Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2023 i APC

WELCOME | EDITORIAL Welcome to a particularly shiny new issue of APC. Our talented Creative Director Troy has given all our pages a clean scrub, and the end result is a refreshing new look for your favourite tech mag. As always, we’ve focussed on clean design and easy readability, all while being just a bit nicer to look at. It’s a lovely new set of clothes, but the content itself remains the same great APC that’s made the mag a winner. Do let me know your thoughts if there’s something here you really love – or don’t. Your feedback is always so important to us. Shoot me an email at ben.mansill@futurenet.com if there’s anything I need to hear – my inbox is always open! Inside this issue is a bumper…

OPINION | TECH TALK DRAM is at the heart of many computing devices. Whether it’s DDR4 and DDR5 in PCs, HBM2 and HBM3 in GPUs, or GDDR6 and GDDR6X in graphics cards, a lot of the building blocks remain the same. It’s the signalling that get upgraded, and now GDDR7 is on its way, with Samsung modules in production and Micron’s alternatives to arrive in 2024. It’s a safe bet that GDDR7 will end up in the next-generation AMD, Nvidia, and Intel GPUs. We don’t expect any of those to start shipping until 2024 at earliest – Intel’s Battlemage architecture will almost certainly be the first “next-gen” GPU to arrive – so we still have plenty of time. But the transition is otherwise right on schedule. “The initial Samsung GDDR7…

OPINION | ONE MORE THING It seemed innocent enough. The air-conditioning system needed its annual service. This was never particularly onerous – check the pressure levels, clean the air filters, give it a good spray of some suitably pungent smelling gloop. Move on to the next one. “It was clear that the scope of the data exfiltration was all-encompassing. And the actions of the competitor, by being ahead of every move they took, was quite a smoking gun.” It was only a few months later that strange things started to happen. Quotations to established clients weren’t turning into orders. A surprise, but perhaps that’s just the economy. But when that usual big quarterly order didn’t materialise, it was time to phone the client to ask what had happened. It seems…

LABS PRICE $239 WEB logitechg.com That Superlight name isn’t just marketing guff – this thing very nearly floats off your mouse mat. At just 60g, it’s 3g lighter than its predecessor, and while that kind of difference is lost on a decidedly mediocre gamer such as myself, there’s no denying this is a beautifully nimble pointer. Impressively, it clocks up this lighter weight without cutting any holes into its frame, meaning it looks like, you know, a normal mouse. In fact, it’s 8g lighter than the hole punched SteelSeries Aerox 3 Wireless, and manages to do so without looking like an RGB cheesegrater. Instead, you’ll find a comfortable, sturdy frame that doesn’t mess with the classics. No outlandish swoops and curves, no overabundance of buttons, and certainly no RGB. The…

IJK SUPERIOR AMD5 $2,379 tinyurl.com/APC526IKJ This system is a good choice for a first gaming PC. It is possible to get cheaper ones, but this provides a better starting point in some respects. It’s on the latest AM5 platform, meaning a drop-in upgrade in a couple of years will be possible. The 32GB of RAM is also nice for longevity. Unfortunately to keep the price down the main SSD is only 500GB, but there is an additional 1TB of SATA SSD capacity so that can be overlooked. The graphics card is the weakest link, from near the bottom of last-gen’s lineup, but for those starting out it’ll do well until it’s time to invest in an upgrade. CPU Ryzen 5 7600X COOLER Cooler Master MasterLiquid 240L Core ARGB MOTHERBOARD GigabyteB650M…

Home server advice I’m planning to build a replacement home server. My current server is on its last legs: a 4th gen Intel i7 CPU on an ITX Asus board running Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials. My server is used to back up my and my wife’s laptop, plus run a Plex server. I need one that’s more modern and accessible online. I would like to stick with an ITX board and Windows Server, since I am familiar with it. Some of my mandatory requirements are: four or more SATA slots for 20TB of storage; the latest generation CPU that isn’t a power hog; two NVME slots – one for the OS, and another for a scratch disk cache for Plex; 32GB RAM, and a possible Blu-ray burner. Wireless isn’t…

ANDROID & iOS Send higher-quality photos and videos in WhatsApp When you send a photo to someone in WhatsApp, the messaging app compresses the image to reduce its file size and conserve data. However, this also lowers the quality of the picture, which many users find annoying. To address the problem, WhatsApp has introduced the option to send HD versions of photos at their original resolution. To use it, tap the attachment icon in the message box at the bottom of a chat and select either Camera to take a photo or Gallery to choose an existing picture. Tap the new HD button in the top menu bar ( 1 in our screenshot below) and select ‘HD quality’ 2 under ‘Photo quality’. Add a caption, and send the image as…

GAMES PRICE Free PLATFORM PC, Mac, Linux WEB bit.ly/ScrimshawP1 South Scrimshaw, Part One has really come out of nowhere, using a familiar framework to show something thrillingly new. It’s sort of a visual novel – but forget the cutout characters and dialogue choices. No, we’re being told the story of the Brillo whale – enormous whales that adorn their bodies with other sea life, in a symbiotic process – and our only choices are whether to hear more of it, when given the option. The artwork is extraordinary. From the scientific cross-sections of important species to the zoomed-out portraits of the hulking whales, there’s a real sense of majesty and authenticity to this aquatic society. It’s all static images, but there are an enormous quantity, and I’m not sure they…

GAMES PRICE Free PLATFORM Browser WEB dukope.itch.io/lcd-please To celebrate the tenth anniversary of Papers, Please, developers Lucas and Keiko Pope have created a demake/spin-off that lets you control the border of glorious Arstotzka from a simple LCD screen. I’m lucky enough to have owned some LCD games, and the accuracy of LCD, Please is uncanny. It’s there in the bassy, bleepy sound effects, in the subtle screen glare and light screen scratches, and it understands how sprites were drawn on LCD devices. Gone are many of your tools for finding discrepancies in the documents you’re handed at border control – but the spirit of Papers, Please is present and correct. Your job is stripped down to pressing Approve or Deny, as a procession of faces appears on the screen. Does…

Download these APC exclusives free from: www.apcmag.com/exclusives ASHAMPOO BACKGROUND REMOVER AUTO-CROP AND EDIT OBJECTS AND SWAP BACKGROUNDS. Ashampoo Background Remover crops persons and objects automatically thanks to smart object detection – no manual editing required in many instances. Detected objects can be saved individually or copied to the system clipboard for use with other programs. Even minute details are recognised, like strands of hair. Users can also replace image backgrounds or apply a stylish Bokeh effect. This makes it easy to visually emphasise or put people in completely new scenes. Manually adding or removing objects takes only a few strokes with the built-in correction brush. Ashampoo Background Remover is the time-saving solution for beginners and professionals alike to crop/share objects and replace image backgrounds, no learning curve required. ASCOMP IMAGE…

OPINION | END USER Epic Games purchased Bandcamp in early 2022 for an undisclosed sum. It caused a lot of anxiety in the music world. For those unfamiliar, Bandcamp is a huge distribution platform for music. It’s traditionally been favoured by smaller independent artists, but is nowadays also used by big name acts like Radiohead and Bjork as a means to sell direct to listeners. It’s primarily a platform for outright digital music sales, standing at odds with the big exploitative streaming services like Spotify whose piddling royalty system is completely unsustainable for artists not attracting multimillion listeners. Sure, Bandcamp takes a slice from each sale (15 percent on digital; 10 percent on physical goods purchased through their storefront) but it regularly holds “Bandcamp Friday” events during which the company…

OPINION | TWO BITS For too long, consumers have had to deal with devices that need to be thrown away, or returned to an expensive ‘authorised repair center’ to be fixed at too high a cost. Even something as simple as replacing a battery is all too frequently an impossible task. Some phones and laptops are harder to break into than Fort Knox. Manufacturers are all too happy to rake in the profits when you’re forced to buy a new device instead of repairing an older one. It’s planned obsolescence in action. Things like custom tools, non-available replacement parts or proprietary software are things that prevent end users from extending the life of their devices. Thankfully, slowly but surely, world governments are waking up to these shenanigans and are introducing…

LABS PRICE $449 WEB row.hyperx.com SPECS Sony Starvis 8MP Sensor; 90-degree FOV; 4K 30fps, 1080p up to 60fps, H.264 or MJPEG format; Auto focus; privacy shutter; HyperX Ngunity software; screen clip, 1/4 -inch tripod thread mount; Windows Hello IR; 9 x 4.2 x 4.2cm. Webcams are the kind of thing that you don’t really think about until right before a big meeting or interview and this general lack of awareness makes it a particularly difficult product to get right. There’s a lot of tech in cameras to get images looking right immediately, but webcams are used infrequently and can’t be overly expensive. This means the Hyper X Vision S is stepping into a difficult arena with this webcam, even if it does have the Poly (formerly Plantronics) team to lean…

WEB www.snipca.com/47451 NEEDS Windows 10 or 11 EarTrumpet improves the volume control in Windows 10 and 11 to make it easier to adjust the audio levels of different software and hardware on your PC. Install the app from the Microsoft Store, then click its system-tray icon – this looks exactly like the Windows speaker icon (see screenshot), but may be in the ‘Show hidden icons’ flyout menu (click up-pointing arrow to reveal this) . EarTrumpet will show you individual sliders for all your audio devices and sound-enabled programs, which you can drag left or right to decrease or increase their volume. The latest version of the app lets you use the scroll wheel on your mouse to adjust speaker volume when you hover your cursor over its system-tray icon. Right-click…

Budget. A perfect balance between price and performance. The GPU market is hard to keep up with these days, especially in terms of pricing. But the upside is that there are now some very interesting, if often fleeting, deals to be had. That’s a welcome change from 18 months to two years of hideously high pricing during the pandemic. Anyway, here’s one we’d like to swing past you. How about an AMD Radeon 6700 XT 12GB for $649? This is avaiable at Amazon, and ships locally. Into our AMD rig it goes. Sure, it’s last-gen versus the Radeon RX 7600 it replaces, but critically, it has 12GB, where the 7600 has just 8GB. 8GB is becoming an increasing limitation, even at 1080p. Moreover, the new RX 7000 range brings very…

WINDOWS 11 Switch on Paint’s new dark mode Microsoft has updated Paint so you can set it to mirror your system’s screen mode (light or dark), or make it appear in dark mode permanently. Search for and open Paint. You’ll know you’re using the latest version if you see a gear icon ( 1 in our screenshot below) at the top right. Click this to see Paint’s new settings menu. Now select Dark 2 in the ‘App theme’ options, and Paint will adopt the dark mode. If you don’t see the cog icon, you need to update to version 11.2304.30.0 (or later) of Windows 11. Do this by opening Windows Update in Settings and clicking ‘Check for updates’. WINDOWS 10 & 11 Stop processes from being reordered in Task Manager…

YOU’LL NEED Pi 4/4B+/ZeroW/2 WCytron Maker Drive4x AA battery box4x AA batteries2x DC motors5x female-to-malejumper wiresCode: tinyurl.com/APC526bot We are travelling back in time. Nine years, to be precise. That was the last time we connected a Nintendo Wiimote to a Raspberry Pi. In this tutorial, we are learning how to configure a Pi to communicate with a Wiimote over Bluetooth. We’ll put the connection to use by constructing a very simple robot control script to spin motors connected to a Cytron Maker Drive motor controller. Using this script as a template, you can easily build a remote-controlled robot using the Raspberry Pi 4, 3B+, Zero W or Zero 2 W. Wiring up the circuit The circuit has four main components: a Raspberry Pi, a Maker Drive motor controller, motors and…

GAME CHANGER RELEASE November 11, 2015 DEVELOPER Bethesda Game Studios PUBLISHER Bethesda Softworks LINK beth.games/3YMV18O A staggering eight years ago, Fallout 4 was released. Its developer, Bethesda, made the swap back to the rusty post-apocalypse after having launched what would become one of the most influential open world RPGs of all time, Skyrim, just three years before. In many ways, Fallout 4 is a sequel to both Skyrim and Fallout 3. It refines the expansive structure of the fantasy setting by rooting it in the familiar, real world locations of the ruined American setting. It begins before the bombs fall, in an intro sequence that whiffs an attempt to ground your character in its fascinating world. You’re already awake and staring at the bathroom mirror in the first ten minutes…

OPINION | RANDOM ACCESS As the lead systems reviewer at APC for the last nine-odd years, I’ve had my fair share of PC problems to troubleshoot and for the most part I reckon I’m pretty quick to diagnose and solve issues. One issue however has eluded me for years and in hindsight it’s not even a particularly difficult one. “I’d struggle to move web browsers or resize pages and clicking on specific buttons and shortcuts was like trying to squeeze a wet bar of soap.” Sometimes my PC would drop highlighted text and move the positioning of the cursor in documents when I tried to copy things. It would also go through periods where I’d struggle to move web browsers or resize pages and clicking on specific buttons and shortcuts…

OPINION | TRADE CHAT I noted a while back that prices of pretty much everything had normalised with the pandemic receding and other supply chain abnormalities subsiding. The one exception were GPUs. Several months later, while graphics cards are cheaper, they still haven’t returned to historical trends. But what’s even more frustrating is that pricing just doesn’t make sense. “Call it bang for buck or frames per dollar, whatever you prefer, the value curve when it comes to all manner of electronics has always been the same.” The most recent example of this involves AMD’s hot new Radeon RX 7700 XT and 7800 XT boards, but we’ll come back to those GPUs in a moment. The overarching problem here, aside from the more obvious issue of painfully high pricing, involves…

Find the best deals on new gear at getprice.com/au Premium laptops Apple MacBook Pro 16in (M2) STUNNING CREATIVE POWER All the upgrades to this 2023 model are within, as Apple’s M2 Pro and M2 Max processors take charge. Combine this power with the 16.2in mini-LED screen, superb sound system and phenomenal battery life, and you have the world’s premier workstation laptop. From $3,199, apple.com/au THE ALTERNATIVES ASUS VIVOBOOK PRO 16X OLED This 2023 update has some impressive features for the price and is a surprisingly powerful creative workstation with a stunning screen. $3,199, asus.com APPLE MACBOOK AIR The MacBook Air M2 looks like a standout to us. A powerful and quiet ultraportable with an unbeatable battery life and a great pro display. From $1,799 apple.com/au MICROSOFT SURFACE PRO 9 APC…

LABS PRICE Yeti Orb $99.95 | Yeti GX $249.95 | Litra Beam LX $269.95 WEB logitechg.com SPECS YETI GX: Dynamic Supercardioid Microphone w RGB, gain and mute; 24bit / 96KHz quality, 50Hz-18KHz frequency response; Lightsync compatible, Blue Voicesoftware. YETI ORB: Condenser Cardioid Microphone w RGB; 24bit / 48KHz quality, 70Hz-20KHz frequency response; Lightsync compatible, Blue Voicesoftware. LITRA BEAM LX: Dual-Sided RGB Streaming Key Light; 42mm X 400.6mm x 35.43mm; Bi-colour 2700K - 6500K; RGB 16 million colours; Up to 400 Lumens + on Bi-colour side; Lightsync compatible. Logitech has set its sights on the streaming market with three new peripherals. Sharing the familiar G-series design cues the Yeti Orb microphone, Yeti GX microphone, and Litra Beam LX RGB key light compliment the plethora of keyboards, mice and accessories already available…

WEB www.snipca.com/47452 NEEDS Windows 7, 8.1, 10 or 11 Wise Duplicate Finder is one of the simplest and fastest tools for finding and removing duplicate files. Although the free version lacks the ‘Keep One’ option, which deletes all unwanted copies in one click (to get this, upgrade to the Pro edition for $28 a year), you can easily remove files manually (see screenshot) – and restore them from the recycle bin if you delete the wrong item. This update introduces the ability to preview entire image files when you’re reviewing your scan results, rather than just segments, to help you confirm pictures are duplicates. Additionally, it fixes a bug that caused ‘abnormal’ behaviour when previewing 0-byte image files. Wise has also added extra file paths to Duplicate Cleaner’s Exclusion list…

COVER There’s something rather magical about products that ‘just work’. Smart TVs, speakers with built-in voice assistants and video doorbells all fall into this category. Plug them in, connect them to your Wi-Fi, and you’re ready to go. There’s very little to configure and usually even less to maintain. The trouble is that such convenience can provide a false sense of security – and that can lead to complacency. Smart devices – just like computers – are often eminently hackable and you’re reliant on the manufacturer to remotely apply the necessary security patches and updates in a timely manner. If they don’t, you risk hosting an unsafe device on your network, which could put other devices, including your PC, at risk. If you don’t believe us, read around. There have…

From the front lines of the Australian PC market The graphics card market is creeping back down to pricing normalcy. There’s still a long way to go though. Going back to 2017, the then top graphics card was Nvidia’s GTX 1080 Ti and it sold for around $1,100, not bad right? Sticking with top Nvidia products let’s look at how they’re priced as time went on. In 2019 the RTX 2080 Ti shocked us with its huge price jump over the GTX 1080 Ti, coming in at $1,800, but with hardware ray tracing and DLSS support at least it gave us never before seen features. Then in 2021 the RTX 3090 during the crypto mining and Covid bubbles was the hottest thing on the market and thus demanded the insane…

LIBREOFFICE WRITER & MICROSOFT WORD Create columns in a document By default, Word documents present text in a single column, with text flowing from left to right. But you can change this to two or more columns. To add columns to your whole document, click the Layout tab ( 1 in our screenshot above), then Columns 2 and choose a format of your choice. In our example, we’ve chosen Three 3 , as we want to style our document like a newspaper column. To do the same in LibreOffice Writer, click Format at the top, then Columns. In the box that opens change the Columns value to the number you want, then click OK. LIBREOFFICE WRITER Turn off ‘Orphan control’ to avoid large gaps When writing a document, you can…

Remember the good ol’ days of the internet when the best you could do with your pics and videos was share them with friends and family? Close ones at that. This is in stark contrast to the modern-day practice of turning everything into a reel or insert-latest-jargon-here, and releasing it online. Editly is a CLI utility that relies on FFmpeg to help you create slideshows, GIFs or movie masterpieces, complete with music score, text overlays, zooms and other effects. Best of all, you don’t have to muck about with the terminal pushing dozens of different settings, because Editly works with a JSON file instead to save you time and effort. Whether for private use or for internet fame, Editly can help turn your images and videos into memorable pieces with…

SCORE PRICE Around $250 (if you can find one) Night after night for a few weeks in the late 1980s, I would gaze longingly at a photograph in a copy of Smash Hits magazine. To see this object of my desire, I needed to flick past numerous images of Debbie Gibson, Madonna and Kylie, but there was so much to take in and admire. For starters, there was a sleek-looking computer with a built-in 3in disk drive, a sturdy-looking joystick and a collection of 17 games with familiar names such as Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit. There was a colour TV monitor and a clock/radio, all sitting upon a smart desk. Lying in a bed in a room bereft of entertainment, it felt like the stuff of dreams. At the time,…