Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2024 i APC

WELCOME | EDITORIAL The number of Aussies using a VPN is on the up, and that’s a trend that we’ve watched, generally unsurprised, over the last few years. According to a recent study by IT Wire (tinyurl.com/APC539VPN), in the period between 2020 and 2024 the percentage of Australian using a VPN frequently has climbed from 25.1% to 27.1%. That’s in line with global trends, too, though we’re behind some countries that have seen far greater surges in VPN popularity. China and India lead that charge. The reasons behind especially strong VPN growth in some countries are reasons we thankfully don’t generally have to worry about here in Australia. Security is a huge appeal, and while we all now know and grudgingly (apathetically?) accept that government agencies are spying on everything…

OPINION | TRADE CHAT The PS5 Pro has arrived. It’s far, far more powerful than the plain old PS5, but it’s also a lot more expensive at $1,199. Does the PS5 Pro make gaming PCs look like good value again? Or are GPU prices still so high, you’d have to be very serious about PC gaming to overlook Sony’s latest console? Boil it down to basics, and the PS5 Pro is a $624 premium for a GPU upgrade. The rest of the PS5 Pro’s hardware hasn’t changed much. But the uplift from $575 to $1,200 puts the Pro into territory where it might just have to fight to justify its existence. As a gaming platform, a $1,200 PS5 versus a $1,200 ‘gaming’ PC was always a bit of a non-starter.…

PRICE $1,349 (128GB) WEB store.google.com Next to its Pro-branded siblings the regular Pixel 9 might not seem like much to get excited about. But Google has clearly put a lot of effort into updating its mainstream handset for 2024, introducing some major improvements over the previous model. The new model is a touch thicker and heavier than the Pixel 8, and there’s not much in the way of snazzy new colours: alongside the classic Obsidian and Porcelain, your options are Peony and Winter Green – fancy ways of saying pink and mint green. Still, the design has been refined in a few other ways. A jaunty new oval camera housing replaces the staid edge-to-edge bar of previous generations, although it does seem to protrude out a little further. The rounded…

While the shuttering of Apple’s self-driving car project earlier this year was disappointing, the lessons learnt during its development may well prove useful on a smaller scale – in robotic devices for the home. The first Apple robot is expected to be a tabletop assistant arriving in 2026 or 2027, to be followed later by a more sophisticated mobile droid. So could Apple reshape the smart home in the same way that it revolutionised smartphones, tablets, and wearables? The company’s move into robotics, combined with the power of its artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem, Apple Intelligence, could transform not only the types of devices we have at home but also how we interact with them. First up, the planned tabletop robot – codenamed J595 – is likely to serve as an…

Budget. A perfect balance between price and performance. We’re finally introducing new processors into our Blueprints mix. A lot has happened over the last month. We’ve had Intel dealing with massive stability issues, both at a physical and a software level, along with AMD launching new flagship chips riddled with latency and Windows bugs. But it finally feels like things are calming down, and everything’s going back to normal. The latest microcode updates are now available for both AMD and Intel, with AMD’s significantly reducing latency on its 9000 series, and Intel massively curtailing power draw, without sacrificing too much on the performance front. With that, we’ve decided to include new chips across a swathe of our builds. First up is the budget end of the spectrum. Both systems below…

WORD ONLINE Quickly add rows and column to tables Microsoft is improving the online version of Word (tinyurl.com/APC539word) by letting you add rows and columns to your tables without having to access the toolbar or right-click your mouse. Previously, if you wanted to add a row, you had to right-click one, then right-click and select Insert. All you need to do now is hover your cursor between two rows at the edge of a table until a plus symbol appears ( 1 in our screenshot below). Click this and a new row will appear in the space between the two existing rows 2 . You can also do this for columns by hovering your cursor between two existing columns on the edge of a table. ONLYOFFICE Change editing modes more…

When you’ve got a tool to grab torrents and your web browser has a download manager for most other files, do you still need a dedicated download manager? Short answer, yes – use Aria2. Aria2 is a lightweight, multi-protocol, multi-server and multi-source command-line download utility that can verify checksums and authentication certificates on the fly. Furthermore, it includes a fully featured BitTorrent client with support for DHT, PEX, encryption, magnet URIs, web seeding, selective downloads, local peer discovery and a UDP tracker. You can also throttle the bandwidth, so you can watch YouTube while downloading the latest release of your favourite distro. While this might not be a deciding factor for modern multi-core multiprocessor computing devices, CLI utilities like Aria2 are incredibly lightweight. And no matter how many GHz and…

GAMES PRICE Free PLATFORM PC, browser WEB bit.ly/SuperDassalo LIVE, LAUGH, LEAP IN THIS PLATFORMER. I can’t be alone in missing licensed platformers (right?), even if their quality was variable, to put it kindly. So I was happy to fire up Super Dassalo Land, a new game playable on GB hardware, but also in your browser. What’s it licensing? An actual person, comedian Tommy Dassalo, who has been shrunk down and inserted into his notebook. Stages reflect the inside of his head, with World 1 being themed around ramen, and World 2 reflecting his late-night obsessive phone use. Part Comix Zone and part Mario, it’s a hyperactive, funny throwback with some good ideas that doesn’t outstay its welcome. We’ve got to talk about the pixel art, which was done by Game…

GAMES PRICE Free PLATFORM PC WEB bit.ly/CoagulationGame THE BLOOD MUST FLOW. Saddled with an enormous debt, you can hardly pass up the opportunity to become a Clot Management Specialist on a living meat planet known as Carrion Prime. It’s exactly as fleshy as you’re expecting, as you oversee a blood pumping operation in this stressful horror game. It all starts simply enough, as you push the button to start the pump and then hang back, just in case anything goes wrong. At first it’s leaks from nearby pipes, which are easily fixed with your wrench, and then unsettling blockages (toothy fish, mostly) that need to be plucked out and fed into the nearest grinder. But the scariest part is having to put on a diving suit and ride the lift…

Download these APC exclusives free from: www.apcmag.com/exclusives ASCOMP SECURE-PDF ENCRYPT, DIGITALLY SIGN, A ND SIGN PDFS. With Secure-PDF, you can secure your PDF documents with up to 256-bit AES encryption. This method ensures that your sensitive information is protected from unauthorised access. By adding a password, only authorised users can open and view the document. This feature is especially useful for confidential documents such as contracts, financial reports, or personal data. To ensure the authenticity and integrity of your PDF documents, Secure-PDF offers the ability to digitally sign documents. With a PKCS#12 certificate, you can add a digital signature to your document, guaranteeing that the document has not been altered after signing. Additionally, you can integrate a visual signature to personalise the document and make it even more trustworthy. ASHAMPOO…

OPINION | END USER Elon Musk’s harsh turn to the right of politics isn’t new, but the insufferable billionaire still manages to find ways to surprise. When he’s not endorsing extreme right sentiment on the social media platform he bought and destroyed, he’s effectively paying Americans to register to vote in Trump-leaning battleground states. In case you missed it, he founded an organisation in July called America PAC with the purpose of winning a second Trump presidency. Musk’s ownership of Twitter, now X, has nearly destroyed what was once a de facto digital public square. It’s now a wasteland of blue check banality, off-the-cuff hate speech, transparent disinformation, AI churn, and the kind of viral content that makes Facebook look cerebral. And yet it remains, for some causes, an important…

PRICE $90 WEB www.elgato.com The Elgato Wave Neo is the newest mic from the streaming gear company. Following a legacy of quality mics such as the beloved Wave 3 and Wave DX, the Neo line-up is aiming to deliver more affordable solutions. Thus, the Wave Neo costs $90, making it the cheapest Wave microphone to date. But it does make some sacrifices to hit that price point. For starters, the thoughtful recycled cardboard box contains only what you need. You get a braided USB Type-C (device side) to Type-A cable, a mic stand complete with some cable management, and the Wave 3 itself. The mic is rocking a pop filter natively. The stand is quite good, but admittedly a little weird. It has a solid circular base with an 8cm…

PRICE $449 (two-pack) WEB https://au.msi.com We’ve been impressed by MSI’s budget Wi-Fi routers in the past, so we were happy to see this Roamii Wi-Fi 7 mesh land on these shores. The (two-node) Roamii BE Lite Wi-Fi Mesh System costs just $449 which is almost one-tenth the price of Netgear’s recent (three-node) rival. So, what are the compromises? The main issue is that calling it Wi-Fi 7 is a stretch. The ‘Lite’ designation reflects the fact that it doesn’t utilise the 6GHz band, which is where the main speed and performance benefits of Wi-Fi 7 (and 6E) stem from. Wi-Fi 7 does include other benefits, though. While we could list a plethora of relevant, techie acronyms, arguably the most important is Multi Link Operation (MLO) – which enables compatible devices…

PRICE $279 WEB thermaltake.com The Thermaltake Tower 600 comes with a fairly high price of $279. There are many cases more expensive than this, but most PC builders will likely stay far below this price point. For those that are interested in venturing to the near-$300 point however, the Tower 600 is fairly justified in its cost. A heavy layer of painted aluminium wraps around the PC case, with the front of it covered in three glass panes, with two slender panes on the sides, forming a geometrically interesting shape. It’s a unique design that gives off “gamer” without screaming it with excessive RGB lighting (which the case does not come with, unless you elect to purchase the $169 LCD screen accessory which can be placed neatly in the bottom…

PRICE $639 WEB au.nothing.tech Nothing can be confusing. This innovative British phone maker not only loves to throw brackets into its phone names, which we will ignore henceforth for the sake of clarity, but extra letters too: the $639 Nothing Phone 2a had all the sensibilities of the $469 Nothing Phone 2, but the new Nothing Phone 2a Plus doesn’t increase its screen size as the name suggests – instead, it brings a slight uplift in performance, front camera hardware, battery life and price. For $170 more, you’ll benefit from a beefier Dimensity 7350 Pro chip, which delivers a modest improvement compared to the Dimensity 7200 Pro powering the standard Phone 2a. And I mean modest: it proved 3.5% faster in CPU tests such as Geekbench, 6% quicker in AI…

From the front lines of the Australian PC market Intel is doing it tough these days, seemingly attacked on all fronts, its share price has slipped over 60% from US$60 a share just three years ago, to around US$22 a share now, reflecting the markets confidence in the company and the struggles it now faces. Intel is now scrounging around to save money or to raise funding. On the savings front it is letting go of around 15,000 of its employees. Whilst a large amount, keep in mind that Intel has a huge 120,000 strong workforce, dwarfing that of AMD and Nvidia which each only stand at around 30,000 strong. Another casualty of the budgetary scalpel are two projects that are of particular interest to APC, it’s graphics division’s Arc…

ANDROID & iOS Find pictures faster in Google Photos The Google Photos app for Android (tinyurl.com/APC539gpa) and iOS (tinyurl.com/APC539gpio) has been redesigned to make it easier to find your pictures and videos. The Library tab on the bottom toolbar has been replaced by a new Collections tab ( 1 in our screenshot below), which organises content “automatically and intelligently”. As well as storing albums you’ve created yourself and that have been shared with you, the Collection tab groups images into categories such as ‘People and pets’, Places and Documents. It also includes shortcuts for Screenshots, Videos and Favourites, plus for the Bin where deleted items are sent 2 . Google has ditched the Utilities folder from Photos and moved the tools it contained to other areas of the app. For…

Inspirational stories from computing’s long-distant past We’ve all encountered laggards. “One of those fancy new smartphones, is it?,” they will have said a decade ago, nodding towards the black slab you just pulled out of your pocket. “My old Nokia 3210 does everything I need. Fancy a game of Snake?” In truth, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this attitude. They swore by their device’s long battery life and robust nature, just as you swore when your phone fell to the floor with a sickening thud. The term “laggards” for people who prefer to stand still was coined back in 1962, when Professor Everett Rogers published Diffusion of Innovations. He didn’t intend the word in a rude way, but no company in its right mind will ever target them. I thought…

OPINION | TECH TALK The US government has been busy over the past year or two handing out large subsidies and grants to help boost US-based silicon manufacturing efforts. Intel was once the undisputed leader in the race for ever smaller and faster fabrication nodes, but after stumbles in the transition from 14nm-class to 10nm-class technologies, TSMC passed it by. Now Intel is playing catchup, investing billions into bringing up new nodes. Under CEO Pat Gelsinger, it has also been working to take on TSMC directly by offering its foundry services to other companies. Things haven’t exactly gone smoothly. During a meeting with the US Department of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Gelsinger expressed frustration with US companies’ reliance on TSMC. Specifically, he’s talking about Apple and Nvidia – though this…

Premium laptops Apple MacBook Pro 16in (M3) STUNNING CREATIVE POWER. A reasonable processor upgrade to device with an impressive screen and unparalleled battery life. The new M3 3nm processors is more efficient, so you’ll be able to run the same tasks as the M1 using half the power draw, which helps battery life. From $4,299, apple.com/au THE ALTERNATIVES ASUS ZENBOOK DUO A dual-screen laptop that uses a practical layout and excels at everyday use. The unique form factor is incredibly handy for those who need dual screens on the go. $3,999, asus.com APPLE MACBOOK AIR The MacBook Air M3 replaces the M2 model previously listed here. It’s a powerful and quiet ultraportable with an unbeatable battery life and screen. From $2,099 apple.com/au MICROSOFT SURFACE LAPTOP 7 A shining example of…

PRICE $3,999 WEB asus.com Dual-screen laptops aren’t exactly common, and two of the best available are from Asus. While the Asus Zenbook Pro Duo uses a smaller second screen above the keyboard, the Zenbook Duo features two 14in OLED touchscreens, and a layout different to competitors like the Lenovo YogaBook 9i. The keyboard and trackpad is a single thin unit that magnetically attaches over the lower screen, giving a standard laptop experience. The keyboard can be removed and used wirelessly, or there is a virtual keyboard and trackpad that can be activated by tapping six fingers on the lower display, plus an included stylus that works with either screen. The underside of the laptop includes a fold out stand that props the laptop up in dual screen mode for easy…

PRICE $309 WEB thermaltake.com The Thermaltake Toughpower GF A3 PSU hit the shelves in Australia last year, and added support for the Intel ATX v3.0 spec, and includes a 12VHPWR output and cable rated for 600W. While you don’t technically need ATX v3.0 support to run current flagship GPUs like the RTX 4090, it does mean your build is nicely future proof. We have the 1200W model of the Toughpower GF A3 (RRP $309) in for testing, but it also comes in a 1050W (RRP $269), 850W (RRP $195), 750W (RRP $175) and 650W (RRP $155) variants. Street price varies, but in general the PSU can be found for around 20% less than the RRP in the higher wattage ratings, and 25% to 30% less for the lower power models.…

WHAT YOU CAN DO • Disguise your identity from websites you visit• Encrypt your data without sacrificing speed• Block hidden trackers and personalised ads• Watch more films on global streaming services• Access Australian TV channels while you’re abroad• Download torrents without your ISP’s knowledge• Get cheaper prices online that are normally blocked in Australia• Connect devices to your VPN hotspot Using a virtual private network (VPN) once implied you had something to hide – be it your location or that you were dabbling in nefarious activities. But while a VPN is the best way to protect your online privacy, it has many other benefits, which is why the encryption technology has now crossed over into the mainstream. A recent survey found that 47 per cent of adults have used a…

WHAT YOU CAN DO • Bypass Windows 11’s system requirements• Block Windows 11 upgrades until next October• Save money on a new Windows 11 computer• Transfer important files from your Windows 10 PC• Ditch Windows for a different operating system• Keep using Windows 10 safely after October 2025 On 14 October 2025, Microsoft will end support for Windows 10. This means the 10-year-old operating system will no longer receive security updates and bug fixes. With Windows 11 freely available since October 2021, Microsoft presumably hoped most of us would have upgraded by now. But the latest figures suggest otherwise – according to Statcounter, around 64 per cent of PC users are still running Windows 10, while only half that number have moved to Windows 11 (www.snipca.com/51995). There are several reasons…

UMART QUANTUMSTRIKE G5 $2,349 | tinyurl.com/APC539umart Sporting the latest generation components available the cheapest rig this month does well for itself on the performance front. The 14600K is no slouch when it comes to multithreaded tasks, having twenty threads on tap to unleash means you’ll be mostly GPU limited when it comes to gaming. With an RTX 4060 Ti it’ll be best kept to 1080p monitor resolutions, especially with the limiting 8GB of VRAM available to it. Otherwise, the 32GB of RAM is very nice to see and a rather swanky Z790 may leave you itching for a bit of overclocking, particularly as the CPU comes water-cooled, giving you that extra headroom to play with. CPU Intel Core i5 14600K; COOLER MSI MAG CoreLiquid M240; MOTHERBOARD MSI Z790 Gaming Plus…

WINDOWS 11 INSIDER Access your favourite files much easier With Windows 11 Build 22635.3930, available to Windows Insiders on the beta channel, Microsoft has made it easier to access your recent, shared and favourite files in File Explorer’s Home tab. You can now cycle between tabs rather than having to open them separately. To access your favourite files in the new layout, open File Explorer and make sure you are in the Home section ( 1 in our screenshot below), click Favourites 2 . To mark a file as ‘favourite’, right-click it then click ‘Add to Favourites’. To access recent and shared files, simply click the relevant heading. WINDOWS 11 Generate images with text prompts Microsoft’s Paint program can now create AI images from descriptions you type. First, open Paint,…

YOU’LL NEED • Pico 2 or Pico 1• Adafruit Airlift FeatherWing co-processor• 8x M2M jumper wires• Breadboard Just like the original Raspberry Pi Pico, the new Raspberry Pi Pico 2 has no Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connectivity. There will be a Pico 2 W, which has been confirmed by Raspberry Pi co-founder and CEO Eben Upton, but it is still a few months off yet. So, what can we do in the meantime? Using an Adafruit Airlift FeatherWing, we can hack in wireless internet access. This board is essentially an ESP32, an already formidable Wi-Fi-enabled microcontroller. You may be asking, “Why?” Because we can – and there may be an edge case that requires the power of the new RP2350 via a Wi-Fi connection. To demonstrate how to use data from…

GAMES PRICE Free PLATFORM PC WEB bit.ly/SliderGame REDEEMING A HATED PUZZLE MECHANIC. Somehow, Slider has turned the worst parts of adventure games into one very fine puzzle game – and a generous one, given the lack of a price tag. I’m talking about sliding tile puzzles, which tend to be shoehorned into adventure games for reasons unknown, inciting audible groans whenever I’m forced to complete one. It has such a lovely cast of characters: memorable little pixel peeps who find themselves adrift in a world that’s been shattered into pieces. You have the power to put it right, one region at a time, by pressing Tab and sliding these world tiles around. On a basic level, you need to connect tiles in certain ways to be able to walk from…