most straightforward way to set up external access to…

For fans of microcomputers, the Sinclair ZX80 and its successor, the ZX81, were integral to establishing the home computing scene. The brainchild of British inventor, Sir Clive Sinclair, the ZX80 first brought affordable home computers to the masses in 1980. As we began our research for this column, we heard the news that Sir Clive had passed away, aged 81. So it seems an even more appropriate time to pay tribute to a computing legend by covering the machines that kick-started Britain’s coding revolution. Development Before the ZX80, Sinclair Research was already well established in the electronics world, pioneering devices such as cheap calculators and pocket televisions. It had developed a rudimentary computing kit under the former name of Science of Cambridge – 1977’s MK14. But from 1980, the Sinclair…

$99.95 | PC | ageofempires.com With Age of Empires II still held up as a paragon of strategy games, you can see why new series developer Relic has decided to model Age of Empires IV on the second entry. The latest iteration strips away the complexities of AoE III, while adding welcome touches of its own. Chief among these are asymmetrical factions, which will elicit screams of bloody imbalance but count as the game’s greatest success. On the other hand, reverence to the past can be restricting, and I can’t help but feel that Age of Empires IV could have been something more. Instead, there’s a staid utilitarianism throughout much of Age of Empires IV – everything in it works much as it ever did, but without the flair that…

Free | Browser crystalclod.itch.io The Florist is a game about being in a trendy apartment: a haven of tranquillity in a busy city. There’s no TV to distract you, although you can play classical music, and bury your nose in a selection of stories from long-dead authors. If you want, you can try to keep your grandma’s houseplants alive. To that end, she sends you a parcel containing fertiliser and a jug. Each plant has different needs. Luckily, you can open the laptop to view a handy guide. As the days turn to weeks, your gran will post ever more fragile plants for you to look after. You’ll also get letters, and occasionally books, in the morning mail. It’s a game that would play best in quick daily bursts, which…

Microsoft has been pushing the idea of high pixel density computing since the release of Windows 7 10 years ago. That it hasn’t happened yet is odd, because consumers are used to high-DPI displays on their smartphones. That smartphone experience generates a sense of cognitive dissonance. Any handset launching with less than 300dpi would get laughed off the internet these days. But most PC users are lucky if their monitor manages 120dpi. Of course, smartphone screens are normally held closer than the typical viewing distance for a PC monitor, but not so as to make up for the chasm between the pixel densities. Many smartphones have pixel densities of 400dpi or more, with some high-end models reaching 500dpi. Meanwhile, a typical 1440p 27-inch PC monitor manages just 109dpi. Even a…

We’re all sick to death of the pandemic and its effects, and as I write this, news of the new Omicron variant is breaking, leading to head shakes and feelings that we’re heading back to March 2020. Let’s hope such thoughts are unfounded. As PC enthusiasts, we’re all aware of the issues with chip supply, amply illustrated by the continuing insanity in the GPU market. Of course, it goes beyond that. All kinds of technology have been affected and it looks like it’s not going to get better anytime soon if you listen to the likes of Intel and Nvidia CEOs Pat Gelsinger and Jensen Huang. It’s bad enough now but there’s something else that looms on the horizon. Sooner or later the China and Taiwan issue is going to…

Vallkree Dual motor e-bike An ebike with a Bond boost switch. $6,200 | vallkree.com Australian regulations mandate a maximum speed of 25km/h for assisted motorisation on e-bikes to be compliant on Australian roads, something that the Vallkree range of e-bikes are capable of adhering to using a single internal motor. But for those times when you happen to be off-road you can engage a second motor to deliver 1,000W of nearly motorbike level power. You can get up to 40km/h in off-road mode with a range of up to 50km on the 20AH battery. The bikes are a pretty cool cafe racer style and feature wide off-road tyres that are capable of tackling anything from dirt roads to soft sand. PETOI NIBBLE For anyone that wants to build themselves a…

From $3,899 | dell.com/en-au There’s a lot of finesse in an Alienware laptop, especially one of Dell’s 2021 top-of-the-line 17-inch gaming rigs. The Alienware X17 is coated in a powdery metallic finish and offers a generously spaced 10-keyless X-series mechanical keyboard. It also offers components all the way up to an 11th generation Intel Core i9 and a Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 GPU. Dell is currently only offering the Core i7, 3060 and 3070 X17 models currently due to “higher than expected global GPU demand”, but it will range the high-end devices again once the “backlog of orders” have been filled. Despite this, Dell did send us the highest spec 3080 model to review, which is listed as US$4,779 in the U.S., or around AUD$6,600 using current conversion rates. The…

$599 | www.kingston.com It’s been a while since we reviewed a high-end Kingston SSD. As one of the industry giants, Kingston drives are always worthy of consideration. A look at the specs indicates that this is a genuine high-end contender, and it should perform much like the Seagate FireCuda 530 we reviewed a few months back. Can the KC3000 challenge for the outright performance crown? The Kingston KC3000 2TB is a 2280 (80mm length) PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 drive. Our sample came without much of a heatsink, apart from a thin metal strip. You’ll need to install it under a motherboard heatsink to reduce the chance of throttling. It contains the latest high-performance Micron 176-Layer TLC NAND paired with a Phison PS5018-E18 controller, and includes 2GB of DDR4-2666 DRAM. The…

If you’re building a PC from scratch and want to connect numerous RGB components, this is a great foundation for not only overclocking your CPU but also creating an impressive-looking rig. $399 | rog.asus.com The Ryujin II 360 AIO is an AIO with a 360mm radiator. It’s designed with enthusiast use in mind, like overclocking an AMD Ryzen 9 or Intel Core i9 processor, but comes with some handy features everyone can appreciate. Based on the usual Asetek design we’ve come to know and love from all PC brands, Asus went a little further by slapping a 3.5-inch display atop the water and pump combo block. This can show data like temperatures or system usage, as well as custom graphics and animations. It’s quite the head-turner, especially when installed inside…

MAC STORE & OTHER MAC APPS | macOS 10.12 or later | $7.99 per month | busymac.com There are so many calendar apps available for the Mac, not to mention the very good built-in Calendar, that attracting customers and standing out from the crowd is a tough job. The developers of BusyCal hope that this new version will do just that. This version marks a change in the way BusyCal is priced. If you want to download it from the Mac App Store, you’ll have to pay a subscription fee of $7.99. Unlike BusyCal’s competitor Fantastical, that fee only gets you the calendar app, not the associated contacts app. Alternatively, you can pay US$49.99 as a one-time price and get 18 months of upgrades included, with the option to pay…

$1,049 | www.asrock.com Over the years, Asrock’s Taichi family has gone from a solid mid-range brand to a genuine high-end product. It’s got almost all the features you’d expect from a premium motherboard but without the high-cost extras that separate a board at this price from the crazily priced flagships. Looks are subjective, but for us the cyberpunk theme, with splashes of copper colouring, looks amazing. There’s also a small cog above the I/O that actually moves! If you’re a fan of Razer products, Asrock offers a Razer-themed Taichi for easy integration into the Chroma ecosystem. The Taichi features seven SATA ports, one of which (along with a single USB port) is independent from the others. Asrock says this can function as a protection from malware. Other key features include…

$899 | www.msi.com The MSI MEG Z690 Unify sits near the top of MSI’s motherboard range – the MEG name is reserved for MSI’s top of the line boards. It will be joined by the Ace and the flagship Godlike at a later date. MSI has designed the Unify with overclocking in mind and unlike most gaming boards these days, the Unify omits all RGB lighting in favour of an all-black, functional and discrete design. Sometimes, less is more. A board designed for overclocking has to have a strong VRM and cooling solution and as is the case with the Aorus and Asrock boards, it certainly does. A 19-phase digital design with 105A stages means there’s ample power on tap no matter if you’re using air, water, or ln2 cooling.…

Perhaps better known in popular culture for his cat, Erwin Schrodinger (pictured) was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who was in at the beginning of quantum theory. His equation acts as quantum mechanics’ equivalent of Newton’s second law – the one that goes force = mass x acceleration. Newton’s law predicts how a physical system will move over time, and so Schrodinger’s equation does the same for an isolated quantum system. Given a known set of initial conditions, it can predict the evolution of the wave function of a system, making it useful in quantum chemistry. Schrodinger’s Cat is a thought experiment, please don’t try to carry it out, you’ll only end up with an unhappy cat and possibly some unwanted attention from the FBI. He came up with the idea…

MWAVE RESPAWN NINJA ESPORTS DELTA $1,999 – tinyurl.com/APC502MWV In these rough times of high component prices, this system is the modern-day entry-level gaming system. But don’t let the words ‘entry-level’ fool you into thinking this system is slow; with a graphics card optimised for 1080p gaming this system will happily run a high refresh rate 1080p monitor and do a decent job at 1440p as well, offering just below RTX 2070 levels of performance. The CPU is getting on now but with the correct game settings, the GPU should remain the limiting factor. Intriguingly Mwave is shipping this with an AIO water cooler. Overkill, really, given the calibre of the processor. It’ll come in handy should you want to overclock. The RAM is well-matched for the processor and with 1TB…

There’s a story that goes around cybersecurity events about a casino, somewhere in North America. It had a fish tank, and in that watery fish home was a thermometer. For reasons best known to the casino management, the thermometer was an IoT (internet of things) device and reported the tank’s temperature via Wi-Fi. However, it wasn’t particularly secure, and so hackers used it to gain a foothold in the gambling establishment’s network, eventually escaping with a database containing the details of high-rolling customers. We hope the aquarium housed a marine environment, as it would make comparing the heist to the Oceans 11 movies easier. That might sound pretty amusing when it happens to wealthy people with more money than sense, but a general lack of security in IoT devices is…

IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to add, rename and manage tab groups in Safari YOU’LL NEED Safari 15 or later, macOS Big Sur or Monterey If you’re anything like us, you probably have a ton of tabs open in Safari, all completely disorganised and disjointed. Every time a new project comes to mind, more tabs get opened, adding to the ever-growing mess. There is a better way. With the arrival of Safari 15 for macOS Big Sur and Monterey, you can now organise your tabs into Tab Groups – and even sync those Tab Groups across your other devices, as long as you’re logged in with the same Apple ID. You can easily create as many Tab Groups as you wish, making it easy to separate…

Free | Browser tim-sheinman.itch.io Echo Beach is set in a future where music is banned, and where rogue musicians are hunted down by undercover agents. You play as one of these agents, and your job is to infiltrate an online community, reading messages and listening to music for clues to their identities. Every time you work out a name, you feed the information back to your superiors, who will arrest the musician and give you new targets, the following day. There are few other games where you feel as much like a detective, poring over messages and replaying songs for clever lyrical and sound-based clues. I just wish I’d been able to solve them. Perhaps I’m tone-deaf, and unable to keep time, but I hit a brick wall when asked…

“Championing technology doesn’t mean we’re unrelenting yes-men and -women, however, and APC aims to be as objective as possible in all our coverage.” 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.…

Intel has released the best of its new Alder Lake chips first, the headline-grabbing performance models. But what about the more affordable CPUs, the chips we stand a better chance of buying? Thanks to a slip up at Dell, among others, details of further Alder Lake SKUs went online well before the official launch. As expected, we have Core i7-12700, i5-12600, 12500, and 12400, and at the bottom the Core i3-12100. Curiously, the low-end chips don’t appear to have any efficiency cores. An early benchmark of the i5-12400, with six performance cores using Adobe Premiere Pro, shows it stands toe-to-toe with a Ryzen 9 5600X. Alder Lake is proving to be a match for Zen 3 across the range. What’s next? Alder Lake mobile comes first, which has entered production,…

$2,399 | microsoft.com/en-au Any computer that is updated every year is going to get a new set of processors, but it’s generally what a company does outside of making the computer faster that determines whether you end up with a product that’s ahead of its time or a bit of a flop. The last few iterations of the Surface Pro have featured the same 12.3-inch PixelSense Display, so the Surface Pro 8 was well overdue for a refresh. Fortunately, the new 13-inch screen is bigger, faster and has a higher resolution than its predecessors, offering a 120Hz refresh rate and a 2,880 x 1,920 pixel resolution at 267ppi. All these extra pixels allow the screen to be 12.5 percent brighter, which is a welcome improvement that brings up the peak…

$999 | consumer.huawei.com/au The Huawei MateBook D14 was released in 2020, but it is still the current budget MateBook model sold today. Unfortunately, while $1,199 was probably a reasonable asking price when it launched, the 10th generation Intel Core i5-10210U CPU that powers it isn’t far off being lapped twice by new processors. Walk into any major retailer and you’ll be able to get a laptop with an equivalent 11th Gen processor for the same price and we’ve even seen comparable devices with i7-1165G7 CPUs go for hundreds of dollars less. The MateBook D14 was on sale at the time of writing – knocking $200 off the asking price – but even then, they’re still not overly competitive. Two years of processor updates is a major sacrifice when you consider…

$300 | www.dlink.com.au D-Link’s latest AX3200 Wi-Fi 6 router exists in the premium-budget end of the market, costing $300. There are cheaper models and much-more expensive models. So, should you consider buying it? It looks like what it costs: not too plasticy but not overly premium either. It comes from the alien spaceship design school with many angular flourishes while four, long antennae offer the promise of half-decent performance. There aren’t too many hardware features beyond four Gigabit LAN ports, a WAN port, WPS button and a power switch. There are no USB ports. Setting up is simple via the ‘D-Link WiFi’ app and a set-up card with a QR code. We were impressed that one of the first options available was to set it up as a standalone router…

$150, www.dlink.com.au Back in the olden days when Wi-Fi was more often rubbish than it was stable, a next-gen, USB Wi-Fi adapter could represent a good upgrade. However, as laptops’ antennae arrays got stronger and more complex, and as Wi-Fi technology has accelerated in terms of stability, performance and range, they’ve rather dropped by the wayside. But, there’s certainly a market for them. Wi-Fi 6 can deliver fast peak transfer speeds and excels at communicating with numerous, low-powered, IoT, smart home-like devices without decimating the rest of your network’s performance. We don’t expect one to offer the range afforded by laptops’ antennae but how does it perform in the real-world? Firstly, it’s really easy to set-up – the driver setup is accessed like a file on a flash drive. We…

Linux | https://nixos.org Installing Linux is usually a matter of: boot from install media, run installer, make choices, drink a hot beverage, reboot computer and start configuring everything to your needs. NixOS turns this completely on its head. The starting point for NixOS is a configuration file called configuration.nix. This is where you specify everything about how you want your system set up, from which partitions to install to and the filesystems to use, to the list of packages to install and the users to create. You have to create the partitioning yourself – Gentoo users will feel at home here – then run nixosgenerate-config to scan your hardware and create a basic configuration, which you then edit. Once you have done this, run nixosinstall and sit back. After it…

Quantum computing is one of those technologies that seems forever just over the horizon, much like the flying car or an iPhone that lasts all day on a single charge. Developments come and go, announcements are made, each sounding crazier than the last, but tangible benefits never seem to appear. Physicist Richard Feynman, one of the first to conceive of a quantum computer, due to his interest in the relationship between physics and computation, often has a quote attributed to him – it’s possibly apocryphal, but most certainly apt: “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, then you don’t.” The same is almost certainly true of quantum computing, where there are so many new terms and variables to consider, it seems impossible for a single human brain to hold them…

Whatever you want to call these things, in this feature we’ll be exploring the history of the ultimate in tiny computers – not including the now-ubiquitous smartphone. We’ll start with early and ground-breaking models in the 1980s, through to the more mature models in the ‘90s. We’ll also take a look at the UMPC craze of the 2000s and the wilderness years that followed, and dive deep into the resurrection of this form currently taking place in China, examining the models that are on the market today and where they’re going in the future. So how do you classify these computers? Well, to pull some rules out of nowhere, we’re going to define these as something that can fit ideally in your pocket; has some kind of integrated keyboard; and…

2021 has been a mixed year for PC gaming, with standout hits such as Deathloop and Resident Evil Village almost drowned out by a sea of mediocre titles and endless delays and cancellations. Happily, 2022 looks like being a more exciting year, with a whole host of original games and sequels on the way. Many of these upcoming releases have been in the works for a long time, including Starfield (the concept work for which began way back in 1997) and Elden Ring, the latter of which has been on many a gamer’s mind for years. Yes, we know George RR Martin is involved. Hopefully, the game comes out before The Winds of Winter. Some of these games don’t have official release dates yet, so we’ve limited our list to…

1 Advanced This is where all the interesting tools are, though you can find security options in Basic too. 2 Guest Network Both our Netgear and Asus (running Merlin firmware) routers make it easy to find Guest Network options. 3 Even more advanced This is the home of the VLAN settings, which you should read up on further before tackling. 4 Asus General Settings The Guest Network is high up on Asus’s list, and it offers three to Netgear’s one. 5 Wireless settings Here, you’ll find security, filtering, a block list, and advanced Wi-Fi settings, all in one place. 6 AP Isolated This is a useful setting that can cut off one access point from the rest of the network.…

If there’s one programming language that’s really taken the world by storm in the last ten years, it’s Python. Its winning combination of easy-to-learn syntax and mountains of installable packages has made it the choice for everything from teaching kids to code through to university research and machine-learning. But that same combo is also lowering the barrier to entry into a mind-blowing world of hardware development, thanks to a version of Python designed specifically for stand-alone CPUs called ‘microcontrollers’. Say hello to ‘MicroPython’. How microcontrollers make the world tick You won’t see an issue of APC pass by without at least several billion references to CPUs, clock speeds, motherboards, RAM and the rest. But these CPUs in our PCs are actually somewhat limited – they can achieve a seemingly-infinite array…

AFTER YEARS OF STRUGGLING AGAINST DDOS ATTACKS, TITANFALL IS BEING REMOVED FROM SALE Will be removed from subscription services early next year. After years of struggling to combat hacks and DDoS attacks that at times have rendered Titanfall unplayable, Respawn Entertainment is throwing in the towel. The studio said in a message posted to Twitter that it is halting sales of the game and will remove it from subscription services on March 1, 2022. The decision to end Titanfall sales follows a back-and-forth battle with hackers going back to 2019, resulting in a “mostly negative” user review rating for the game on Steam. There were flashes of hope earlier this year – Respawn told players that “help is coming” in April – but by mid-May the situation was as bad…

RELEASE 1998 DEVELOPER Ritual Entertainment PUBLISHER Activision LINK bit.ly/3krVRVs On November 19, 1998, Sierra released Half-Life. In the time it took to install 300MB of exquisitely poised shooter off its CD-ROM, everything from the genre prior became part of a bygone era. And perhaps the unluckiest of the lot was Ritual’s SiN, which released just ten days before it. Here was a game that, like Half-Life, wanted to bring a bit more storytelling back to the genre after a long period of dominance from dialogue-averse id Software and similarly laconic newcomers Epic Games. It had a spectacularly named hero in John Blade, and in its antagonist Elexis Sinclaire a typically salacious depiction of a woman – though to give Ritual some credit, both black player-characters and female CEOs were wildly…

LOGITECH POP KEYS AND MOUSE All the feels at your fingertips. If you were sad about Apple’s decision to ditch the Touch Bar on the new line of MacBook Pros, then now is the perfect time for some retail therapy from your favourite peripheral maker: Logitech. The Logitech Pop mouse and keyboard range feature mappable keys so you can add all your essential emoji responses directly to your interface options. The devices come in three lit colour schemes: love-heart eyes, fire and heavy tears, which Logitech incorrectly dubbed Daydream, Blast and Heartbreaker, respectively. The Pop Keys also offer mechanical switches, even though they’re pitching to a generation that hasn’t been around long enough to have ever used non-digital mechanics, let alone develop nostalgia for them. DECENTRALAND SELLS US$2.4M PLOT OF…