APCJuly 2021的目錄

We’ve just finished filming the first ever all-video Australian PC Awards, and you can watch it all over three parts on June 23rd, 24th and 25th at www.australianpcawards.com.au. Hopefully it all holds up well and our noobishness at presenting in a video format is mostly acceptable. I thought it would be a good time now to more properly introduce the team you’ll see. These are the guys primarily behind all the awards voting too, with the addition of two of our freelance writers covering their specialties Nick Ross (networking and storage) and Mark Williams (components and resellers), who weren’t on camera that day. Long-time APC readers will know former editor Dan Gardiner. Dan’s still part of the APC team in the sense that here at Future Publishing we all row…

Several marketplaces had removed its products. Gigabyte has apologised for a comment it made about Chinese manufacturing that prompted social media outrage, led several marketplaces to remove its products from their platforms, and caused a $710 million drop in its market value. According to Bloomberg, the company published a blog post slamming its competitors for outsourcing production to Chinese manufacturers that make products in a “low-cost, low quality way.” The blog post has since been deleted. That comment was seen as an indictment of Chinese manufacturing writ large instead of a targeted criticism of Gigabyte’s rivals – which is what prompted the removal of its products from the JD.com and Suning.com e-commerce platforms. All of which led Gigabyte to publish an apology for that blog post.…

High demand for PCs and, importantly, desktop PCs has already resulted in increased graphics card, PSU, HDD, and SSD pricing, but apparently, now DRAM is getting even more expensive, too. According to a new report from Taiwan, memory prices are set for double-digit growth in the coming months. Contract memory prices are projected to increase by 10 – 20 percent, DigiTimes reports. According to the report, memory prices may rise by up to 25 percent, depending on the kit. Keeping in mind that demand is high and DRAM is transiting to DDR5 memory, the increase is not surprising. DRAM quotes are not alone when it comes to price hikes. Prices of NAND memory have also increased by 10 percent so far this year.…

The new Fitbit Sense competes against the Apple Watch Series 6, but what happens when the Fitbit gets sick? Well, that’s why we’re here today – to determine how difficult the surgery will be. Major tech specs • 1.58-inch AMOLED screen • 4GB internal storage • A new ECG function as well as a skin temperature sensor, and the standard optical heart rate sensor • Wi-Fi, NFC, Bluetooth 5.0, and built-in GPS • Water resistant up to 50 meters • Also part of the package are a gyroscope, altimeter, three-axis accelerometer, and ambient light sensor Key findings • Like the Apple Watch, the Fitbit Sense’s ingress protection means the very thin gap between the display and the housing of the watch is lined with adhesive. Even with a heat gun…

$3,099 | asus.com/au Looking at the ExpertBook B9400CE from Asus, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was just another 11th Generation Intel Evo Ultrabook, but there are some things quite unique about this new premium portable laptop. For starters it ranges up to offerings with 32GB of RAM, and 2TB of PCIe storage for those willing to drop $3,099 on a lightweight professional laptop. If you’re a pro photographer or videographer it might be worthwhile having a memory workspace that big, but you’d probably want a larger colour gamut screen for this kind of technical visual work (which is not available in the ExpertBook B9400 range unfortunately). While not professional colour work quality, the 14-inch 1080p display is at least 400 nits and IPS, so it looks good enough for…

$139 | www.kingston.com It seems like just yesterday we were talking about how SSDs have replaced hard drives in all but the most affordable systems and laptops. Is it time for a new conversation? Is SATA now useful for secondary storage only? NVMe drives continue to reduce in price, especially now that PCIe 4.0 drives are widely available leaving PCIe 3.0 drives as affordable options. And there are very few NVMe drives that are more affordable than the Kingston NV1. The Kingston NV1 1TB is an NVMe M.2 2280 (80mm length) drive that makes use of a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface. This is the part of the review that we’d go over the flash or controller, however, unlike most manufacturers that disclose fairly detailed specifications, Kingston doesn’t for the NV1.…

“The design looks incredible, the tempered glass really adds a fantastic accenting glamour to the whole thing, and the interior setup and layout are easy to move around in and extremely versatile, enabling you to install all manner of hardware in any way you can imagine.” $199 | lian-li.com We’ve coveted and recommended this case for some time, but it has a bit of a reputation among system builders as being, well, something of a cliche. Why? Mostly because it’s almost too good. In fact, it’s so good, and has received so many awards over the last couple of years, and been praised so much around the tech community for its incredible versatility, top-quality materials, and easy building experience, that it’s almost become a meme. Indeed, it’s the go-to chassis…

$309 | www.asus.com The Asus ROG Strix B560-F Gaming Wi-Fi is one of the more expensive B560 boards and it gives Z590 boards around the same price a serious run for their money. It looks every bit a premium board. The little RGB ROG logo adjacent to the I/O adds a touch of class to the subtle mostly black aesthetic. It features 3x M.2 slots, where the topmost one one connected to the CPU with a PCIe 4.0 connection. The others are PCIe 3.0. All slots come with metal heatsinks. Its one of the few B560 boards to come with heatsinks for all three slots. Notably they come with Asus’ Q-Latch mechanism. No more fiddling with minuscule screws! You also get six SATA ports. Also worthy of note is the…

Are you looking for the best alternatives to Photoshop? Think the software is expensive and hard to use? Well, you’re not alone. Launched as early as 1990, Adobe Photoshop is one of the oldest and most popular photo editing tools in the market. It’s currently part of Creative Cloud, a recurring cloud-based subscription from Adobe for creative professionals. Since its inception, Creative Cloud’s pricing model has been controversial. Photoshop alone costs $29.99 a month or $343.07 a year, with no one-time purchase option available. The idea of having to pay for a monthly subscription doesn’t sit right with many early-career professionals and small businesses, who have been switching to competitors offering more generous pricing plans. We think that Affinity Photo is the best overall alternative to Photoshop. It costs significantly…

Linux | http://system-rescue.org One of the most popular rescue distros, the project has undergone several major changes of late. The earlier Gentoo-based edition of the distro had a compressive boot menu, which was dropped when the distro rebased to Arch. It’s since added several options to the boot menu that help address a range of use cases and rescue scenarios. There are the usual options that you also get on other distros, such as the option to copy the entire system to RAM, another to boot and verify the checksum, and one to use nomodeset to help resolve display issues. The first interesting option is the nofirewall parameter that disables the iptables service. This enables you to connect to SystemRescue-powered computer remotely from over the network with SSH. If you…

Of course, the Germans weren’t the only player in 20th-century geopolitics to encrypt their messages. The British took Enigma, added some extra bits to it, and produced Typex, a seven-rotor machine that the German Beobachtungsdienst (Observation Service) of Naval Intelligence never broke into despite reading most other British radio traffic during the war. Beobachtungsdienst was based in Berlin, however, and Allied bombing raids destroyed many of its records. This, along with the British taking up the practice of superencipherment (enciphering a message using one method, then again using another) meant that by 1944, no British ciphers in use could be read. In the United States, the Japanese diplomatic cipher known as Purple was of more interest, and the intelligence it provided was code-named Magic. Purple was again a modified Enigma,…

That government-funded space agency NASA doesn’t just strap people to the top of a firework and aim them at the Moon. It doesn’t even do that now, but focuses on robotic science and exploration, and crewing the International Space Station. This is an agency, after all, that has three probes currently on their way out of the solar system, including the fastest human vehicle ever launched. It has put robots on Mars and sent more to investigate Mercury and the outer planets. Its latest Martian rover is a nuclear-powered laser-armed tank with a helicopter strapped to it. Along the way, you’d expect it to pick up some neat new technology – and it has. Some of it has become so everyday that we almost no longer think of it, and…

IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to use the Notification Centre and desktop widgets in macOS Big Sur YOU’LL NEED macOS 11 or later When Apple first launched macOS Big Sur in 2020, it overhauled the way the Notification Centre works on your Mac. Previously, this was divided between the Today view, which housed your tasks and widgets, and Notifications, which is where app alerts went if you dismissed them from your desktop. With macOS Big Sur, Apple merged the two sections into one. This makes your notifications and widgets a lot more streamlined but may take some getting used to if you are accustomed to the two sections being separate. However, it also blends in a lot better to your Mac interface, both by improving the…

01 ENTER THE COPY MODE You can enter the copy mode in any Byobu screen or split pane by pressing Alt-PgUp. You’ll notice that you can now use the arrow keys to freely move through all the text on the current pane. 02 SELECT TEXT To select text, first press Space and then use the arrow keys to select all the text you’re interest in. You can select text across multiple lines. Next, press Enter to copy the text and exit the copy mode. 03 PASTE SELECTED TEXT You can paste the selection made from one pane to another pane on the same window, or onto a different window. Switch to the target pane/window and then press Alt-Insert.…

The arrival of the Raspberry Pi back in 2012 revolutionised computing. All of a sudden, we had this single-core single-board computer that cost less than $50. It wasn’t the only option, with a number of Android TV sticks also hitting the market for around the same price, but it was the Raspberry Pi that turned computing into a commodity item. However, prior to the Pi, another revolution had sparked up in the electronics engineering world – Arduino created a new common platform for single-function or ‘embedded’ applications, no operating system required. For the last ten years, both Raspberry Pi and Arduino have built their respective ecosystems. But now in 2021, the new Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller board and the Arduino IDE allow these two ecosystems to collide. This month, we…

Nearly two months after its release in the rest of the world, Disco Elysium: The Final Cut is now available in Australia for PS5 and PS4. The delayed release comes after the RPG was initially refused classification in Australia, meaning it was effectively banned in the country. Despite its “ban” however, versions of the game for PC have remained available throughout the ban period. The game now carries an R18+ rating in Australia and costs $59.95 on the PlayStation Store. The main sticking point for the Australian Classification Board was the game’s depiction of drug use, among other things. When the board revised its rating in May, it admitted that Disco Elysium offers “sufficient disincentives to drug use to enable it to be accommodated within the R 18+ classification”. Now…

$18.49 | PC, XB1, PS4, Mac, Linux, Switch | hitchhiker-game.com I’m strapped into the passenger seat of a car somewhere in the American midwest. I don’t know how I got here, just like I don’t know how I’ll end up alongside the next four drivers I hitch a ride with in Hitchhiker. In an even vaguely real-world context, this scenario could be a little alarming, given how vulnerable I am as an amnesiac hitchhiker with no sense of direction. But as soon my driver, a raisin farmer called Vern, starts musing about everything from relationships to philosophical raisin-based analogies, a wave of comfort washes over me and I’m all aboard for the ride – wherever it may take me. Why our protagonist is hitchhiking across America will eventually become clear.…

$21.50 | PC, Mac | clockworkbird.net/games Here we have a game that not only understands Blade Runner, but thoroughly deserves to be mentioned alongside it. Your character is an android created with the sole purpose of running what is for legal reasons absolutely not a Voight-Kampff machine. The game (mostly) consists of a half dozen or so interrogations conducted with this machine. Usually you’ll be speaking with androids, but occasionally with a human. You see, while you will at one point be tasked with determining whether somebody is human or android, the experience for the most part takes sharp turns into territory you’ll never see coming. With no voice acting and relatively simple graphics, there is enormous pressure on the script. The writing is incredible, some of the best I’ve…

Performance, specs, availability, and more. Nvidia’s still eager to pump out GPUs that most gamers will have a hard time getting hold of, as is the case with its latest mobile GPU, the RTX 3050 Ti. Its debut officially puts the nail in the coffin of the GTX 1650, Nvidia’s previous mainstay budget GPU for low-end gaming laptops. Nvidia gives a few examples of how the RTX 3050 Ti and GTX 1650 will differ. In Call of Duty: Warzone, the 1650 can manage 55-ish FPS at medium settings at 1080p with an Intel Core i7 processor. With the same config, a 3050 Ti can output FPS counts in the low 80s, escalating to just under 100 if DLSS is enabled. Basically, under the right circumstances, performance is almost doubled when…

AMD, Intel and Nvidia could see chip production ramping up within a few years, thanks to increased substrate supply. That’s because, according to DigiTimes, global supplies for the ABF substrate industry are expected to improve sometime in late 2021 or 2022 as substrate manufacturers based in Taiwan and China start bringing additional capacity online through more plants and production lines. ABF substrate material is incredibly important for the semiconductor industry as it is responsible for connecting microchips to their associated circuit boards. Recent substrate shortages are partially to blame for the CPU and GPU shortages we’ve been seeing over the past few months. AMD, Intel, and Nvidia have also been busy, securing more and more capacity from substrate manufacturers to help improve the lack of supply.…

AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su doesn’t seem all that worried about the global chip shortage. In fact, she said in an interview with Bloomberg that this is just a “megacycle” the semiconductor industry has to go through. It’s the type of thing she says she has watched the industry go through similar periods of demand far outpacing supply throughout her career. “Semiconductors do go through these cycles,” she said. “There are some times when supply is much greater than demand, and there are some times when demand is much greater than supply. And this particular cycle is special because what we’re seeing is the incredible demand for all things that require chips [across markets].” “The ongoing chip shortage has affected the availability of everything from automobiles and display drivers to…

$79 | amazon.com/au Govee Immersion WiFi TV Backlights A big splash of immersive colour . This is a cheap and effective way to cast the RGBs from behind your TV onto a wall, with dynamic colours based on what’s happening on-screen. The kit contains a long enough RGB strip to cover three edges, which is stuck in place behind your TV. Instead of taking a feed from the source, like the Philips Hue solution, the Govee kit has a camera that’s placed at the top or bottom of your screen that watches TV with you, and changes the colours via a controller box. There’s an app for selecting modes if you don’t want it synced, and instead want a mess of disco lightning. It’s a very elegant and cost-effective solution…

$2,199 | acer.com We’ve loved the last couple of Nitro devices from Acer and it looks like the 2021 Nitro 5 is on track to deliver the same bang-for-buck value as its predecessors. Part of the reason these budget gaming rigs can afford to be such good value is that they harness the power of 10th generation Intel H processors, which were almost end-of-life when the first 2021 Nitro 5s hit shelves locally. Regardless of their age the i5-10300H or the i7-10750H are powerful mobile CPUs that’ll give you enough under the hood to push through demanding workloads, creative projects and gaming. In addition to the Intel arrangements, the Nitro 5 also has AMD models that range all the way up to a Ryzen 9 5900HX with an Nvidia RTX…

We recently mentioned that monitors are one of the few technology categories that isn’t commoditised: most models specialise or compromise in various areas of performance and value. So, we love it when a monster like Asus’ PG32UQX comes along. There’s no compromising here. It offers Display Stream Compression (DSC), HDR 1,400, a 144Hz refresh rate, 1,152-zone mini-LED dynamic rear lighting and G-sync Ultimate – all on a matte, 32-inch, IPS screen with a 3,840 x 2,160 resolution – all the things that genuinely make the best content look awesome. We started at the top, which for this reviewer means Far Cry 5 in HDR. On a good monitor this game’s visuals are phenomenal, with smooth motion, back-lit objects genuinely glowing, light flooding out of the screen and bright objects practically…

$250 | www.qnap.com In a sea of small NAS, what makes the QNAP TS-130 stand out? Aside from the self described “elegant” baby blue colour, the TS-130 is a memory-focused NAS with the ability to stream 4K video. The rest of the spec is pretty standard, – not a bad thing at all, since the biggest drawcard is actually the software available. “In testing, the QNAP has the chops to saturate the ethernet connection at 111 MB/s up and 112 MB/s down. ” But first the hardware. The $250 TS-130 has a single 3.5in SATA drive bay, one Gigabit Ethernet port plus dual USB around the back. It’s powered by a Realtek RTD1295 SOC that buzzes along at 1.4GHz, backed up by 1GB of DDR4 RAM. The RTD1295 is common…

$309 | www.msi.com The MSI MPG B560i Gaming Edge Wi-Fi is one of very few B560 Mini-ITX offerings. It incorporates a bit of a retro spectrum analyser aesthetic. We thought the look was a bit garish on the MSI Z590 Gaming Carbon, but here it looks really nice. These days you can pack a lot of tech onto an ITX board, with less need for auxiliary controllers or expansion cards. Yet for some reason ITX hasn’t really caught on outside of its dedicated base. There’s nothing really stopping you from running an 11900K with an RTX 3090 and 64GB of RAM on this little board. The MSI B560i Gaming Edge features a basic VRM. This is partly due to space constraints. The 6+2+1 phase design is powered by a single…

Needs macOS 10.15 or later | $14.99 | textsniper.app Scanning text so you can edit it, quote it or reuse it can be a pain, and the apps that do it can cost a lot of money. Not here. TextSniper can extract and recognise text from anything you can see on your Mac’s screen and it does it incredibly quickly. It’s cheap, too. Not all of the text we see on our displays can be copied via traditional cut and paste. Celebrities’ insincere apologies screenshotted in Notes and shared on social media; text with graphics behind it; scanned or photographed documents such as legal decisions or old newspaper articles; app dialog boxes and options; recipes shown on video; text from presentations or displayed in embedded document readers; text from uneditable…

Frame stutter problem I’m experiencing an intermittent frame stutter issue in games as varied as World of Warships and Ghost Recon Breakpoint. It’s not tied to graphics quality settings, as I’ve tried everything from maxed out to turning them down to mud, and still have the issue. I’ve tried killing all background apps/processes, I update regularly, whether BIOS, drivers, or firmware. I’ve tried stock voltages, PBO enabled, Ryzen Master OC, and so on but can’t resolve it. I built my PC in November 2019 – key specs are Gigabyte Aorus Ultra X570 MB, AMD Ryzen 3800X CPU, 32GB (4x 8GB) DDR 3600 RAM with XMP enabled, plenty of cooling, 2TB Seagate Firecuda PCIe 4.0 OS drive, 1TB Samsung 970 Evo PCIe 3.0 auxiliary drive, 2x 3TB Seagate mechanical drives in…

IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to connect USB drives to your device YOU’LL NEED Mac, iPad or iPhone, a suitable adapter and a power source iPads and iPhones don’t have expandable storage – but you can use external USB sticks and memory cards to transfer files or store things you don’t need to keep on your device. Things are easier if you own an iPad Air or iPad Pro equipped with USB-C, since you can connect USB-C sticks directly. However, often you’ll need an adapter, especially when using a memory card, or an iPad or iPhone equipped with Lightning. In that case, to connect USB sticks, you’ll need the Lightning to USB Camera Adapter or the Lightning to USB 3 Camera Adapter; to connect memory cards,…

YOU’LL NEED Any Raspberry Pi Raspberry Pi OS Breadboard LED 330 Ohm resistor (Orange-Orange-Brown-Gold) 2 x female-to-male jumper wires Code: Block-based coding is a great way to introduce the concepts of coding, via an easy-to-understand mechanism. Blocks of code are stacked to create a flow, and if we encounter a mistake, we can easily pull the code apart to “debug”. Scratch is a popular block editor and in this tutorial we’ll create a space escape game, where our rocket is trapped on an alien world and we need to calculate the correct thrust for lift-off. If we get it wrong more than 10 times then the evil space squids will get us. Scratch 3 should come pre-installed on your Raspberry Pi OS image, but if it’s missing it can be…

Before its famous consoles, Sega briefly experimented with home computing. Until the 1980s, Sega’s income came mostly from arcade machines, but the booming market in home gaming and home computing was simply too big to ignore, and it was time for Sega to test the market. Sega was unsure whether to put its weight behind home computers or simple game consoles. The company decided to hedge its bets with both: a console, the SG-1000, and a microcomputer, the SC-3000. Each model is based on the same underlying hardware. These machines provide an excellent way to explore Sega’s earlier software before its worldwide console-gaming success. And the SC-3000 provides a glimpse of what Sega would have been like had it continued down the path of home computing. However, the SC-3000 never…

DEVELOPMENT HASN’T STARTED, SO IT’S PROBABLY A WHILE OFF. A new TimeSplitters game will enter development “in the coming months,” publisher Deep Silver has confirmed. Not only that, but founding studio Free Radical Design has been reformed to develop it, with founders David Doak and Steve Ellis confirmed to be involved. TimeSplitters is a beloved console FPS first released in 2000. It had a lot in common with Rare’s classic Nintendo 64 shooters – Goldeneye 007 and Perfect Dark – not least because Doak had a hand in creating those games, too. The last official TimeSplitters game released in 2005, though a fan project called TimeSplitters Rewind is still in development. As for this new, fourth installment, Deep Silver has said very little about it. Free Radical Design is currently…

Free | PC, Linux | bit.ly/FourTravelers This game’s three protagonists converge on a train setting to tell their dreadful tales of rejection, delusion, and messing with forbidden lore. The first story, The Silent Room, offers a short, sharp shock in a hotel room, as a man named Carlo awaits his lover, Patrick. Like the other stories, it’s set in the 1920s: not an especially good time to be gay, particularly when one man is more comfortable with himself than the other. The Slow Vanishing of Lady Winterbourne is an affecting tale of gothic horror, where you play as a laudanum-addicted woman in a neglected mansion. The Nameless Ritual is a work of crunchy cosmic horror that nails the Lovecraftian feeling of sticking your toe into an alien, unknowable realm. As…

$69 | PC, PS4, XB1, XBSX/S, Switch | motogpvideogame.com This series has taken a turn sim-wards since its move to UnrealEngine in 2018, but this year’s release represents the most noticeable shift in difficulty and realism in years. In particular, changes to suspension and braking make themselves felt in every corner entry and apex, demanding a different approach than last year’s game asked of you. The main course Milestone offers you is a career mode in which your custom rider graduates from Moto3 through Moto2 and finally to the big leagues – or just picks a ride in the fastest category as a rookie, your call. In any event, you’re given RPG-like levels of control over your team, earning upgrade points by ticking off objectives in practice sessions and then…

Broken Sword is a game that knows every great mystery needs a killer premise to hook you in. It begins with an American tourist on vacation in France, sipping coffee outside a Parisian cafe. Then a guy dressed as a clown blows it up. Most people would fly home and try to forget about it, but George Stobbart is not most people: he’s an adventure game protagonist. You know what those guys are like. Vacation be damned, he wants to know who tried to kill him – and he’s going to find out by picking up a bunch of random objects and solving puzzles with them. Developed by UK studio Revolution Software and released in 1996, Broken Sword is one of the best point-and-click adventure games ever made. It’s beautiful…

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…

Intel introduced its long-awaited eight-core Tiger Lake-H chips for laptops, marking Intel’s first shipping eight-core 10nm chips for the consumer market. These new 11th-generation chips, which Intel touts as the ‘World’s best gaming laptop processors,’ come as the company faces unprecedented challenges in the laptop market – not only is it contending with AMD’s increasingly popular 7nm Ryzen “Renoir” chips, but perhaps more importantly, Intel is also now playing defence against Apple’s innovative new Arm-based M1 that powers its new MacBooks. The halo eight-core 16-thread Core i9-11980HK peaks at 5.0GHz on two cores, fully supports overclocking, and despite its official 65W TDP, can consume up to 107W in base mode and 135W under heavy load in high performance mode. Additionally, Intel has also added limited overclocking support in the form…

IBM research unveiled a new 2nm chip with nanosheet technology that will serve as the underpinning of its future process technology. IBM displayed a full 300mm wafer produced on the 2nm nanosheet process at its Albany, New York facilities. However, it is important to remember that the technology is still in the research phase, so the wafer doesn’t have productisable chips, at least in their current form. IBM no longer mass-produces processors; instead, it helps develop technology for its partners, like Intel and Samsung. The former recently announced that it would research new process node and packaging technologies with IBM as part of its new IDM 2.0 initiative. That means that Intel’s future 2nm chips could be based on some of these IBM breakthroughs. IBM claims that the new process…

From $1,599 | microsoft.com/en-au It doesn’t feel that long ago that Microsoft was announcing its first Surface Laptops, but now more than a few years on we have the fourth iteration of this clamshell Surface range... and it’s really starting to mature into a sophisticated and reasonably priced offering. What’s most notable about the Surface Laptop 4 is that it’s still one of the only Ultrabook ranges to offer various AMD and Intel based models side by side, clearly the strategy has been working for them since the Surface Pro 3 launched at the end of 2019. In addition to processor choice, the Surface Laptop 4 devices offer much longer than average battery lifespans, vibrant 3 by 2 displays, a sophisticated chassis design and many sophisticated colours to choose from.…

$200 | www.qnap.com Patchy Wi-Fi signal strength is a true horror, but to help upgrade your network QNAP has released the new QMiro-201W tri-band mesh router. It has some business-focused features, but is also well-suited to normal home use, and comes in a unique baby blue. The QMiro-201W AC2200 spec, which means dual band 802.11ac (2.4 and 5GHz) plus two more 5GHz bands across four internal antennas. The router itself has two GbE ports – WAN and LAN, plus a USB 3.2 connection, and Bluetooth. Each router is rated to cover 195 square metres, which translates into enough for a one or two bedroom apartment. The 201W is mesh capable, which means adding in extra coverage is simple as buying another router – no cables needed. Being Tri-Band, the units…

$649 | au.aoc.com Do you need an ultrawide gaming monitor? It’s certainly the first question to answer for yourself before considering the AOC U34G3X – a 34-inch beast of a screen with some pretty impressive specs to match. Would your day-to-day use and gaming benefit from a 21:9 aspect ratio rather than 16:9? Do your games or consoles even support the format? If so, read on. Aesthetically, this AOC monitor treads a comfortable line between understated elegance and lavish gaming flair. On the front, limited branding and text along with thin bezels make sure the display itself is very much the centre of attention. The monitor’s stand holds the product’s only real design flourish, with some red trim accenting a large cable management hole in the centre of the vertical…

$239 | www.intel.com 11th Gen CPUs may not have upended the marketplace like we hoped they would, but that perception was framed by our review of the flagship 11900K. It’s powerful, but it was generally a let down due to its step backwards in core count and its runaway power consumption. The 11600K fares a lot better, but now it’s time to look at the budget end of the market. The Core i5-11400F is the most affordable Rocket Lake CPU. It’s a 6-core/12-thread design with a 65W TDP. It includes the improved IPC of Rocket Lake while doing away with the crazy power consumption of the 8-core models. Then there’s the price. At around $239 at the time of writing, the 11400F offers stunning value for money. Is it the…

Needs iOS 11 or later | Free (IAPs) | agenda.com This app combines notes, calendars, and reminders. Agenda notes can contain pretty much anything, and you can organise notes by category, project, dates or tags. There are two versions of Agenda: a free version that you can use forever and the Premium iteration, which for a one-off $54.99 unlocks features such as project archiving, creating smart overviews from search criteria, copying text as Markdown/HTML, and editing Calendar events. The free version is good but Premium, which also covers your Mac, is better. Agenda uses a three-panel layout. The left sidebar contains On The Agenda – a bird’s-eye view of your most important notes – as well as a Today view, a Search link, and direct links to your projects. You…

While you wait for Google’s Stadia and Microsoft’s Project xCloud to become viable and available in Australia, did you know it’s already possible to stream games you own to devices around your house, including mobiles and TV screens? You can play your Xbox or Playstation games on your PC, for example; or beam your PC games from your study to your loungeroom TV over your home network; or play your PC games on an Android phone. You don’t actually need much to make this happen – a wired home network helps but is not strictly necessary, and the rest is really just software and possibly controllers. We’re not going to look at every permutation and device here (there are a lot), but we thought we’d walk through some of the…

Terminal multiplexers such as Tmux and Screen are part of the daily routine for most command-line warriors. These amazing tools can be used to run multiple shell sessions within a single terminal, or display more than one application in a single window. But these tasks are beyond the capabilities of regular terminal emulators, and you must use multiplexers. Although multiplexers such as Screen have been around since the late 1980s, they aren’t exactly welcoming to new users or CLI novices. Byobu aims to bridge the gap by providing a wrapper over multiplexers such as Screen and Tmux, as well as add some features to appeal to even new users. Released under the GPLv3 Licence, Byobu started its journey as a wrapper for Screen, and was only available for Ubuntu. It…

$89.95 | PC, PS4, XB1 | nier.square-enix-games.com/en-us If Nier was characterised by desperation, Nier Replicant is an act of love. Created by developer Toylogic and publisher Square Enix with the direct involvement of Taro and his regular band of collaborators, this remaster feels like an attempt to make good on the ideas and promises of that original game. After its sequel Nier Automata became an unlikely hit in 2017, the team is betting that now is the right time to reintroduce broader audiences to the charms of the original game. Maybe this time they’ll be more receptive. I honestly don’t know if they will: even in its remastered form, Nier remains a singular and at times tedious game, a piece of art eager to try everything and constantly seeking out…

Free | PC | bit.ly/3uBJtpg It took me several plays to fully comprehend Nojong, which is a a Columns-style match-three game, but where matching blocks is only half of the story. In addition to smushing pairs of two or three identical blocks together, as they fall from the top of the screen, you’re also trying to build a beautiful hand of cards. Well, I say cards, but it’s actually a hand of nine blocks, initially shuffled from the nine colourful designs: wood, leaves, sun, glass, etc. The blocks in your hand can be swapped for the falling one at any time – for instance, if you need to clear a sun block that’s been clogging up the playing field. The rub, however, is that the falling block will then go…

Free | PC | benjamin-soul.itch.io Beasts of Mehetia sets a child battling monsters in a fiery volcano. His main weapon is his courage, and his main form of defence is, er, closing his eyes. This doesn’t make the monsters go away, but it does give him a moment to come to his senses, without them in sight to hinder his recovery. Courage is a resource you use to battle enemies: one point of courage does one damage, and if you run out, you’ll expend precious HP instead. While courage does recover naturally over time, this will only happen if there are no enemies present, or if you press the button to close your eyes, causing the viewing area to shrink and giving monsters the chance for a surprise attack. It’s…

Broken Sword, like most games developed by Revolution Software, uses an in-house engine called Virtual Theatre. The studio was formed in 1990 by Charles Cecil, Tony Warriner, David Sykes, and Noirin Carmody, and its first project was Lure of the Temptress. This fantasy adventure game (which is now free on GOG) was the debut of the Virtual Theatre system, which would see characters moving around the world, travelling between locations, and following simple routines – around which many of the puzzles were designed. Broken Sword, however, doesn’t actually utilise Virtual Theatre to the same degree, but an iteration of the engine has been in almost every Revolution game to date, including its latest, Beyond a Steel Sky.…

Real and fake Elon Musks are here to hurt your crypto portfolio SEC says investors lost US$2 million to fraudsters, but the real Elon cost crypto much more. The federal Trade Commission reported in May that consumers had been scammed out of around US$2 million in cryptocurrency by fraudsters impersonating Elon Musk. A number that perhaps pales in comparison to the amount the crypto market would have lost to the real Musk in the Tesla CEO’s apparent Bitcoin pump-and-dump scheme. In February, Tesla announced it had purchased US$1.5 billion of Bitcoin, causing the price of the crypto currency to surge 20 percent in a day and allowing the company to sell 10 percent of its holdings for a US$101 million boost in Q1 profits. In May, Tesla then announced it…