TechLife

OF ALL THE tech tasks that we’re called upon to master in this modern age there’s one that I always find more of a chore than almost anything else... Networking. If there is one technology you want to work and do so quietly and without fuss it’s the

AS YOU MIGHT have already guessed based on its name, the iMac Pro is a sleek and beautiful all-in-one PC that packed in lots of power in the traditional iMac form factor. Don’t judge this behemoth by its cover, though – the iMac Pro absolutely demoli

IN MARCH THIS year, Facebook released a tool called “Why am I seeing this?”, which allowed users to take a deeper look at the ads they were being shown and the reason they were being targeted. The service was created in response to the public outcry

PANASONIC HAS ARGUABLY done more than any manufacturer with mirrorless technology. It launched the first mirrorless camera, after all, and thereafter it expanded its G-series of cameras and lenses in many different directions, notably developing some

CYBERMEN, ROBOCOP, THE Terminator: anyone familiar with science fiction will be all too aware of the concept of the cyborg. The term was first used in 1960 by scientists Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Kline in reference to an enhanced human that could

KEVIN WARWICK IS AN AUTHOR, ENGINEER, DEPUTY VICE-CHANCELLOR (RESEARCH) AT COVENTRY UNIVERSITY, CYBORG AND ALL-ROUND CYBER GURU. What is cybernetics being used for at the moment? In terms of therapy there’s quite a bit happening. Looking at people

CHIP MAKER AMD is on a roll at the moment, having recently announced its new third-gen Ryzen CPUs. But that’s a desktop processor. What of its mobile offerings? Enter the HP Envy x360 13 2-in-1 convertible. It’s not an entirely new laptop. Indeed, we

THE GALAXY S10E is Samsung’s flagship phone with 2019 specs and features at 2016 prices, providing consumers an option to snag all of the cool new features in the Galaxy S10 at a notable discount. In this way, the S10e (‘e’ for ‘essential’) has a lot

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never really thought to myself “Hey, I wish I could move my Google Home Mini anywhere in the house!” However, someone has had that very thought, and to making that mobility a touch easier is where the Jot comes in. It

$599 (hub + two cameras), www.dlink.com.au With the easiest setup, the most secure mounting options, decent battery life and the cleverest hub on test here, D-Link’s mid-range 1080p camera system manages to stand out from a tough crowd. $399 (pack o

OUTWARDLY THERE’S NO difference between the 1080p model of the Swann Smart Security Camera and its 720p predecessor. Both use the same compact casing, both use the same mount – and that latter feature is a shame. In theory the rubberised magnetic dis

SIDE BY SIDE with its competitors, you’d be hard pressed to outwardly tell the difference, but fire up the Arlo app and the quality gap between this and others is all too clear. It starts with connectivity. Setup of the Arlo hub and its paired camera

THIS ONE HAD us torn. On the one hand, it’s a well designed camera and hub combo, with a long-lasting battery, at a decent price. On the other, there are some big issues to look past. To begin with, the picture quality is a tad questionable. Detail a

$99 (hub + two cameras) WE’RE IMPRESSED High-resolution footage, high-quality components, and high-end connectivity. This is a superbly engineered camera with an excellent app and lots of smarts. WE’D IMPROVE The Arlo Ultra is a real investment. Fo

IT CAN BE easy to take for granted video streaming as it exists today. Go back even just five years and on-demand streamers like Netflix didn’t even exist in Australia (without a VPN). Sure, free to air catch-up services have been around for many yea

CHIPMAKER INTEL, WHICH likely built the processor at the heart of your PC, can’t catch a break. After word of two potential flaws with its processors came out last year – and the company’s only fix, at least for one of them, caused said processors to

WITH FACEBOOK REPORTING over US$5 million of Oculus Quest game sales in the first two weeks since launch and two to three week backorder waits for Amazon US order fulfillment, standalone VR is looking like it may have finally cracked a more mainstrea

Free / N/A Trash takes the short video craze and does something weird and beautiful with it. In this app, you give your videos over to its AI and it will edit it into a new video for you. The new video will be set to a piece of license-free music a

earth.nullschool.net Weather apps are fairly ubiquitous at this point, but for the great majority of us, we’re rarely looking beyond our own suburb, let alone city. This website focuses much more on the macro and is completely mesmerising as a resul

Tab Tosser is a Firefox extension that automatically closes browser tabs you have ignored. It tracks when browser tabs are last viewed and closes them when they have not been revisited for 1–90 days, based on your preference. If you go on vacation, T

Cyberpunk 2077 minigames will fill out your time in Night City beyond the eternal chase for eurodollars and near-future romance. Though developer CD Projekt Red is remaining cagey in just how much gameplay it shows off for its new open-world RPG, it

Nintendo Switch | $79.95 | www.nintendo.com/ THERE’S SOMETHING ODDLY transgressive about Mario Maker. After over 30 years stomping Goombas in carefully designed and refined Super Mario Bros. levels, the opportunity to take the reins comes with a stra

AUTO CHESS WITHOUT COMPROMISE. Free with IAP IN WHAT MUST be one of the quickest turnarounds in history, what began as a custom mode that launched in January via in the popular PC brawler Dota 2 has now found its way five months later to its own s

THE WORLD’S SMALLEST 14-inch laptop. That’s Asus’s sock-it-to-you sales pitch for the new Zenbook 14 UX433F. It’s not the only thing this slick Intel-powered laptop has going for it, of course. There’s powerful quad-core processing, just for starters

ONE OF THE most striking features of the Triton 500 is just how thin it is. With a closed profile of just 1.8cm it’s knocking on the door of ultrabooks despite being a 15.6-inch performance gaming laptop. The sleek Triton 500 can be configured to hav

BUT THE FUTURE of VR is inevitably expensive and before we hail Valve’s hardware as our VR savior, it’s worth pointing out that it’s not without issues (see: a lack of compelling VR games on Steam and SteamVR’s problematic troubleshooting process). B

EVER ONE FOR classy designs, Oppo’s latest handset is truly stunning. The Reno 5G sports an iridescent, yet predominantly matte finish on its rear – a welcome aesthetic and tactile change to all the high-gloss that arrived on flagship phones with the

CUBOT CLAIMS THAT its device is the thinnest rugged device on the market. At 8.8mm, it is certainly thin, just one millimeter thicker than the Apple iPhone X and the Samsung Galaxy S10. Measuring 157 x 73.7mm for a weight of 211g, it feels both solid

2018’S FITBIT ACE may have been aimed at kids, but it was actually based on the company’s adult-oriented Fitbit Alta, so it could hardly be claimed that it was built from the ground-up with younger users in mind. Fitbit has changed its approach this

A significant leap from 2016’s Powerbeats 3 earbuds, which were wireless but still connected to each other by a cable, the Beats Powerbeats Pro offers truly independent wire-free functionality backed by incredible sound quality and exceptional comfor

OFFERING GREAT DESIGN as well as great audio performance, we were fans of the B&O Beoplay E8 before they were revised. Now, they’re a bit more expensive than before but they’re also far more appealing too with the addition of wireless charging and a

THE ORIGINAL UE Wonderboom has been at the top of our Best Waterproof Speaker list since its debut and for good reason: It’s rugged, plays louder than its diminutive sound suggests, and could be paired to other UE Wonderboom speakers to amplify sound

SOUNDBARS LIKE THE Sony HT-S350 are a godsend – as built-in TV speakers are getting worse, 2.1 channel soundbars and subwoofers have stepped in to make our favorite shows and movies sound like they’re supposed to. With Sony’s HT-S350, you get both in

THE MINI LIPLAY is the smallest Instax camera in Fujifilm’s range, offering up the barebones functionality of a point-and-shoot digital camera combined with a portable Bluetooth printer. For the money, having both of these in one machine is quite goo

THERE ARE SO many potential network performance issues. Do you have problems with so-called ‘dead zones’ where your Wi-Fi connection is weak or non-existent? Do you find your internet connection slows down at certain times of day or even drops out pe

When issues won’t go away, or have disrupted your network completely, you’ll need to take a different approach. Start with the classic ‘turn it off and on again’ – either the one troublesome device, or your router if the problem is network-wide. In t

PLENTY OF PEOPLE overlook it, but your router is very important to the quality of your home network. The router provided by your ISP (internet service provider) is often relatively basic, so it’s often a good idea to get a better alternative. But wha

GETTING A STABLE signal is one thing, but are your devices performing to their best? Network speeds vary for all kinds of reasons, so how do you go about testing each device in your home to confirm things are working as well as they can be? Devices c

ONCE YOU’VE IMPROVED your network’s stability, it’s time to focus on performance. Step one is to look at your current internet connection. Is it fast enough for your needs? The explosion in streaming and online gaming means that regular broadband con

YOU’VE UPGRADED YOUR internet connection to meet your demands, and you’ve optimised some parts of your network too. But there’s still room for improvement. Here, we’ll examine ways to maximise your Wi-Fi connection at distance, plus spread the demand

NOW IS THE time to turn to the thorny issue of network security. You don’t want to be giving neighbours free Wi-Fi or letting any Tom, Dick or Harry gain easy access to your network for whatever nefarious purposes. (Remember, anything done on your ne

Not all Wi-Fi hotspots employ WPA2-PSK encryption, even if protected by a password. Never surf on a public Wi-Fi hotspot without a VPN – Windscribe (windscribe.com) offers 10GB monthly bandwidth for free. 5GHz networks are much faster when you’re clo

WE’RE DETAILING ALL of the major iOS 13 features here, in case you want wait to get iOS 13 public beta until the next, more stable version. It remains unfinished software. The change list for iOS 13 starts with our favorite feature: Dark Mode. This i

I have an external 3TB drive with 500GB of data on it, formatted as NTFS. Can I convert this to exFAT without losing any data? WAYNE SCOWEN Sadly no – the recommended, and safest, option is to copy the files to another drive before reformatting th

JUST AS WITH previous versions of Windows, the look of Windows 10 can be customised using themes. These are collections of desktop wallpapers, menu colours and sounds that overhaul the look and feel of Windows. While Windows 10 comes with a few theme

FILES IS IOS’S equivalent of Finder in macOS and enables you to browse files stored on your device or in iCloud Drive. You can add other cloud services too and – with the help of a third–party app – access files on Macs, PCs and network–attached stor

EVERY SMART HOME has to provide a control method, and Apple’s way of managing HomeKit–compatible devices is its Home app. Through this, you can turn accessories on or off, monitor their output, and tweak very specific settings. Up until the release o

HOW MANY SMART devices do you have in your house? We’re betting there’s at least one – your internet router – but there are probably a few others as well. Do you own a smart TV, one that connects to the internet and can watch Netflix or YouTube? A ga

UP UNTIL RECENTLY, home automation had been a tough business, best left to professionals and hard core enthusiasts. A dizzying array of incompatible protocols and devices made most home automation projects absurdly complex, requiring weeks of researc

THE NEUTRAL DENSITY filter is a staple item in the landscape photographer’s kit bag and a firm favourite for creating images with energy and depth. An ND filter is a sheet of glass or plastic that is dyed with a pigment to reduce light transmission,

TO CREATE THIS bold and striking art style, the overall aim is to split the image into three distinct areas; black, white and a solid colour. To get the best results, choose a start image that can easily be broken down into just a few shapes, yet sti

US$30 | igg.me/at/datacar/x#/ Studies have found that people who play Forza or Need for Speed daily have a higher incidence of accidents and speeding tickets than the general population. So we’re not sure the ‘gamification’ of everyday driving is suc