TechLife

Most of us – and especially TechLife readers – are living increasingly more and more digital lives. It’s become even more true since the pandemic hit. Many of us have switched to working from home, while also depending upon the internet for everythin

Ashampoo Backup 2021 backs up and restores entire disk partitions, including bootable Windows installations, in just a few clicks. Incremental auto-updates ensure backup files are always up-to-date and prevent data loss. The user interface was design

From $1,199, www.apple.com/au The iPhone 13 mini is Apple’s smallest new iPhone, and the only compact phone you should buy if you’re looking to fully wrap your hands around your next smartphone. For its size, there’s nothing that comes close to the

Google has been working to develop better tools to track energy consumption and production in order to achieve its 24/7 carbon-free energy goal by 2030. As part of these efforts, the search giant announced a new tool called Time-based Energy Attribut

The annual Australian PC Awards gives us a wonderful opportunity to consider the year just passed, and spotlight the things that were very much better than the others. It’s always fun for us to do this here at APC, and we hope you’re inspired to do a

$3,579, www.panasonic.com Last year’s Panasonic Lumix GH5 II was just the appetiser: for would-be filmmakers looking for a small camera with huge creative potential, the Panasonic Lumix GH6 is the true main course. And what a feast it is: the new fl

Astronomers watched a giant star blow up in a fiery supernova for the first time ever, and the spectacle was even more explosive than researchers anticipated. Scientists began watching the doomed star, a red supergiant now designated SN 2020tlf, loca

$549, www.garmin.com What sets the Garmin Instinct 2 apart from other running watches in its price band are its tough build and practical design. It’s thoughtfully crafted and no-nonsense, but unlike the original Garmin Instinct, it’s fun rather tha

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is a great time to see some outlandish tech, and Samsung did not disappoint this year with its Odyssey Ark monitor. This display behemoth is a mammoth 55 inches across – more than double Apple’s largest 27-inch iMa

From US$399, www.steamdeck.com The Steam Deck is one of the most eagerly anticipated product launches in recent times, with Valve trying its hand at making a handheld console. It’s certainly an ambitious task, but one that Valve mostly pulls off. Ho

Not yet. Oh, dear reader, not yet. Guru has recently tested a Samsung Galaxy Book Go, which pushes Windows 11 onto the most unwilling frame of the Snapdragon 888 processor, and there just isn’t enough power there. While there’s a translation layer th

With such a heavy focus on Metaverse and NFT projects over the last couple of months it’s nice to see AI take the reins again in this month’s Emerging Tech. Whether it’s helping locate meteorites, streamlining biofuel creation or diagnosing mental di

While most browsers now make privacy a pillar of their development, Brave has always had an intense focus on making it the absolute core of its foundation. Literally every part of the experience is related to making sure it knows as little about you

The Hogwarts Legacy release window has been set for ‘Holiday 2022’ as part of a special PlayStation State of Play live stream. Initially due to launch in 2021, the game was then delayed into 2022 with the caveat that it would arrive after Fantastic B

$89.95, en.bandainamcoent.eu, PC, Xbox, PlayStation I can’t pretend to be entirely unbiased about Elden Ring. FromSoftware is my darling, as it is for so many people, and there’s no game it’s made since Demon Souls that I haven’t played through at l

Fortnite’s continued absence from both the major app stores has created an enormous gap for the still burgeoning and incredibly popular battle royale genre to fill. While mobile-focused versions of big titles like PUBGand CallofDutydo fill that gap t

$8,799, www.msi.com MSI has made some outstanding gaming laptops, and the latest WS66 is an ongoing exploration of the related mobile workstation market. There is a demand for high power laptops to avoid the inconvenience of lugging entire desktop s

$1,359, onyxboox.com You want to go paperless. Completely. But can you really ditch that printer when editing and annotating on a tablet is such a squeeze given their sizes? Cue the Max Lumi 2, a large-format E Ink slate that’s perfectly sized for s

$2,199, www.samsung.com With the Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra, we can see that someone at Samsung has watched Spinal Tap because the company has really taken the popular line ‘turn it up to 11’ to heart. In the constant game of one-upmanship between

$399, www.mi.com With its Redmi and Poco sub-brands, Xiaomi wants to remind us that it’s not all about the top-tier flagship smartphones – and the company consistently puts out low-price handsets that give you more than you might expect for your mon

$449, www.msi.com With its 27-inch IPS panel with a 2,560 x 1440 resolution, the MSI Modern MD271QP business monitor aims to be your “window to the world.” The monitor has a sleek design with minimal bezels at the top and on either side while its co

$1,199, www.dell.com Dell often gets early access to the latest display tech. So, it is that the new Dell Ultrasharp U3223QE debuts LG’s IPS Black panel technology, which delivers up to 2,000:1 contrast. That’s a big jump over the 1,300:1 maximum co

$219, www.razer.com The Razer Kraken V3 HyperSense gaming headset offers excellent sound quality and clear mic pickup, a comfortable fit, and the characteristic Razer style that will make a great addition to any gamer’s setup. But you will need to a

$669, www.masterdynamic.eu Like a number of traditional Hi-Fi specialists, M&D has decided that the fast-growing gaming market is now too big to ignore, and has released the new MG20 Wireless Gaming Headphones in order to get in on the gaming action

$399, www.tp-link.com TP-Link has become a household name thanks to their affordable smart home products. Low-cost usually equates to poor software support but this isn’t the case with TP-Link products. Their device installation usually takes a coup

$149, au.nothing.tech When the Nothing Ear (1) first launched last year, there was a lot of excitement and hype for the first true wireless earbuds from OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei’s new company. Previously only available via a limited drop on the N

$259, www.denon.com It’s almost as if Denon decided to wait until the market for true wireless earbuds was reaching critical mass before entering the fray. It’s a bold strategy… but it’s just about paid off. How do you like your true wireless earbud

Your browser is your window to the web, but it’s a window that thousands of strangers are secretly watching you through. Hidden trackers are embedded in virtually every site you visit, monitoring your activities, collecting and sharing your personal

This year, the flagship XPS 15 comes with a shiny new stunner of a screen, alongside the usual XPS offerings – you know, powerful innards, elegant woven chassis, and all the other premium trimmings. The new OLED display is such eye-candy, delivering

It’s tempting to wade in here and make some grandiose statement about the era of hi-fi being over. But that wouldn’t be quite right. Audiophile hardware is only getting better, vinyl is back on the rise, and there’s nothing quite like building your o

HiBit Startup 10 minutes Programs that start automatically with Windows can make your PC much slower to boot, but you may not even realise they’re running. You can use Task Manager to disable some of these, but it’s also useful to delay programs so

Smaller isn’t always better when it comes to laptops. We know from your recent emails that many of you don’t need a computer that slips into your bag, but want a machine you can use at home that has a good-sized screen and doesn’t take up much space.

www.hp.com Price $1,599 Along with a 17.3-inch touchscreen and full-size keyboard, this HP laptop (pictured left) has a four-core Intel Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD, so it’s as big on the inside as it is on the outside.  www.lg.com

Many people prefer using WhatsApp on a computer than their phone because they find it easier to type on a physical keyboard than on a phone’s touchscreen. The bigger screen also helps. You can download a desktop version of WhatsApp from www.whatsapp.

Installing Microsoft’s twice-yearly ‘Feature’ updates can be unnerving because you never know whether they will cause problems, such as disabling settings you’ve carefully configured. There are ways to delay updates, but they involve tweaking the reg

Mastering the finer points of Excel can be stressful, so it’s apt that Microsoft offers a template for tracking your blood pressure. Download it from www.snipca. com/40876, then add your name at the top. Scroll down and you’ll see columns for time, d

If you use column layouts in your documents, you should consider inserting vertical lines between each column to make sure they are clearly separated. To do this in Word, place your cursor within a column then open the Layout tab, click the Columns d

Photos app How to help Photos recognise and organise friends and family 10 minutes Apple’s Photo app scans your Library and gathers any shots of people that it finds into collections in its dedicated People album. However, it may not recognise e

The data you’ve already recorded about your ancestor is on the left. The right-hand column contains the information contained on FamilySearch. Click to add information to your tree – you can create a new fact or overwrite one. Use this section to

MacFamilyTree 9, FamilySearch.org account (free) To sync your tree with FamilySearch 30 minutes This issue, we’re going to reveal how to link your tree to the familysearch.org website, giving you access to the largest collection of free family histo

We’re going to take a basic ebook and make it shine with the help of images such as photographs and charts. We’ll also add some features that are appropriate for non-fiction books, such as tip boxes, an index and citations within the text. Finally, w

The ISBN number is the 13-digit number (with barcode) on the back of nearly all professionally published books. Thanks to print-on-demand publishing, you can often get away without having one. However, many traditional book sellers such as bookshops

We’ve used LibreOffice for the text editing and page layout of our book. However, as ever when it comes to Linux, there are many other publishing options available. LaTeX is a document preparation system that actually predates Linux. It’s a markup la

iOS 15 or iPadOS 15 How to use the Focus feature on your iPhone or iPad 30 minutes There are few things more annoying or distracting when you’re trying to work, sleep, or watch the latest episode of your favorite show, than the repetitive pinging of

Lately we’ve been sending and receiving business communication by SMS more frequently than in the past. It’s generally quicker and more direct than email, and photos can be added very simply too. But one thing is a big step backwards – no pre-defined

If you’ve ever attempted to automate some of your home electronics, you’ll probably know just how messy the whole scene is. Between all the different protocols, the dozens of different interfaces and apps, and the often shaky integration between soft

Internet outages are an unfortunate fact of life, and they can be crippling to your daily life, especially for those relying on their NBN plans in order to work from home. Thankfully, there’s a number of steps you can take to identify and rectify the

Foxtel has had quite the history when it comes to video streaming. Starting off as a cable TV provider in the 90s, Foxtel eventually made the leap into video-streaming – first giving its cable subscribers the ability to watch select shows and films o

Cooler conditions aren’t for everyone and many of us find ourselves stuck indoors when the weather outside is more frightful than festive. This can introduce some creativity issues when looking for suitable photographic subjects. Flower portraits and

The Shadows/Highlights command has long been one of the most useful tonal tools on offer in Photoshop – but to get the most out of it, you need to master a few simple settings. Initially the tool offers two simple sliders: one lets you lift the shado