APC

Oh we do love the annual CES show. Except that it’s on right at the start of January. It’s easily the busiest week of the year, and coming out of our holidays it’s a rather abrupt halt to the holiday bliss. And yet, we go and we love it. This is wher

Editorial Editor: Ben Mansill ben.mansill@futurenet.comSenior Journalist: Shaun PrescottSenior Journalist: Joel BurgessSenior Journalist: Chris SzewczykGroup Art Director: Troy Coleman Contributors Jon Bailes, Rowan Campbell, David Crookes, Barry C

Download these APC exclusives free from: www.apcmag.com/exclusives ENCRYPTION OF SENSITIVE FILES WITH AES. Security doesn’t always have to be complicated: thanks to Guardian Of Data, you can encrypt your documents directly from the context menu of Wi

Last month Disney purchased a US$1.5 billion stake in Epic Games – the company responsible for Fortnite and Unreal Engine 5 – and thanks to the former it’s nowadays extremely wealthy: Epic Games is worth US$32 billion (Disney is worth US$178 billion)

This will be my last Random Access column and issue of APC. I’m moving into a role in environmental policy to help keep the planet from being iceless in the next hundred years. I’ve been writing with Future Australia since 2014, and while nine years

Nvidia’s RTX 40-series Ada Lovelace GPUs have had a rocky reception, mostly on account of their significantly higher generational prices, reduced memory interface widths, and reliance on DLSS 3 frame generation to make performance look better. It’s a

By the time you read this, Intel will have rolled out a whole new roadmap, the next waypoint on its journey to renewed technological dominance. Except I can’t help but notice that the company hasn’t come close to delivering on its existing roadmap. Y

For many years, modders have helped to reinvigorate older titles with things as diverse as graphical improvements, expanded content and things like new weapons or physics improvements. At the best of times, modding is a challenging and time-consuming

For my recent trip to CES in Las Vegas, I decided to fly to Los Angeles, pick up and rental car and drive over. I have had too many bad experiences at LAX to trust it with a connecting flight, and it’s simply quicker to drive. Looking at Hertz’s rent

Find the best deals on new gear at getprice.com/au 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 sa

What exactly do you want from a webcam? How about something that makes you look your best, no matter how dimly lit your bedroom or home office? Just be aware that there are webcam horses for specific streaming courses. The best webcam for live stream

PRICE $539 WEB www.amd.com The 8700G is outwardly similar to its Ryzen 7000-series siblings. It’s built around the Zen 4 architecture, but it is a different beast. Most especially, it uses a monolithic die as opposed to the chiplet design of regular

PRICE $239 (1TB); $439 (2TB) WEB westerndigital.com Honestly, that strapline is perhaps the best summation this journalist has ever written for a product. Western Digital’s Black SN770M is designed with one thing in mind: to massively expand your ha

PRICE $999 WEB www.tp-link.com/au We were seriously impressed with our first Wi-Fi 7 kit – TP-Link’s recent BE22000 mesh – even though it was eye-wateringly expensive. It redefined wireless speed to the point where we were getting faster transfers t

PRICE $30 WEB www.tp-link.com/au TP-Link’s Tapo Mini Smart Wi-Fi Plug is a diminutive device that, unlike many other smart plugs, isn’t a nuisance to its plug-socket neighbours – it’s not thick, just a little long at the top. It’s also not prone to

PRICE $999 (8TB) WEB samsung.com With rated read and write speeds of only 460MB/sec, the Samsung Portable SSD T5 Evo was never aiming for speed awards. Instead, it’s about capacity: with 2TB, 4TB and 8TB versions, it’s even roomier than most portabl

WEB www.irfanview.com/ NEEDS Windows 7, 8.1, 10 or 11 This excellent free image viewer is frequently updated with new features, yet remains easy to use and less than 5MB in size. IrfanView 4.65 introduces a long-awaited dark mode, which you can activ

WEB tinyurl.com/APC530dup NEEDS Windows 7, 8.1, 10 or 11 AllDup is one of the best free programs for removing duplicate files from your PC. The latest version adds useful options to its Search Results tab to make it easier to manage the duplicates it

WEB www.burnaware.com FREE TRIAL Seven days PRICE $29.95 per year or $89.95 lifetime licence NEEDS Windows 7, 8, 10 or 11 BurnAware is one of the few remaining programs for creating your own CDs and DVDs, and recently released version 17.2. The disc-

When it comes to future technology, no show does it quite like CES. It’s the A-Z of everything electrical, with companies from Acer to Zyxel displaying their new products for 2024. But it’s not just about big companies: over 1,400 startups were at Eu

ChatGPT is a splendid time sink, letting you plot out horror movies starring Michael Stipe and Kylie Minogue, or practically anything else you can dream up. But it’s a lot more than a plaything to pass a tea break with. OpenAI’s chatbot has a series

• Stop YouTube forcing you to disable your ad blocker • Protect your privacy by deleting your watch history • Hide reminders to subscribe to YouTube channels • Replace misleading thumbnail images for videos • Convert and download videos in any browse

$2,549 tinyurl.com/APC530itw This all-white system has some solid underpinnings that are unfortunately becoming a little dated. The Ryzen 5 5600X is no slouch and is perfectly serviceable for most games and tasks, but it sits in the outgoing (though

CES has wrapped up for another year, and once again we’re treated to a plethora of new technologies, concepts and soon to come products. Display technologies were one of the largest categories on show with: LG and Samsung showing off flashy transpare

I’m looking to upgrade my J4125-ITX NAS server, and have settled on Intel’s newest chip – the N100 processor, which benchmarks tell me represents a huge leap forward over the previous board, even though the J4125 chip has served me well. I see that i

When writing in LibreOffice, you can choose from a variety of preset styles – with different fonts, sizes, and paragraph spacing. LibreOffice also lets you choose a ‘next style’, which means you can swap from one style to another when you tap Enter.

The Android version of Firefox (tinyurl.com/APC530aff) is one of the only mobile browsers that lets you install extensions, but until now you were limited to just 21 of them. Although these included useful tools such as uBlock Origin, Bitwarden and T

PRICE Free PLATFORM Browser WEB bit.ly/Roottrees The Roottrees are Dead stands on the shoulders of Tim Sheinman’s Family, a similarly browser-based detective game that had you investigating a music scene and filling in a family tree of linked musicia

PRICE Free PLATFORM PC WEB bit.ly/TommyGunWitches Here we have witches that dress like Payday robbers, hiding the green skin of the witch from The Wizard of Oz. And they use Tommy guns because, well, I suspect because it makes for a catchy title. The

PRICE Free PLATFORM PC WEB bit.ly/RiversHypothesis The Two Rivers Hypothesis is pure aesthetic and atmosphere, with little beneath that – but what aesthetic and atmosphere. It’s a game where you pilot a submersible around a dark and flooded facility,