TechLifeNovember 2018的目錄

IT’S ALSO NOT GOING TO BRAINWASH YOU INTO BEING A DELINQUENT. IT’S JUST A GAME. ANY PARENTS WHO ARE WORRIED THAT THEIR CHILDREN ARE ADDICTED BECAUSE THEY’RE THROWING TANTRUMS OR WON’T DO ANYTHING BUT PLAY FORTNITE NEED TO SET LIMITS ON PLAYTIME. BY NOW YOU will have heard of Fortnitein the press, on TV, and if you have children in (or visiting) your household, you may have even heard its name uttered out loud. You might have also seen a few segments on TV, parents worried they’ve lost their children to Fortnite. So what is it? Fortniteis a videogame, playable on PC, Mac, PlayStation 4, Xbox and even a smartphone, and is popular for two reasons. First up, it’s caught that magic wave of the ‘battle royale’ trend — where…

US$22 billion SAMSUNG PLANS TO SPEND BIG ON AI, AUTO TECH AND 5G BY 2020 While Samsung is famous for being the world’s number one manufacturer for smartphones and TVs, the company’s recent announcement will see it spending big on expanding its domain into future tech. Up until and throughout 2020, Samsung has announced that it intends to spend US$22 billion on its artificial intelligence, automotive technology, and 5G cellular network tech. Given these investments, it’s likely we’ll see benefits across Samsung’s different divisions, just as we’ve seen the company’s display panel manufacturing lending a big hand to its smartphone team. 30 million NUMBER OF GOPRO HEROS SOLD SINCE 2009 Since launching in 2009, GoPro’s Hero line of action cameras has proven incredibly successful. In fact, the company has recently…

MICROSOFT’S SURFACE GO, the company’s latest tablet that aims to be a smaller and more affordable Surface Pro, is finally here. The Surface Go doesn’t bring about any major surprises — but perhaps that’s a good thing. What you see here is what should have arguably been the core conceit of every budget-priced Windows tablet since the beginning: everything you love about the Surface Pro, only smaller. No half-baked operating systems — though this model does ship with Windows 10 in the restricted S Mode — and no strange app compatibility issues. It’s just a smaller Surface that works. Of course, there were some cuts to be made to create a Surface tablet of this price, namely in the horsepower department, but your expectations should scale accordingly. Depending on your…

GoCube THE CLASSIC PUZZLE GAME REINVENTED. tinyurl.com/tla82-gocube | GOAL: US$25,000 | RAISED: US$875,775 from 8,242 backers | RRP: From US$119 Do you ‘cube’? No, that’s not some new hip word that the young people are using. We’re talking about the Rubik’s cube. The creator behind this new project felt that the traditional puzzle deserved to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Here it is, redesigned and reimagined, utilising powerful sensors that track your moves and relay that information to your phone so you can track your game. You can challenge your friends to a race or other competitions, or even just try to beat your best score. The app contains loads of stats and can even guide you to the solution, teaching you the techniques required to…

Lenovo Mirage Solo THE FIRST STANDALONE GOOGLE DAYDREAM VR HEADSET ADDS HIGH-END TRACKING TO A TOTALLY WIRELESS VIRTUAL EXPERIENCE. AS MUCH AS VR feels like the future when you try an HTC Vive or PlayStation VR, it’s pretty clear that getting tangled in cables powering the headset from an expensive gaming box would always keep it niche. Phone-based headsets weren’t going to solve the problem, because slotting your phone in is either too much hassle, or induces the slightly panicky feeling of ‘where did I leave my phone?’. To take off, VR needs to be easy, convenient, not interfere with the rest of your life, and affordable. That’s where standalone VR headsets come in: all the good stuff, totally wireless and self-contained. SOLO MISSION Like the Oculus Go (TechLife#79, page…

WHAT SETS THE BLADE 15 APART IS THE DETAILS. ITS ALUMINIUM BODY IS THE MOST SOLID AND FLEX-RESISTANT OF ALL THE LAPTOPS WE’VE TESTED LATELY. JUST OVER FIVE years ago, Razer introduced the original Blade laptop. Compared to its contemporaries, it was minuscule, but gaming laptops have slimmed down since, culminating in the Max-Q design seen in the best laptops of the last year or so. With the Blade 15, Razer has caught up with the competition in terms of what makes a great gaming laptop. Solid build, slim body, elegant design, long battery life, thin bezels, 144Hz screen, and internals powerful enough to play the latest games. That means an Intel Core i7-8750H paired with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Max-Q . What sets the Blade 15 apart is…

YOU DON’T NEED to invest hundreds of dollars to get your feet wet with smart home devices. Smart plugs and sensors are typically available for less than a hundred bucks, and if you’re starting out, these work well as ‘building blocks’ that can set you up for a more advanced smart home setup down the track. Smart plugs enable you to add smarts to a ‘dumb’ device. By acting as the middleman between an appliance (anything from a heater or lamp through to a coffee machine or iron) and the power outlet, you’re able to toggle it on or off through the app. Depending on the model, you may also be able to turn it on and off on a schedule, when you get/leave home, or based on other events.…

Isn’t the future wonderful? A new kind of sound technology comes along and it isn’t just available to those with an elaborate home cinema. Almost immediately after becoming widespread, Dolby Atmos is now available in small-size surround systems, full-size soundbars, mini soundbars... and, of course, those big speakers that fit into your elaborate home cinema. With the right speaker, every living room can benefit from the extra 3D effects of Atmos. We’ve picked the best of each kind here, so you can find the right speakers to fit your layout. In the case of the KEF R50s, you’ll also need to add your 5.1 surround system — we’re just bringing the Atmos. LIFESTYLE SPEAKER PACKAGE Focal Sib Evo 5.1.2 dolby atmos A loudspeaker package that won’t take over your living…

01 PIN YOUR FAVOURITE APPS When you open an application, you’ll see its icon appear on the taskbar. Clicking the logo brings the application to the forefront of your desktop so you can swap between your open applications. You can also ‘pin’ the applications you use the most to your taskbar. This keeps their icons on the taskbar, even when the apps are closed, and clicking on it will quickly open them. Right-click an icon and select ‘Pin to taskbar’. 02 SEARCH STRAIGHT FROM THE TASKBAR One of the new additions to the taskbar in Windows 10 is the search box on the left side, next to the Start menu. Click in the search box and start typing what you want to look for. This could be a file or…

01 ARRANGE BY… Control-click in an empty space or click the Arrange tool (a grid of tiny rectangles) to pick an order. Items are automatically arranged from the top left of the window in as many columns as will fit at the current icon size. 02 GO FREEFORM If you choose ‘Arrange By > None’, you can drag icons wherever you want within an autosizing canvas that can be bigger than the window. If you arrange on another attribute, returning to None restores items’ positions. 03 ICON FORMATTING Press Command-J to open the View Options window, where you can set icon size and grid spacing. The grid applies even with ‘Arrange By > None’ selected. The tightest grid spacing still wastes a lot of space, though. 04 TEXT SIZE AND…

SAFARI LOOKS STRAIGHTFORWARD and it is but hidden behind the simple controls are a lot of features you may not realise it has. It has more menus, functions and options than you might think and unlocking the browser’s secrets is easy. Many hidden features can be accessed by using 3D touch on newer iPhones which can detect how hard you press on the screen. There are two levels and a firm press accesses hidden features. If you have an older iPhone or iPad without 3D touch, just press and hold instead. Hidden menus pop up with 3D touch and provide additional functions and you can discover a lot by 3D touching everywhere. Almost everything responds.…

HOW MUCH IS TOO MUCH? EYES ARE A PORTRAIT’S MOST VITAL FEATURES. They’re the first thing the viewer looks at, so it’s important to make the most of them. As such, when photographing a face we always focus on the eyes: it doesn’t matter if everything else is soft, as long as the eyes – or, if the face is side on, the nearer eye – is sharp. When it comes to enhancing eyes using Photoshop or Lightroom, there’s a fine line between boosting them and pushing things too far. We’ve all seen ghastly portraits with blindingly white overcooked eyes (right). Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should! This is why it’s best to make your enhancements on a separate layer. This way, you always have the option to…

As the name suggests, screw-on filters simply rotate onto the filter thread on a lens. They can be a bit of a pain to remove if you’ve attached them too tightly, and you may need filters in a range of diameters to match your lenses — but they are convenient and easy to carry. By contrast, a sliding or ‘square’ filter system (the filters are generally rectangular) is bulkier, but you only need one filter of each type, which you can then fit to all your lenses using different sized adaptor rings. If you plan to do a lot of landscape photography, the square system is the way to go. 01 SCREW-ON SYSTEM 01 CIRCULAR POLARISER Rotating filters, such as a polariser, make sense on a screw-on system. One advantage…

MIA THE FIXER OF FIRST-WORLD ANIMAL PROBLEMS. CA$239 | kolonyrobotic.com Our relationship with man’s best friend has changed dramatically throughout history and while there are a bunch of perks to being a modern dog, being left at home all day while your owner’s at work isn’t one of them. Thankfully, Kickstarter has the solution for that final hurdle to the uninterrupted bliss of the modern pet. MIA is an autonomous companion robot that’ll keep your coddled canines or pampered pussies from feeling the full force of your simply inexplicable daily abandonment. In addition to intermittently dropping tasty care packages throughout the house for your pet to eat, MIA also attempts to distract barking dogs and can feed live video through an app. Microphone Cover for Nintendo Switch SING OR SWIM.…

BACK IN JULY 2017, the Australian Government stated its intention to introduce new legislation that would force companies to decrypt secure messages, and the details surrounding the proposed laws have finally come to light. While Australian telcos already offer a degree of assistance to the country’s law enforcement, providing user data in investigations relating to high-level crime, the government’s concern is that the same cooperation isn’t currently provided by big tech companies that offer encrypted messaging services. An exposure draft of the Assistance and Access Bill 2018 has revealed legislation that will allow certain high-ranking security officials to formally request access to encrypted communications from the providers of those services. While the companies being issued the requests are initially only asked to hand over information on a voluntary basis, this…

NIKON TOOK ITS time entering the full-frame mirrorless fray, but the wait was worth it. The Japanese imaging company has come close to hitting bullseye with the Nikon Z7, thanks to its familiar setup (that will please Nikon fans) and a very impressive spec sheet. Take the best bits of the D850 — the company’s best pro-level full-frame DSLR — pack it into a smaller and lighter body with some hefty changes, and you’re close to what the Z7 is all about. A NEW BEGINNING The first headline change comes with the new lens mount. Nikon’s famous F mount has been around since 1959, however, the company has made the bold decision to drop it for its new full-frame mirrorless cameras for a new design it calls Z mount. This…

AFTER LAUNCHING THE original Home in 2016, Google believed that music would be the primary use case for its smart speakers. One year, 100 million hours of music, a ton of Google Assistant analytics later, and it’s pretty clear that this original assumption was right. With this in mind, Google hired an entirely new team of audio engineers and hardware designers to make the Max the best sounding speaker it could. This audio focus is woven into all aspects of the Google Home Max, from the physical bookshelf-speaker appearance to the speckled chalk or charcoal acoustically-transparent fabric that it’s wrapped in. The besser-block looking boombox is rather weighty at 5.3kg, but the sturdy steel and polycarbonate enclosure works alongside a magnetically mounted silicone base to minimise unwanted vibration and distortion.…

WE PROBABLY SAY this for almost every single genre of podcast we cover, but investigative journalism really does feel at home in this medium. While podcasts obviously can’t show the visuals of tearful victims, car chases, the uncovering of critical evidence, suspects running away, shocking crime scenes or obvious expressions of deceit on suspects’ faces, they can grip us in other ways. Many productions use music, interviews, sound effects, elements of narration and even silence to great effect, but it’s often down to the stories themselves to keep us on the edge of our seats. This month, we’ve tracked down a few traditional investigative productions, but also found a couple that look at the genre from a different angle — not from the perspective of the journalist or victims, but…

IF YOU FEEL EMOTIONALLY DISCONNECTED, MAKE A LIST OF FIVE PEOPLE YOU’VE BEEN CLOSE TO IN THE PAST. REACH OUT TO THEM AND SUGGEST GETTING TOGETHER AND CATCHING UP. FORGET SMOKING CIGARETTES or stuffing your face with bacon — one of the biggest avoidable killers is loneliness. Don’t take our word for it: one study found that loneliness can increase the risk of premature death by up to 30%. The world is more connected than ever before, and yet more and more of us feel isolated. Can technology help or is it part of the problem? Are we lonely because of technology or despite it? The answer is like a Facebook relationship status: it’s complicated. THE SADNESS OF SOCIAL MEDIA Newspapers may have exaggerated the issue for scary headlines, but…

COMBAT FEELS QUITE SATISFYING HERE, WITH THE GAME EXPECTEDLY USING THE CHARACTER’S “SPIDER SENSE” TO HELP YOU COUNTER AND DODGE ATTACKS FROM THE REAR LIKE BATMAN IN HIS ARKHAM SERIES OF GAMES, ALBEIT IN A MORE ACROBATIC FASHION. Spider-Man OL’ WEB-HEAD IS BACK AND FULL OF SURPRISES $94.95 | PS4 | playstation.com WHILE THERE’S BEEN no shortage of games starring everyone’s favorite web-slinging spider-guy over the last decade and a half, very few have come close to matching the vertigo-inducing heights of 2002’s Spider-Man 2 — the first game to absolutely nail the sensation of swinging through an open-world New York setting. In the trusted hands of Ratchet and Clank-developer Insomniac Games, Spider-Man has finally received a game that’s as polished and cinematic as the beloved character deserves. When we…

MICROSOFT STILL KNOWS A THING OR TWO ABOUT DESIGNING ERGONOMIC PERIPHERALS. ONE OF THE most well-loved devices made by Microsoft during the late 1990s and early 2000s was the IntelliMouse, and now the company has revisited the iconic brand with the Classic IntelliMouse, which — according to Microsoft — is inspired by the IntelliMouse 3.0. As our devices become ever more complex and convoluted (as well as delicate), there is a lot to be said about older hardware that’s solidly built and does the job without fuss. Chunky and ‘retro’ designs can also help. It’s this nostalgia and goodwill that Microsoft appears to be targeting with the Classic IntelliMouse. You can clearly see the inspiration, with a similar ergonomic shape and black-and-grey design. For many people, this will be a…

FOR SOMETHING THAT feels like a piece of plastic in the hand, the Canon EOS 1500D surprises in performance and image quality. It replaces the two-year-old EOS 1300D and, like its predecessor, the EOS 1500D is a stripped-back, no-frills entry-level DSLR that makes it affordable for beginners to learn the ins and outs of photography. On the exterior, the new snapper isn’t very different from the 1300D, although Canon has managed to shave 10g off the weight of the 1500D by using an all-plastic body that feels surprisingly solid. The hand grip on the front comes with an accompanying thumb rest on the back, making it easy to handle the 1500D over long periods of time. There’s also a pop-up flash, a hot shoe for additional accessories and, like all…

GEORGE LUCAS FAMOUSLY said that sound was 50% of the movie-watching experience. With Dolby Atmos, we think it could be a good deal more. Basically 3D for your ears, it’s the biggest thing in home cinema audio since the launch of Dolby Digital 5.1, and has opened up a completely new way for TV and films to deliver sound. A big change in Dolby Atmos is that sounds become ‘object-based’, rather than ‘channelbased’ as in Dolby 5.1. With channel-based tech, the engineers could direct sounds to specific speakers. In an object-based system, however, audio designers can place individual sonic elements inside a 3D soundfield, with their movement and position reflected by the speaker arrangement. This technology, says Dolby, creates an “illusion of an infinite number of speakers” and can fully…

[WINDOWS] Bitlocker drive problem When I plug in my encrypted USB flash drive and click on the padlock icon I get an ‘Application not found’ error message. I would appreciate your assistance please! JOHN WALLIS Matt Hanson replies: John had encrypted the USB drive using BitLocker as part of a prior Windows 7 Ultimate installation. The problem occurred on a laptop running Windows 10 Pro. By opening the BitLocker Drive Encryption Control Panel – type bitlocker into the Search box – he was able to manually unlock the drive and access its contents through there. Thankfully, a permanent fix to the error message is also available, involving a trip into the Registry (type regedit into the Search box to locate Registry Editor). Visit support. microsoft.com/kb/2748266/ for a detailed explanation…

FINDER WINDOWS CAN display files in various views, selected from icons in the toolbar at the top. Two of these — List and Column — are the most customisable. Pressing Command-J brings up the View Options window. Here you can pick a view from Finder’s toolbar icons at any time and the panel switches to options for it. Clicking ‘Use as Defaults’ at the foot of View Options you’ll see current options respected by any new folders that you create — including the column headers you’ve made visible or hidden. However, existing folders retain their own settings. To set a folder to use your new defaults, open its view options, hold Option and click Restore Defaults. At the top of View Options, check mark ‘Always open in’ to use this…

APPLE USERS HAVE an advantage when it comes to privacy: Apple isn’t in the business of selling user data to advertisers, so the data it stores is minimal. If you go ahead and download your entire data archive from privacy.apple.com you’ll see there’s hardly anything in it. You can’t say the same about Google or Facebook. That doesn’t mean we can be complacent, though. If we’re not careful we can end up sharing all kinds of information without realising it. That’s mainly used by advertising networks who want to follow your every waking moment so they can better target you with adverts, but there are other worries too. Do you want you children broadcasting their location wherever they go to whoever wants to know it, or have apps turning on…

GET SEARCH SUGGESTIONS When typing into Safari’s address box the selected search engine will suggest popular searches. Is this useful, an irritation, or even a privacy issue? Turn it on or off as you prefer. MORE SAFARI SECRETS Hidden features are everywhere and there are even more waiting to be discovered. 3D/long-press the ‘Done’ button on the tabs view to close all the tabs with one tap. 3D/long-press the reload button next to the address box to request the desktop website. Long-press the icons in the favourites view to edit or delete them. SELECT YOUR SEARCH Choose the search engine to use from Google, Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. If you value your privacy, set Search Engine to use DuckDuckGo because it has less tracking than the others. QUICK WEBSITE SEARCH…

ANDROID AUTO IS an interface designed to make Android devices easier to use and less distracting in a car. The whole idea is to use your smartphone functions without taking your attention off the road, and much that you would read or type on your phone is handled by spoken words. In a compatible car, Android Auto uses the infotainment system in place of your smartphone screen, displaying a simplified interface featuring voice interaction and touch control. The voice recognition is very good, with almost no mistakes in our testing, and the text-to-speech is equally good, reading out messages on request. Android Auto anticipates where you might want to go next, and what you might want to know or listen to, so there’s a chance it will display possible destinations,…

STEP BY STEP REPLACE A BACKDROP 01 SET UP THE TOOL Open erase.jpg. For our background image we used a free London skyline from pixabay.com. Drag in your background image with the Move tool, then drag the background scene to the bottom of the layers stack. Next, grab the Background Eraser tool. Set Sampling to Continuous and Tolerance to 50 in the options. 02 REMOVE THE WINDOWS Zoom in and paint over the windows to reveal the background scene below. You might need to experiment with the Tolerance settings to change how the tool targets colours. Once done, adjust the tones in each image so they match, then add a tonal adjustment on top of everything using Adjustment Layers. STEP BY STEP PHOTOSHOP ANATOMY HOW DOES IT WORK? The Background…

DIGITAL CAMERAS HAVE largely done away with the need for carrying a stack of optical filters around. In the heyday of film photography, you might have required a set of colour correction filters to warm up or cool down the light, depending on what type of film you had loaded in the camera. But a digital camera’s white balance control lets you change the camera’s colour response from shot to shot. Special-effects filters — such as diffusers to create a soft-focus look, or star filters to add a starburst effect to light sources — have largely taken a back seat thanks to photo editors such as Photoshop. But there are still some optical filters worth considering adding to your kit, whether that’s because their effects are time-consuming to replicate in…

I TRIED SOMETHING THAT IS RARELY COVERED IN WI-FI ARTICLES — ROTATING THE WIRELESS MODEM (THERE WAS NO SEPARATE ANTENNA). BY ROTATING THE MODEM THROUGH 90 DEGREES AND RUNNING THE SPEED TEST AGAIN, I WAS GETTING 27 MB/S CONSISTENTLY. Turn, turn, turn Referring to your September 2018 issue with the lead article, ‘Transform your Wi-Fi’ (page 57), I was particularly interested as I had just been connected to the NBN (FTTC). Being an Optus client, I was initially going to set up with their supplied equipment before considering the purchase of a new modem router. Everything went well in getting the system up and running. On a direct connection to the modem I was getting an expected 40-50 MB/s download that dropped down to a disappointing 10-15 MB/s by wireless…

THE WHISPERS OF a merger between Vodafone Hutchison Australia (VHA) and TPG have now been confirmed, with the two telcos recently announcing they’ve entered into a “merger of equals transaction to establish Australia’s leading challenger full-service telecommunications provider”. According to a statement release by TPG, “The merger will create a more effective challenger to Telstra and Optus, with an integrated fixed and mobile offering and a pro forma enterprise value of approximately $15 billion.” The ‘merger of equals transaction’ is how the shares have been divvied up – Vodafone shareholders will own 50.1% of the shares in the new company, and the other 49.9% will be held by TPG shareholders. Vodafone and TPG coming together joins more than 27,000km of fibre and 500 mobile sites across the country, with more…

Sleeping too much or not enough may damage your health YOU NEED TO BE SLEEPING JUST RIGHT... A study from Seoul National University College of Medicine has found that sleeping too much or not enough can leave you prone to metabolic syndrome. It’s a collection of conditions associated with cardiovascular disease, stroke, and Type 2 diabetes. The study involved 133,608 Korean men and women aged between 40 and 69, and investigated why the prevalence of the disease is so high. The team considered individuals to have the syndrome if they showed at least three of the following symptoms: larger waist circumference, high triglyceride levels, low levels of healthy cholesterol, high blood pressure, or high fasting blood sugar. The researchers conducted an extensive investigation into each participant’s health, including their medical…

Meteor Showers VISUALISE COSMIC CHAOS AND ORDER meteorshowers.org Whether or not you’re interested in tracking a particular meteor shower event, this certainly is a pretty way to experience a sense of universal scale. This website is an animated 3D model of the known meteor shower events in our solar system, allowing you to view them from a fixed or moving point, zoom in and out, and rotate at will. You can select which shower to view, what speed to view the movements at, the date of the projected data, or go all-in with the stunning “everything at once” option. For a cosmic trip, we recommend setting the speed to 0.1, un-ticking the “show orbits” option, selecting “watch from earth”, and turning on all the meteors. You can hide many of…

IN ONE LEVEL, WE FLIP A NAPPING ALLIGATOR HEAD OVER HEELS IN HIS GARDEN LOUNGE CHAIR. HE JUST CARRIES ON SNOOZING. AFTER WE’VE FLIPPED HIM TEN TIMES, AND SENT HIM FLYING FROM ONE SIDE OF HIS GARDEN TO THE OTHER, HE SIMPLY FOLDS OBEDIENTLY INTO THE EVER-GROWING HOLE, STILL ASLEEP. Donut County A HOLE NEW WORLD. $7.99 | donutcounty.com DK THE RACCOON works in a doughnut shop, but doesn’t appear to know what a doughnut is. Whenever a customer orders one, he doesn’t send a frosted treat. Instead, he sends a giant, moveable hole to their garden into which tumble cars, bunnies, deck chairs and, eventually, the customer. These customers are now gathered in an underground cave that they must escape from — but first, you must slip into each…

“ASUS CLAIMS THAT THE ZENBOOK FLIP S IS THE WORLD’S THINNEST CONVERTIBLE, AND IT CERTAINLY FEELS IT.” IF YOU’RE FEELING a sense of déjà vu, you’re not alone. Asus updated its ZenBook Flip S only a few months ago, but then Intel released some new Kaby Lake R 8th-generation processors and Asus felt the need to squeeze them into its product lines. And we’re glad it did. The ZenBook Flip S UX370 is a 2-in-1 with a good deal of performance, while keeping the base running speed low until it’s needed. Beyond the hardware, the externals are pretty much the same — which is no bad thing, since the ZenBook Flip S is a joy to use. This latest ZenBook Flip S isn’t for the light of pocket. You’re looking…

ACTING AS INTELLIGENT hubs, the Google Home, Amazon Echo and Apple HomePod can tie all of your smart home devices together and make them all accessible through a common interface – your voice. From a home security perspective, you can use a smart speaker to leverage devices such as smart bulbs, Wi-Fi cameras, and smart switches and sensors to alert you when something at home is awry. While all of these devices come with their own apps, integrating them into your smart speaker’s ecosystem enables you to control them through voice commands rather than having to jump between multiple apps. Routines (also known as Scenes for Apple users) let you combine several smart home actions together which are triggered when you say a pre-specified voice command. It’s worth noting that…

SMART LIGHTING, WE must admit, looks on the outside like little more than a gimmick. Even now it’s had a few years to mature, the marketing surrounding the process of going smart revolves around the pretty RGB colours, and almost entirely sidesteps the more subtle and useful features of clever bulbs. But it shouldn’t: used properly, and for the right reasons, smart lighting can absolutely transform your home. First and foremost, let’s dispel any kind of intimidation: smart lighting is easy to get on board with. There’s no need to throw out all of your existing bulbs and start again; you can add smart bulbs to your current lighting setup piecemeal, and they’ll work alongside dumb bulbs just fine. Smart bulbs aren’t listening to you, or indeed doing anything more…

Hue White and Colour Ambiance Starter Kit SEE THE WORLD THROUGH HUE COLOURED GLASSES. HUE WAS ONE of the first smart lights game, but it’s still our favourite for anyone serious about fitting out their house with a futuristic lighting system. You’ll have to buy the Hue Bridge as well as any lights you want to start, but this initial outlay gives you a Zigbee connection hub which can add daisy chain connectivity between bulbs and frees up your Wi-Fi network (router congestion is a common problem down the track). While this hardware sets it apart, Phillips has worked on the Hue App, allowing you to change everything from the LED colour to scheduling lighting routines that mimic the sun rising for when you want to wake up. You can…

IT MIGHT NOT look it, but our planet is a fragile place. A delicate balance of pressure, temperature and gases keeps us alive as our atmosphere lets in enough heat for us to thrive, but not too much that we get too toasty. For many years our planet has looked after itself with ease. Now, with humans on the scene, things are changing more than ever, from climate change to mass deforestation. If our planet is going to survive long into the future it’s going to need our help. Fortunately, we’ve got plenty of missions that are working for the benefit of our world already. Using observation satellites in orbit, scientists have been monitoring Earth for decades, watching how the planet pulsates and changes over time. From orbit we can…

THE TASKBAR — that long menu that runs along the bottom of your screen and holds various icons, the search bar and Start menu — has been an important part of Windows since all the way back to Windows 95. There was even a very early version of it included in Windows 1.0 in 1985! It’s probably one of the most-used parts of the Windows interface, since it contains some useful features such as the notification area. But, did you know that there’s a lot more you can do with it? If you onlyuse it for quickly jumping between apps or launching the Start menu then you’re not using it to its full potential. In this taskbar masterclass, we’ll show you some of the brilliant hidden things the taskbar can…

01 CHOOSE COLUMNS File names are always shown on the left. Control-click a heading to pick which columns are shown (size, kind and so on). Drag headings to the side to reorder columns. Click a heading to sort by its attribute, and again to reverse. 02 ADJUST WIDTHS Drag the vertical line between any two columns to adjust widths. Finder remembers your setting, and applies it if you click ‘Use as Defaults’. However, if it thinks a column is too narrow, it’ll ignore your setting.…

01 THE NUCLEAR OPTION Let’s start with the big worry: someone finding or stealing your device. Go into Settings > Touch ID & Passcode and enable ‘Erase Data’. This wipes your device after 10 failed passcode attempts (this can’t be done accidentally). 02 ELIMINATE ADS Many adverts are designed to track you on the internet. You can block them with a third-party content blocker such as Better or Purify from the App Store. Blockers are enabled in Settings > Safari. 03 SEE WHAT’S SHARED Go to Settings > Privacy and you’ll see the screen above, which shows the different kinds of data that are being shared with third party apps. Tap on a feature to see which apps can access that feature. 04 LIMIT AD TRACKING You don’t need a…

BACK IN MAY this year, the long awaited General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) finally took effect. In case you missed the flurry of emails back then, GDPR was a set of strict new privacy rules for companies operating in Europe. The laws were the most progressive digital privacy rules of anywhere in the world, and they’ve had wide ranging effects on the service offerings of many companies, including many of the biggest players in social media and internet services. If you haven’t already, it’s a good time to check out the privacy settings of all the online services that you use. A lot more power has been given to users thanks to GDPR, and you may find new options for privacy that weren’t there before. Below, we’re going to look…

When it comes to removing a backdrop, Photoshop has Quick Selection [1], Magic Wand, Select Subject, Color Range or Select And Mask [2] — so why use the Background Eraser? It’s quick and easy to control. It’s not the tool to use for complex cutouts or fuzzy detail (Select And Mask is better here), but it’s very effective on hard edges. It’s ideal for quickly removing the windows in the upper part of our train interior – but it struggles when the windows become more detailed at the bottom. This is when you should switch to another tool to complete the job. You could paint freehand with the Eraser tool [3] or use the Pen tool [4], ideal for straight-edged areas. Click anchor points with the tool [5] or click…