Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2024 i APC

Engineers working on the Europa Clipper satellite have discovered that its onboard transistors are more vulnerable to radiation damage than anticipated, imperilling the mission. While fixing this issue might be as simple as replacing the affected parts, they’re already sealed inside an electronics vault inside the satellite. This means NASA has to find novel ways to repair the MOSFETs without opening up the satellite, like heating up the vault to cook the transistors. The Europa Clipper was designed to study Jupiter’s moon of the same name. The discovery was made when the people working at NASA’s JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), the lead developers of the project, attended a conference with other engineers working on a classified satellite project that used the same equipment. They revealed they were having issues with…

FUTURES We explore the trends and technologies that are set to shape the future The average speed for a car travelling across a large city is around 16kph; for buses, it’s closer to 14kph. That’s the same as a horse-drawn carriage in 1908. Why? Traffic. Too many of us drive, and that causes problems for everyone else driving a car — as well as those who suffer the downsides of cars, be it clogged roads holding up bikes and buses, or emissions causing dangerously poor air quality while exacerbating climate change. Policies to reduce car use have become fodder for the tabloids’ culture war – ideas such as modal filtering or LTNs (low-traffic neighbourhoods), and air quality rule are all deemed battles in the so-called “war against cars”. Setting aside…

HEAD TO HEAD CINEBENCH R23/24 Free, www.maxon.net GEEKBENCH 6.2.1 Free / Starting from US$99, www.geekbench.com We spend a lot of our time benchmarking. It’s a core part of the job. In fact, no matter where you work as a tech journalist, it’s fair to say that your career very much hinges on your ability to benchmark. And not only being able to benchmark successfully (which can be as complex or as simple as you’d like to make it), but also in being able to analyse the data that those tests spit out. In a similar vein, picking the right benchmarks for your own test set is of pivotal importance. Finding ones that stress whatever it is you’re testing to the max, or providing unique workloads that are relevant both to…

PRICE $2,799 (barebones) WEB rog.asus.com The concept of the Asus ROG NUC is simple – a compact computer system that uses premium laptop spec hardware to give great performance for both gaming and workstation use. While you can buy a barebones kit and add RAM, an SSD and an operating system, the NUC can also be sold by retailers ready to go out of the box. The ROG NUC comes with a base spec of an Intel Ultra 7 and a RTX 4060, or an Ultra 9 and a RTX 4070. Our Ultra 9, RTX 4070 NUC was kitted out with 32GB of RAM (but it can handle up to 64GB), a 1TB M.2 SSD and Windows 11. Setup is normal, but once into Windows itself the NUC needed a…

PRICE $1,399 WEB acer.com We like OLED monitors, their thinness and brightness appearing contradictory yet strangely alluring. Add the 240Hz refresh rate of this Acer Predator, and you have a winning combination. The resolution of 1440p looks like a wise choice, even though it’s a step down from the old Quantum Dot Predator X27’s 2160p. By showing restraint and dialling it back a bit, Acer is able to increase the chances that today’s GPUs will be able to supply the high frame rates a screen like this deserves. It’ll display them without tearing, too, thanks to Freesync Premium and VRR support, though it drops the G-Sync certification of its predecessor. You also get plenty of ways to feed it those frames. At the back of the X27U, there’s an array…

PRICE $799 WEB rog.asus.com Yes, it’s $800, and yes, I can hear the scoffing from here, but this is the state of the keyboard art in its ultimate form and it’s worth every cent. What you’re getting is a keyboard with astonishing build quality and design, constructed with the very best materials, loaded up with every feature and option that you can imagine – and then some – all in a highly customisable package. It’s evident Asus did not hold anything back here, this is super premium, unashamedly. It all adds up to make the ROG Azoth Extreme the nicest keyboard I’ve ever used, by a country mile. It is for people that want the indisputable best and can afford to pay for it. It’s a 75% design, which to…

PRICE $369 WEB rog.asus.com Gaming headsets have become too subtle. Some of the best wireless headsets of the year, including Turtle Beach’s stunning Atlas Air, don’t even look like gaming headsets. Asus is here to re-assert the primacy of RGB, angles and chunkiness with the ROG Delta II. This thing looks badass. Heck, it even has “for those who dare” emblazoned on one of its cup hooks. Before you put it on, the Delta II pleases with its robustness. The headband base is weapons grade solid, while the headband itself evidently prizes durability over lavish comfort. The cups themselves however, do not skimp on the memory foam; they’re definitely on the fatter and deeper end of the spectrum. Unless you’ve got elven ears, they’re going to fit just fine inside…

MAC PRICE $94.99 one-time purchase for three devices/$59.99 a year for five devices NEEDS macOS 10.11 or later WEB imazing.com Launched in 2008 (as DiskAid), DigiDNA’s iMazing for Macs and Windows PCs puts you in control of your iPhone, iPad, iPod and even Vision Pro. The mobile device manager is packed with tools that go far beyond those offered by Apple. These include incremental backups, browsing and exporting text and voicemail messages, app management, easy migration from an old device to a new one; it can also reinstall iOS, and allow you to use your mobile device as an external hard drive. It can even detect spyware by looking for known malicious file names, links, process names and emails. iMazing 3 requires macOS 10.11 or later. And you can manage…

We’ve all done it. Justified a lavish piece of tech spending by telling ourselves that the expensive treat we’re buying will come in handy for all manner of purposes. That expensive digital camera that was going to be essential for your YouTube channel, but now only comes out for summer holidays; the Apple Pencil that was going to kickstart your digital drawing side hustle, but does little more than sign the occasional PDF; the monstrously pricy headphones you’d need for mixing tracks for your long-forgotten band that now only serve to make Spotify sound a fraction less scratchy. Is the same true of handheld PCs? Of course, we’d all love a poky handheld that lets us play Cyberpunk 2077 in bed, but can we really justify the expense? Well, what…

LIBREOFFICE WRITER & MICROSOFT WORD Rotate text in documents Typing into a document normally means keeping your text fixed horizontally left to right. But you can use a text box to rotate your text for effect. In Microsoft Word, click Insert ( 1 in our screenshot below), followed by the Text Box button 2 , then pick an option from the menu. In our example, we chose Simple Text Box. In LibreOffice Writer, click Insert then Text Box in the dropdown menu. Once you’ve typed your text, left-click and hold the rotation icon 3 . Drag your mouse in a circle clockwise or anticlockwise to rotate the box, then let go. MICROSOFT EXCEL ONLINE Export your file in CSV format Microsoft has updated the online version of Excel to let…

PRICE $59.95 PLATFORM PC, PS4/5, XB1/S/X WEB tinyurl.com/APC536erdtree Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree is a staggering expansion, not only for its massive size – it’s about as big as half of the original map – but for all the ways it challenges the assumptions I had about the nature of its world and the limits of an open world narrative. It complements the base game in unexpected ways that make for one of the most impressive send-offs I’ve ever seen. SotE rivals Dark Souls with a corkscrew world design layered with wondrous and horrific secrets to discover. FromSoftware has perfected its command over creating a dark fantasy world layered with history and details that cement Elden Ring as one of the most creative and satisfying action RPGs ever made.…

Philips Screeneo UL5 Smart We may be reaching the tipping point for home projectors, where the impractical and awkward room layouts dictated by traditional models are banished by the increasing power and practicality of short throw devices. Why go to the effort of screwing something to your ceiling when you could just place your projector on a flat surface half a metre from the wall? It doesn’t make sense. The Philips Screeneo UL5 Smart could just be the device which skews the scales in the direction of ultra short throw projectors, somewhat ironically given its svelte form. Heck, let’s start with the looks: it’s an undeniably handsome device, partially cloth covered and far smaller than Screeneo’s previous widebody U5. That narrow form makes it super-portable, and it even manages to…

PRICE $1,499 WEB www.aorus.com/en-au Another month, another super-premium gaming monitor from Gigabyte’s Aorus range. This is no bad thing, as its sibling, the FO32U2P, knocked it out the park. The 27-inch FO27Q3 is another QD-OLED monitor but with a lower, 1,440P resolution, no expensive DisplayPort 2.1 ports plus a headline 360Hz refresh rate. So, which is best? Our initial inclination was to choose more screen real estate and a higher resolution as 240Hz seems fast enough for many gamers, but it took all of several seconds to remember that the smoothness afforded by a 360Hz panel (especially with a fast 0.03ms pixel response time) is glorious and hard to give up. There’s next-to-no image blur or ghosting evident during both fast-and-frantic firefights and technical tests. It’s one of the fastest…

PRICE $239.95 WEB au.kobobooks.com Kobo’s Clara BW is the first e-reader we’ve seen to use E Ink’s Carta 1300 technology. This keeps the screen resolution at a sharp 300ppi while improving both refresh time and contrast over previous generations. Design-wise, the Clara BW has less to shout about. It looks very generic, with a black case, raised side bezels for an easy grip and a sunken screen that helps reduce glare from overhead lights. While it won’t win any design awards, at 174g it’s light enough to hold comfortably for long periods, and the 6in screen means it’s small enough to carry wherever you go. An IPX8 water-resistance rating means you need not worry about getting caught in the rain or even dropping it in the bath. The standout feature…

DEVELOPER LibreELEC Team WEB libreelec.tv LICENCE GPL 2.0 LibreELEC has been in active development since 2016, when a number of OpenELEC programmers decided to fork the project. According to the main website, its purpose is to provide “just enough operating system” to run the Kodi media player, which is reflected in the fact that it runs happily on single-board computers such as the Raspberry Pi 4 and 5. This said, the project wiki advises against trying to run LibreELEC on legacy hardware, as “just enough” doesn’t always stretch to older device drivers. There’s no bootable ISO but interested parties can download a disk image to write to a bootable USB. Although LibreELEC isn’t really designed to be run via a hypervisor, there’s a virtual machine (OVA) image available for testing purposes,…

Server teething troubles I’ve just built a new server, and decided to install Ubuntu 24.04 LTS instead of Debian, as I know it better, and the new LTS supports Podman 4.9.3. So far, so good, but I’ve run into two annoying problems. The major one is that if I leave the server unattended for a short period, my Nextcloud client reports that the server is disconnected. If I log on to the server through cockpit, the connection is restored, but as soon as I leave the server to its own devices, it disconnects again. The second problem is that I cannot get the server to shut down on a schedule. I’ve edited both user and root instances of crontab, but however I phrase the command, it’s ignored. Can you suggest…

EDGE Improve your writing style using Copilot Edge 124, released at the end of April, continues Microsoft’s integration of its Copilot AI tool with the browser, by adding the option to rewrite text. Previously, you needed to open the Copilot sidebar and either type (or copy and paste) the text you wanted the chatbot to rewrite. Now, you can access the feature directly from the email, social-media post, comment box or other online text you’re writing. Simply highlight the text you’ve written and either click the ‘Rewrite with Copilot’ button that appears or press Alt+I on your keyboard. Copilot will then generate a reworded version of the text, and suggest ‘Here is another way of writing this’ ( 1 in our screenshot below). If you’re not happy with its first…

GAMES PRICE $99.95 PLATFORM PC, PS4/5, XB1/S/X WEB ea.com Last year’s F1 23 was great because it offered three compelling single-player pillars, including the lavishly-produced, Drive To Survive-esque story mode. Take that away, in the now-predictable two-year cycle for such major features, and you’re left with something that really does invite the question of whether it could have just been DLC instead. You bought it for the racing, of course. And in that respect at least, it’s still very good. Fast, responsive driving on all the real tracks, including four that have been entirely remodelled. The handling has been tweaked and feels a touch lighter than last year’s game. Max Verstappen himself has apparently helped Codemasters tweak the handling to make it more realistic, which is probably why it feels…

PRICE $50.95 PLATFORM PC, PS5, XBS/X WEB tinyurl.com/APC536still Here you play as Caz McLeary, an electrical engineer on the Beira D oil rig who’s running from the law and some stupid decisions. Caz has been on the rig for a while, so you don’t have to worry about getting to know your co-workers – meaningful relationships have already been established. Still Wakes the Deep skips the usual slog of tutorial-like character introductions and just throws you into the meat of the story, and all of the interactions feel natural and worthwhile. After drilling through something that was probably best left alone, the rig descends into chaos. With communication patchy thanks to a selfish manager named Rennick and decaying safety mechanisms making escape impossible, you and the crew end up putting…

Everything you need to know from the month in tech It’s been a busy few weeks for Intel and its attempts to stop the bleeding from 13th and 14th Gen processors. The bleeding we’re talking about involves instability issues that have plagued Intel’s most recent “Raptor Lake” (and the 14th Gen Raptor Lake refresh) desktop chips for the past two years. Widespread reports of crashes and BSODs have been under investigation by Intel for years, but on July 22 we got a major update. Intel’s Thomas Hannaford posted on Intel’s community board that the company had finally found the root cause of the instability issues. Here’s what Hannaford delivered: “Based on extensive analysis of Intel Core 13th/14th Gen desktop processors returned to us due to instability issues, we have determined…

The Steam Deck and its shiny new OLED variant are our favourite additions to PC gaming in years. They’re perfect for those who don’t want to play PC games in bed or on the sofa, and with Verified Playable support for more than 10,000 games now, there are almost too many options to choose from. More games are getting verified for the Steam Deck every day, but here’s our pick of the best. 5 DAVE THE DIVER Charming, deep, and constantly surprising, Dave the Diver is packed with activities. An adventure RPG featuring deep-sea exploration and fishing during the day and sushi restaurant management at night, it sounds pretty pedestrian – until you clock the stunning pixel art and characters. Even the credits sequence gives you a new game to…

33 Asus ROG NUC 970 34 HP OmniBook X 35 Alienware M16 R2 36 Acer Predator X27U 37 Aorus FO27Q3 38 Samsung Galaxy Z Flip6 39 Asus ROG Azoth Extreme 40 Phanteks XT Pro 41 Glorious Model D2 Pro 42 Asus ROG Delta II 43 Kobo Clara BW APC is Australia’s oldest consumer technology magazine – having been consistently in print for over 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…

PRICE $3,300 WEB dell.com Who doesn’t want a big 16in gaming laptop, featuring a Ultra 9 CPU, a RTX 4070 GPU and 32GB of RAM? And for a surprisingly decent price, considering it’s from Alienware. The m16 R2 (and m18 R2) is a more affordable line of gaming laptops that are a step up from the Dell G series, but not as pricey as the premium Alienware x16 R2 and x14 R2. The m16 R2 also comes in a Ultra 7 / RTX 4060 / 16GB RAM configuration, but at about 18% cheaper it’s not compelling value. The m16 R2 is equipped with a 16in, 2560 x 1600 screen that has a 240Hz variable refresh rate, a 3ms response time, a 300 nit brightness and displays 100% of the sRGB…

PRICE $169 WEB gloriousgaming.com Outrageous speed in a featherweight chassis. That’s what Glorious is bringing to the table with the Model D 2 Pro 4KHz/8KHz Edition. This gaming mouse delivers a quick 8,000Hz polling rate over a wired connection, and maintains half of that even over wireless. In other words, it’s communicating its position with your PC eight times faster than most gaming mice. Superficially, the 4K/8KHz Edition appears to be your run-of-the-mill black plastic mouse, and hardly screams quality from the outset, though this is the trade-off you have to make to shed weight. It has to be pretty simple to keep weight down, which is paramount to competitive gaming aspirations, and comes in at just 62 grams. However, the 4K/8KHz Edition’s strongest feature is its refined shape. It…

NEEDS Windows 10 or 11 WEB github.com/builtbybel/Winpilot System tool Some cynics have dismissed Microsoft’s AI tool Copilot as a glorified version of its old Office assistant Clippy. Winpilot has fun with this notion by using a version of the animated paperclip to host a Copilot-style tool for tweaking Windows settings. Although it’s primarily designed to fix annoyances in Windows 11, most of Winpilot’s features also work in Windows 10, aside from those specific to the newer operating system. When you launch the program, the Clippy character – which Winpilot calls NeoClippy – immediately springs into action, offering to help with tasks such as ‘Uninstall an app’, ‘Tweak Windows appearance and performance’ and ‘Check available disk space’. Select a suggestion to open the relevant Windows tool, if NeoClippy is unable to…

...looking at where they’ve been, where we’re at, and where it’s all heading Keyboards are one of the few devices that we often overlook as PC enthusiasts. Whenever we price up systems and specs, peripherals are mostly ignored outside of the occasional consideration to screen resolution. Yet the reality is that monitors, keyboards, and mice are all integral elements of any good build. So why are keyboards so overlooked? For the majority, a keyboard is the primary method of interacting with the PC. Yet, the world of keyboards has changed dramatically since the PC scene first exploded. To get a good idea of where we’ve been, and where we’re heading, we’re going to jump into the noisy world of the humble keyswitch, giving you the lowdown on all the latest…

HELP STATION | MAC IT WILL TAKE 10 mins YOU WILL LEARN To make web pages easier to navigate in the Safari browser YOU’LL NEED macOS 14 or later, Safari, Adblock (macOS 11 or later) and/or StopTheMadness (macOS 12 or later, optional) With macOS Sequoia, navigating the web in Safari is going to be easier than ever before. It’s going to highlight key details on a web page and point you towards more information. It’s going to put video front and centre, and it’ll help to make sites far less distracting and more practical thanks to a designed Reader. But that’s not to say you can’t make improvements to your browsing habits right now. By using Safari in macOS 14 (Sonoma), you already have the potential to take browsing to…

I’m often grateful that the tools of my trade are all programs installed on my laptop, rather than big heavy objects I’d have to lug around in a van. For example, the versatile free image viewer IrfanView (www.irfanview.com) is my equivalent of a combi-drill or angle grinder, allowing me to capture and edit screenshots for the articles I write. So I was interested to learn that the latest version of IrfanView (4.67) has a new plug-in that uses OCR to extract text from images. As I often need to type the contents of screenshots, such as the names and descriptions of settings in software and apps, this sounded like a useful time-saving addition. It has non-work benefits too, such as copying text from photos of documents, manuals and menus. To…