APC - March 2024

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 Eureka Park in the hope of coverage or a distribution deal. As you can imagine, CES is enormous. It not only consumes the halls of the gigantic Las Vegas Convention Center, it spreads out to a second convention centre – called the Venetian Expo – with three more huge halls to fill. As if that weren’t enough, the show’s tendrils spread into hotels across the city. There’s no hope for one person to cover this event, and APC still relied on 30 colleagues at Future Publishing – from brands such as Laptop Magazine, TechRadar and Tom’s Guide – to help us hunt out the gems. And those gems are what this article is all about. The fantastic products we saw at CES that will hit the streets in 2024. A handful are already on sale, most will land before winter, a few stragglers will go on sale closer to Christmas, while some are concepts that may never be seen again. We hope you enjoy our pick of the show. CONTRIBUTORS Barry Collins, Tim Danton and Jon Honeyball plus Rowan Campbell, Jason England, Andrew E. Freedman, Mark Anthony Ramirez, Chris Szewczyk, Momo Tabaari and Jarred Walton MARCH 2024 APC MAGAZINE 51

LAPTOPS & ACCESSORIES Asus Zenbook Duo (2024) PRICE From $3,999 AVAILABLE Late Q1 2024 On opening the laptop you’ll see the Zenbook Duo has a pair of 14in OLED displays and a detachable Bluetooth keyboard that can wirelessly recharge, all of which neatly packs into an impressively slim size. It’s an idea we first saw hit production in Lenovo’s Yoga Book 9i, but that had a U-series CPU and an origami kickstand that left much to be desired. Improving on that design, the Zenbook Duo’s kickstand is permanently attached to the laptop, and it goes up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 185H, so it should be easier to use and more powerful. The Asus model has far more ports than the Yoga, including HDMI (should two screens not do it for you) alongside two Thunderbolt 4 ports. It would seem that Asus has taken the innovations of the Yoga Book 9i and refined them into what can only be called a truly impressive piece of tech.Andrew E. Freedman Alienware m18 R2 PRICE $TBC AVAILABLE Now We didn’t get our hands on the Alienware m18 R2 at CES, making do with a pre-show video demonstration instead. But one thing we know for sure is that this second iteration of the Alienware m18 brings enough power to suit any gamer’s needs. From Intel’s 14th generation Core i7 and i9 options to Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics, ranging from the RTX 4060 to the top-of-theline RTX 4090, the m18 has you covered. Need a bright colourful and speedy display? The m18 arrives with either a 165Hz QHD (2,560 x 1,600) panel or a Full HD display that whacks refresh rates up to 480Hz. With RAM choices up to 64GB, the Alienware m18 has everything a gamer could want in a laptop. Mark Anthony Ramirez Lenovo ThinkBook Plus G5 Hybrid PRICE TBC AVAILABLE TBC Lenovo restricted its ThinkPad updates at CES to refreshes of the X1 2-in-1 and the X1 Carbon (I can reveal that Gen 12 of the latter looks as tempting as ever), but it loves to take risks with its ThinkBook range. So while this is supposedly Gen 5 of the ThinkBook Plus, it’s actually a radical departure. First, the lid magnetically detaches, much like Microsoft’s Surface Book series. However, here the screen takes on a second life as an Android tablet (it includes its own Qualcomm processor, RAM and storage), while the base unit continues to whirr away as a Windows 11 PC. Confused? It certainly didn’t convince Barry or Jon, but if you currently take a Windows laptop and a tablet with you on trips then this 1.7kg machine does it all. And with a super-sharp 14in OLED display and Core Ultra processor, it’s a speedy, premium offering. Tim Danton Razer Blade 14 PRICE TBC AVAILABLE Q1 2024 While Barry was smitten by the 2.5kg Razer Blade 16, with its Core i9-14900HX, 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, RTX 4070 graphics and a 240Hz OLED panel, my wallet started itching on seeing the Razer Blade 14. Of course, the sacrifice is screen size, but it offers something close to all-day battery life when you’re working and gives up to RTX 4070 graphics when you want to game. All wrapped up in an all-aluminium casing that both looks and feels great. Personally, I’m more than happy to see a Ryzen 9 8945HS processor in there, too – great for games, great for AI tasks and great for multicore tasks. Tim Danton Acer Swift X 14 (SFX14-72G) PRICE From $TBC AVAILABLE February 2024 Acer is doubling down on the AI PC – see Barry’s view on this, opposite – with the Swift X 14 (not to be confused with the Swift Go 14). First of all it includes Intel’s new Core Ultra H-Series processors, complete with NPUs. Second, it can be specified with up to Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 graphics, which will come in extremely handy if you decide to generate your own AI images locally rather than in the cloud. It will ship with Nvidia Studio graphics drivers (easily replaced by Game-Ready drivers), optimised for AI-accelerated software such as Omniverse, Canvas and Broadcast. I’ll admit I wasn’t blown away when I saw the chassis design – slim, grey, predictable – but I’m not going to argue with a 2.8K, 120Hz OLED display, up to 32GB of RAM and up to 1TB of SSD storage. If you embrace the AI PC concept, this may well be its peak incarnation. Tim Danton 52 APC MAGAZINE MARCH 2024

SHOULD YOU BUY AN AI PC THIS YEAR? With chip and PC makers desperately searching for something to rouse the industry from its post-pandemic slump, the AI PC is their big hope. Essentially a regular PC with a neural processing unit (NPU) inside to handle AI workloads locally, companies including HP, Lenovo and Dell are bullishly predicting a surge in sales. Should you jump in? No, not yet. It’s early days for NPUs and nobody seems quite sure what to do with them yet. There are a lot of prototype demos, much talk about running AI services locally instead of the cloud, but little in the way of concrete benefits to leaping in at this stage. Not unless you’re particularly desperate to have a Windows Copilot key on your keyboard (narrator: nobody was desperate for a Windows Copilot key). Much will hang on what Microsoft delivers with Windows 12. Heavy hints were dropped during CES that Microsoft is refactoring the next version of Windows to handle more of its AI tasks locally rather than sending everything to the cloud. With Windows 12 expected to arrive in the second half of this year, it would certainly seem wise to wait. Microsoft over-promised on Windows 11 Copilot, but if it can finally deliver the AI features it trailed (such as full integration with third-party apps) then Windows 12 really could be a reason to invest in new hardware. Certainly, if you’re forced into replacing a PC before Windows 12 arrives, you should look for one with an NPU included. It would be no surprise if Microsoft included NPUs in its system requirements for Windows 12, meaning you’ve (hopefully) future-proofed your investment. But until the benefits become clearer, the AI PC revolution can wait. BARRY COLLINS Lenovo Mechanical Energy Harvesting keyboard and mouse PRICE TBC AVAILABLE TBC (if ever) I’ll be honest – when Lenovo trailed the idea of a mechanical “energy harvesting” keyboard, I thought this Bluetooth device would somehow capture the energy from my heavy-handed typing and save me from ever charging a keyboard again. Not quite. Instead, the company’s keyboard has a solar strip running across the top, capturing any ambient light that might be available. If that’s not enough, you can flip the keyboard over and turn a mechanical crank, although five minutes of spinning that wheel will power the keyboard for a mere 30 minutes. The crank on the mouse does likewise. We all want greener peripherals, but I’m not sure these are the answer. Barry Collins Dell XPS 16 PRICE From $TBC AVAILABLE Q1 2024 Officially, Dell wasn’t at CES. The only places to find its wares were on AMD and Intel’s stands. But that didn’t stop the company from releasing new products to coincide with the show, and the XPS 16 was arguably the best of them all. From its sleek design, beautifully responsive keyboard and Full HD (1,920 x 1,080) 120Hz and 4K (3,840 x 2,400) display options to its choices of Intel Core Ultra CPUs, the XPS 16 is a masterclass in producing a laptop with both productivity and performance in mind. With GPU options ranging from Intel’s integrated Arc graphics to Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070, and up to 4TB of SSD storage, I can’t wait to get my hands on a review unit. Mark Anthony Ramirez Lenovo Magic Bay Studio PRICE US$200 AVAILABLE April 2024 The Studio webcam is only one of a series of Magic Bay accessories that Lenovo could launch this year. Magic Bay lets peripherals attach magnetically to the back of the laptop lid, and working Lenovo prototypes shown at CES include a (rather chunky) SSD and a 10in screen to complement the main display. With USB-C ports at a premium on most modern laptops, it’s a convenient way to attach peripherals without wasting ports. The Magic Bay Studio is a 4K camera that should offer much better video quality than the laptop’s tiny integrated cam, and it also includes a pair of 2W speakers to work in harmony with the laptop’s own and boost the sense of spatial audio on video calls. Alas, this concept is currently restricted to selected laptops in Lenovo’s ThinkBook range. We’d love to see it adopted by other manufacturers to supercharge a market for third-party Magic Bay peripherals. Barry Collins Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (2024) PRICE TBC AVAILABLE Q1 2024 This year’s Zephyrus G14 has taken a sensible sidestep away from Asus’ almost too strikingly bold designs towards a far more professional-looking piece of equipment. Replacing the cringeworthy AniMe Matrix design, a single slash of lighting brings a greatly refined look and feel to the equally refined aluminium shell. And while this model is upgradable to an RTX 4070 rather than last year’s 4090, it more than makes up for it with a stunning OLED display and solid improvements to the keyboard and touchpad experience, increasing viability for on-the-go use without a keyboard and mouse. In fact, with these small tweaks, I would argue that the new ROG Zephyrus G14 has bigger competition in mind than simply gaming laptops. The Zephyrus G14’s vibrant new screen and more professional look means the 14in MacBook Pro should be getting nervous right now. Jason England MARCH 2024 APC MAGAZINE 53

CPUs NPUs& AI DeepX DX-V1 PRICE Not applicable AVAILABLE Now At the DeepX stand, I chatted to Ha Joon Yu, an IP specialist at the South Korean AI chip-maker. It was displaying three of its NPUs, which are built into M.2 format devices so they can be easily added to, for example, single-board computers. The DX-V1 (pictured) detects people and objects in tandem with a camera. Was he worried about the rise of NPUs in chips from AMD and Intel? “Intel, AMD and Qualcomm... have to have an AI function built into their microprocessor, because this market is very big, but this market is also very fragmented. “There are very huge markets, like AI PCs, AI smartphones, and that’s what Qualcomm, Intel and AMD will do. But we want every data to be analysed or handled at the edge, that’s what we have done. It reduces the cost, and it reduces power consumption.” Tim Danton Rabbit r1 PRICE US$199 AVAILABLE Pre-order now With just an LCD screen, camera, scroll wheel and a button, the pocket-friendly Rabbit r1 is nothing special to look at (if you ignore the neon orange casing). But go down the proverbial rabbit hole and you’ll find a lot more hiding behind the retro design. The Rabbit r1 works as the next step up from Siri or Google Assistant, able to understand natural language requests thanks to a ChatGPT-style LLM voice assistant. It can break down and perform those tasks thanks to a “breakthrough” innovation called the Large Action Model. For example, if you want to book an Uber to get six people to a restaurant by 6pm, the r1 will hook into the Uber API, look for options and present the choice back to the LLM. The user can then press a button on the screen to confirm the ride. You can teach the Rabbit new tricks by using the camera to capture you interacting with the service. A practical example is learning to add information to a spreadsheet. The r1 isn’t designed to be a replacement for a phone, but as a companion. The makers claim “it can do some things better than a phone and much faster”. And at just US$199 and with no subscription, it’s a cheaper long-term option than subscribing to an AI service. Ryan Morrison Intel Core 14th Gen HX-series PRICE Not applicable AVAILABLE Now With all the AI razzmatazz surrounding the launch of its Core Ultra processors, it’s perhaps surprising that Intel chose CES as its launchpad for what must be the last hurrah of its traditional Core chips. The HX-series sits right at the top of the line, above the Intel Core Ultra H-series, with 24 cores and Turbo clocks up to 5.8GHz. That compares to 16 cores and a 5.1GHz peak for the Ultra H-series. So, you may ask, why release it at all? Intel argues that it has produced the world’s fastest mobile processor, one that can be overclocked and will perform better in multicore scenarios. The downside (other than its high price) is that HX-series chips require thicker chassis to keep them cool, so you’ll find the CPUs in gaming laptops such as the Asus ROG Strix Scar rather than traditional designs. Tim Danton AMD Ryzen 5 8600G and Ryzen 7 8700G PRICE 8600G, $229; 8700G, $329 AVAILABLE Now AMD rolled out its Ryzen 8000G lineup of APUs at CES 2024, beating Intel to the punch as the first company to bring purpose-built AI accelerators to the desktop PC. As we’ve seen in the past, AMD builds its APUs for the desktop using the same silicon as its laptop chips. In this case, AMD uses the “Phoenix” architecture that employs the Zen 4 CPU architecture and RDNA 3 graphics engine. However, the lack of battery life concerns in desktop PCs allows the chip to run at higher power limits, thus unleashing the full power of the silicon. AMD’s two flagship models, the Ryzen 7 8700G and the Ryzen 5 8600G, boast eight and six cores respectively. AMD also brought its new APU lineup up to modern standards with support for AM5’s DDR5 and PCI-E 4 connectivity. AMD’s APUs have historically dominated the entry-level gaming market as Intel doesn’t have processors with powerful enough integrated graphics to provide meaningful gaming performance, even for low-end gaming systems. Here, AMD claims it delivers 1080p-capable gaming performance, even in some AAA titles, albeit at reduced settings. With competitive pricing and bundled coolers, the new Ryzen APU models are poised to dominate the entry-level gaming segment once again. Paul Alcorn AMD Ryzen 5000 series update PRICE From $215 (5500GT) AVAILABLE Now It didn’t garner many headlines, but AMD also refreshed its AM4-based Ryzen 5000 platform at CES. Four new chips join the party: the Ryzen 5 5500GT, Ryzen 5 5600GT, Ryzen 7 5700 and the gaming-focused Ryzen 7 5700X3D. The idea is to give users of older AM4 boards the chance to boost their speeds without throwing away the platform they’ve built. The GT suffix indicates that the chips have six Radeon cores built in, giving, AMD claims, a boost of anything from 3% (Far Cry 6) to 10% (PUBG) in games, and 6% (Cinebench multicore) and 11% (WinRAR) in applications compared to the 5600G. Tim Danton Intel Core 14th gen desktop CPUs PRICE From $199 AVAILABLE Now Intel released the overclockable, high-end K series of 14th generation desktop Core processors in October last year, and while they’re all solid chips we found little to shout about. This isn’t surprising, as they’re based on the same Raptor Lake design as 13th generation chips, but with minor clock increases. At CES, Intel announced the full 14th gen lineup, from the Core i3-14100F ($199) to the Core i9-14900 ($949). These are mainstream CPUs, with no overclocking capability, with even Intel’s benchmarking suggesting a modest 3% to 4% increase in speed compared to 13th gen Core desktop chips. The star of the releases is the Core i7-14700, which, thanks to four additional E-cores, has 12 cores compared to the eight of the i7-13700. Tim Danton 54 APC MAGAZINE MARCH 2024

MSI Project Zero PRICE $TBC AVAILABLE Q1 2024 If you’re the kind of person who hates seeing cables but loves building PCs, then you may well find yourself buying an MSI motherboard this year. That’s because its Project Zero boards are designed with precisely you in mind: storage and power are handled behind the scenes, leaving the user-visible side of the motherboard for the graphics card, RAM and CPU. By no coincidence, the components that are riddled with RGB fans in many gaming setups. When I asked the MSI rep how much this would all cost, I prepared myself for a hefty figure. But with prices for the boards from US$200, MSI Project Zero is well within the reach of keen gamers. Nor is MSI forcing you to buy its own cases, with examples from Origin and Corsair on show. One final benefit: not only will your PC look good, but working in a cable-free chassis makes it far easier to access the core components of your PC when it’s time to upgrade. Tim Danton PCs & COMPONENTS MSI Claw PRICE From US$699 AVAILABLE H1 2024 One way to make a splash at CES is to be the first to do something. And while the MSI Claw isn’t the first modern handheld gaming PC, it is the first mainstream PC brand to use Intel Core Ultra processors (or to use Intel at all, with all its competitors in the field opting for AMD chips). It also packs a bigger battery than other handhelds, even if MSI isn’t exactly claiming record-breaking battery life at a mere two hours. MSI claims that it’s producing a more ergonomic device than rivals, though, and while the plastic shell is a controversial choice, the real test will come with long-term use. What may make the difference and help MSI come out on top is its App Player, an app present in many of MSI’s gaming laptops that is capable of running software from the Google Play Store. Which, presuming that the MSI Claw will come with similar compatibility, could prove to be an excellent way to play mobile games on the go.Andrew E. Freedman Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super PRICE $1,119 AVAILABLE Now With the Nvidia RTX 4070 Super, you’re essentially getting about 93% of the RTX 4070 Ti for 75% of the price. Alternatively, you’re getting 22% more GPU than the RTX 4070 for the same price. More importantly, you’re getting 12GB of high-speed GDDR6X memory, along with access to Nvidia’s RTX technologies: DLSS 3, superior ray tracing and AI tensor cores. Given the RTX 4070 already trades blows with the RX 7800 XT – slightly slower rasterisation performance, much faster ray tracing and AI performance, and the RTX 4070 Ti does the same with the RX 7900 XT – Nvidia now effectively delivers a higher performance option at the same price. Jarred Walton AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT PRICE $549 AVAILABLE Now What’s the difference between the RX 7600 XT and the RX 7600? An extra 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM and $90! Not the best joke you’ll hear this year, so let’s quickly move on and explain why you might want one. In short, it’s about playing games at max settings, where memory matters. AMD claims that Forza Horizon at 1440p, RT Extreme settings, jumps from 56fps to 81fps (with FSR 2 active). More normally, it promises a 10% jump in games at 1440p peak settings – Starfield is up from 53fps to 60fps , for instance. But we’ll wait until we put it through our tests before making a firm conclusion. Tim Danton Asus ROG NUC PC PRICE TBC AVAILABLE TBC Asus finally unveiled its long anticipated NUCs at CES 2024, with the NUC 14 Pro and NUC 14 Pro+ sitting alongside this gaming version. Following in the footsteps of Intel’s now discontinued NUC gaming PCs, this first Asus ROG NUC is a great indicator that the future of mini gaming PCs is in good hands. The Asus ROG NUC will come with two configurations. The first features an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H and an Nvidia RTX 4060 laptop GPU, while the more powerful version packs in a Core Ultra 9 185H and RTX 4070. Both fit snugly into the 2.5-litre chassis, which can be positioned vertically or horizontally, or plugged into a TV or sitting comfortably on a small desk. It includes six USB-A ports, plus a Type-C port with Thunderbolt 4 support, Ethernet, HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 1.4 outputs. An SD card reader and 3.5mm audio jack round things out, along with Wi-Fi 6E. That’s a capable set of connectivity options on such an already versatile device. Chris Szewczyk MARCH 2024 APC MAGAZINE 55

DISPLAYS Samsung MicroLED transparent display PRICE N/A AVAILABLE TBC Is it January, says Samsung to itself? Then it must be time to unveil our latest TV and display technology at CES! It was no different this year, except in its ongoing war with the competition Samsung opted for an entirely transparent panel. Think of a window that’s also a TV screen. It’s quite amazing to look at, with a huge wow factor. (And I’m not easily wowed.) The question, as always, is whether this can be brought to market for a reasonable price, and how well it will work in practical implementations. However, there are obvious use cases, such as transparent front windows for high-end shops, whereby products and adverts can be shown while still allowing a view into the store itself. Although, if the price is right, I might be tempted to have a kitchen window outfitted with this. Jon Honeyball Xebec Snap PRICE US$999 for two screens AVAILABLE Now Portable screens for laptops have become something of a CES staple in recent years, but the Xebec Snap adds a touch of refinement to juggling multiple displays. With this system, you can “snap” a screen to either side of the laptop’s main display, which is held in place by strong magnets. If you want to switch the orientation of either screen, you just pull it off and rotate it, giving you a range of orientation choices. The Snap is available in one or two-screen configurations, with each display a 13.3in Full HD model with a claimed 400cd/m2 of brightness. The company plans to extend the system further with more snap-on accessories, including a wireless smartphone charger and a bright light to help you look your best in video meetings or streams. The two-screen configuration (confusingly called Snap Tri-Screen as it includes the laptop’s own display) costs US$999, while a single extra screen (Snap Dual-Screen) costs US$549. Barry Collins Mobile Pixels Geminos Studio PRICE Around US$800 AVAILABLE 2024 “Let them eat screens” could have been the motto of CES 2024, with almost every stand seemingly intent on thrusting more displays in our faces. The Geminos Studio from US firm Mobile Pixels was one of the more interesting displays. Or should we say two displays, because this beast is a dual 27in display that’s vertically hinged. That allows you to use the bottom display in easel mode, drawing on the screen with a compatible stylus. When the drawing is done, you can push it flush and have two 4K displays stacked atop one another, giving you plenty of screen space to work with. The updated screen is yet to launch, but is expected to cost around US$800, and we expect Scan to ship the new model alongside the existing one. Keep an eye on mobilepixels.us for launch details. Barry Collins Alienware 32 4K QD-OLED PRICE $TBC AVAILABLE Now The Alienware 32 4K QD-OLED is one of the best monitors of CES 2024, if not the best. Billed as the world’s fastest 4K OLED monitor, the Alienware 32 makes any game you’re playing look and run at its best. Minute details come through in crystal clarity thanks to the panel’s 140 pixels per inch, which is the highest of any existing OLED gaming monitor (most max out at 100ppi). Alienware claims the display can achieve 99% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut, which accounts for the lush colours. On top of that, the 240Hz refresh rate and 0.03ms response time ensure games play buttery smooth. If you’re like me and loved 2022’s Alienware 34 QD-OLED, you’re going to adore the new Alienware 32. Tony Polanco 56 APC MAGAZINE MARCH 2024

Auracast Bluetooth PRICE N/A AVAILABLE Now You’re sitting in the pub, trying to watch the football, while all around you are engrossed in a tennis game and its commentary belting through the speakers. But Auracast could soon make that experience more bearable. Pleasant, even. With this new Bluetooth technology, venues will be able to broadcast multi-channel audio to as many customers as they can hold. You could hook your Bluetooth headphones to the footy commentary, while others listen to the tennis. Conference centres could provide live translations of speeches being given on stage, with audience members able to select their language. The technology will even work at a local level, with you able to share your laptop’s audio with other headphone wearers in the vicinity, instead of having to split earbuds between you. It’s going to need hardware support, but Auracast should be arriving in headphones, speakers and smartphones as the year wears on. Barry Collins AUDIO AR Canon Free Viewpoint PRICE N/A AVAILABLE N/A Trailed at last year’s CES, we finally got a chance to test Canon’s Free Viewpoint VR system at this year’s show. In a nutshell, Canon has teamed up with the NBA to capture basketball games and replay the action in VR. With a surface the size of a dining table in front of you, the VR headset allows you to watch the slam dunks and other action as if it were taking place right in front of you, in pseudo 3D. The resolution and frame rates need improvement, but could this be the future of watching sport? Hell, yes. It even made basketball look interesting for ten minutes. There are all manner of challenges to overcome before this translates to watching games live however, not least the huge amount of bandwidth it requires. Barry Collins Sennheiser Momentum True Wireless 4 PRICE $499 AVAILABLE Pre-order, 15 February My early testing suggests these are a rival for the very best earbuds on the market. Listening to “Englishman in New York” was a pleasure, with the drums and vocals coming through perfectly in a busy environment thanks to active noise cancelling, Qualcomm’s S5 Sound Gen 2 platform and a 42mm diameter. Ultra-low latency bodes well for AR lovers, too. They also fitted snugly and comfortably in my ears, making them a rarity for true wireless earbuds in my experience. Sennheiser released two other products at CES. The Accentum Plus slots into the mid-range for ANC headphones at $399, while the $199 Momentum Sport earbuds include a heart-rate and body temperature sensor to effectively replace the heart strap for athletes. Tim Danton Xreal Air 2 Ultra PRICE US$699 AVAILABLE Now AR glasses were something of a spectacle at CES 2024, with dozens of stands thrusting a pair of goggles into your face. We didn’t come across any better than the Xreal Air 2 Ultra, though. This new set of Xreal specs adds hand tracking, meaning you can point at interface items and “click” your thumb and forefinger together to open them. This is all held together by Xreal’s custom interface, which makes it simple to play videos, stream music or interact with friends. The 80g glasses are nowhere near as heavy or all-encompassing as the Apple Vision Pro headset, but you can press a button on the side to toggle background transparency levels to put you back in the room. Resolution is decent at 1080p in each eye, and a 120Hz refresh rate will please most gamers. The drawback is that the “spatial computing” features currently only work with limited Samsung S22 or S23 handsets, but screen mirroring is available for the full gamut of PCs, Macs, phones and consoles. They’ll cost US$699 after the initial launch discount. Barry Collins MARCH 2024 APC MAGAZINE 57

ASSISTIVE & WELLNESS Ximira PHINIX PRICE TBC AVAILABLE TBC Some of the most exciting uses of AI and machine vision is in the area of support for people living with disabilities such as blindness. Ximira is working on a platform called PHINIX (Perceptive Helper with Intelligent Navigation and Intuitive eXperience), which currently looks like an enhanced backpack. A Framework laptop motherboard and storage sit inside, wrapped in a plastic case, with cameras mounted on the backpack’s straps plus headphones for the wearer. PHINIX uses AI to recognise the scene around the user and to describe it clearly – alerting you to pedestrians and street furniture, for example – and it can also use facial recognition to identify nearby friends. It’s early days for this project, but the potential is significant. Jon Honeyball Withings BeamO PRICE $449 AVAILABLE H1 2024 The Withings BeamO is a one-device medical check-up. About the size of an Apple TV remote, it can measure your body temperature, your blood oxygen level, provide a “medical-grade” electrocardiogram to check for heart abnormalities, and includes a digital stethoscope for listening to the heart and lungs. Withings reps claimed it would be easy to share all this captured data with your doctor, although we doubt many GPs are suitably equipped to take its live readings. Still, it can generate a PDF of your recent metrics, if you need to give the doc a less high-tech readout of your results. The $449 price tag shouldn’t induce a heart attack, either. Barry Collins EssilorLuxottica Nuance Audio PRICE N/A AVAILABLE H2 2024 EssilorLuxottica is a big name (in every way) in eyecare, owning a retail network of 18,000 stores across 150 countries. Last year it snapped up Nuance Hearing, and this is the result: a pair of glasses developed to help those with “mild or moderate hearing loss”. Say you’re in a restaurant: the front-mounted cameras will detect who you’re looking at, with the Nuance-developed algorithms then amplifying and enhancing the speaker’s voice. The result is discreetly beamed straight into your ears via speakers mounted into the stems. It’s a clever concept, and it did work when I tried them on in the demo, but I would warn against expecting miracles. But you can try them for yourself later this year. Tim Danton Baracoda BMind PRICE TBC AVAILABLE TBC Looking like something straight out of a sci-fi movie, the BMind smart mirror could well be a glimpse into the bathrooms of the future. Powered by generative AI, it offers personalised recommendations based on your mental state, all read by a built-in camera that can read facial expressions (and remember individuals, to keep user history private). For example, by sensing that you’re feeling down, it can use a series of light therapy techniques or run suitable mindfulness exercises – all provided through Baracoda’s CareOS interface and programs from ThrivePal. It can also offer physical assistance with tools such as guided toothbrush coaching, while skin analysis means it can make recommendations for how to, say, reduce redness in your face (or increase it, should you be looking Snow White). If it works as well as BMind claims, it could prove to be the next step in the evolution of virtual assistants. And hopefully not the start of an episode of Black Mirror.Rowan Campbell 58 APC MAGAZINE MARCH 2024

RANDOM Clicks Keyboard PRICE US$139 AVAILABLE Now (some models) It’s almost impossible nowadays to find a modern smartphone with a real physical keyboard, but from what few devices are available it’s even harder to find a high-end product in that range. It’s that gap that Clicks aims to fill. If you write a lot of messages, miss the tactile feeling of a proper keyboard or even if you’re just sick of typos, Clicks gives you a smart new way to type that notably frees up a ton of screen space and creates new handy shortcuts to use. It fetches quite the price at US$139, but matches the price by offering a premium feel for your iPhone. The case itself has a backlight, and it comes in a London Sky blue or in a striking BumbleBee yellow that will be sure to attract glances from curious keyboard newbs and old-school BlackBerry fans alike. The case Clicks is making for the return of physical keyboards is strong, but at such a hefty price I’m not sure that the premium branding will be enough to sell it to the wider market of Apple users who aren’t just in it for the nostalgia factor. Rowan Campbell Unistellar Odyssey and Odyssey Pro PRICE From $3,700 AVAILABLE Now How many people have telescopes tucked away in the loft because they simply couldn’t find anything interesting to gawp at in the night sky? The Unistellar Odyssey and Odyssey Pro aim to eliminate that struggle by using an accompanying smartphone app to automatically point the telescope at that night’s essential viewing, even displaying the results on your smartphone/tablet screen. If you want to view the action directly, the Odyssey Pro comes with a conventional telescope eyepiece, although we found it a little small. Improved optics in this model should make it easier to see both planets and deep sky objects such as nebulae from the Odyssey, even in light-polluted inner-city areas. At $3,700 for the plain Odyssey, let’s hope there’s plenty to look at, as you won’t be able to afford a night out for a while. Barry Collins Custo Smart Mailbox PRICE From €1,299 AVAILABLE Now A big black box in the middle of the showfloor? How could I not stop to chat, and I’m glad I did as this is exactly what I’m looking for. Think of the Custom Smart Mailbox as Amazon Lockers but for a small collection of houses, much like my cul-de-sac, in fact. It asks couriers to scan the barcode on their package; then the door opens and it can be securely dropped. From the barcode data, Custo informs the supplier that the item has been delivered. Ideally a company such as Ring would have such a unit to go along with its smart doorbells, but for the time being Custo might be the answer. It’s not cheap at €1,599 for the larger, chest-high unit and €1,299 for the smaller one, but that’s an affordable price for a cluster of homes to buy together. Jon Honeyball Aegis Rider PRICE Not stated AVAILABLE Winter 2024 Putting a heads-up display in the eyeline of a motorbike rider has been a long-term goal of many vendors. BMW, famous for its motorbike division, showed a HUD facility some years ago, but it never came to market – perhaps because putting fixed hardware that close to the rider’s eyes is a safety hazard. However, Aegis Rider is working to fix that problem, offering a full HUD display that can be either mounted directly within the helmet or mounted on smart glasses that are worn within the helmet. The company told me it would have product ready to ship in the summer, although the price won’t be cheap. Nevertheless, such capabilities will have a market, and maybe it’s time for the mainstream vendors to look at this area again. Jon Honeyball Swarovski AX Visio PRICE $6,540 AVAILABLE February 2024 It seems like AI is trying to sneak into everything these days, wanted or not, but in this case I think it may actually belong. You can use these high-end binoculars not only to take digital photos with, but also identify what you’re looking at using AI recognition software. The neural processing unit in these binoculars is similar to what you get in the latest phones, and has been trained to identify 9,000 species of birds, making bird-watching more accessible to the layman than ever. Simply look through the AX Visio like any other pair of binoculars, and when you see a mystery bird, press a button on the side that will show a red circle in your vision. Get your bird into this circle, and its name will appear underneath. While the product itself is amazing, it does lead me to wonder whether there are in fact birdwatchers out there who are willing to dish out $6,540 on a pair of binoculars that would need the birds identified for them. Rowan Campbell MARCH 2024 APC MAGAZINE 59

60 APC MAGAZINE MARCH 2024 If ever a decade introduced Australian consumers to a new technology revolution, it was the 1970s. Yet despite the world witnessing humans walking on the moon less than six months earlier, the decade started inauspiciously enough – and in Australia, in black-and-white no less. The only entertainment television provided was free-to-air broadcasts and due their unique voltage/power requirements, many new televisions were still driven by electronic valves. However, by the end of the 1970s, Australians would be playing computer games, watching their favourite movies whenever they liked – and doing it all in glorious colour. But not everyone finished the decade a winner. The Battle for Australian Colour TV Much in the same way WWII delayed television’s arrival in Australia, so too the Vietnam War delayed Australia’s switch to colour TV – as the late Bruce Gyngell put it in a 1998 interview quoting former Prime Minister William McMahon, ‘frankly, Standards of national pride Meanwhile, the French already had the highest resolution in the world, thanks to Henri de France’s 819-TV line masterpiece. Not long after the U.S. began colour transmission, France began work on colour in 1956, formalising the SECAM I colour standard in 1961. SECAM stands for ‘SEquential Colour And Memory’ and it’s said that having the highest TV standard was a source of French pride. But when the European Economic Community in 1963 voted to rationalise TV standards and settle on 625 TV lines for the introduction of colour, SECAM I had to be scrapped. Not surprisingly, the French may have had to accept 625 TV-line resolution, but they certainly weren’t going to cop the colour standard from another country. So, SECAM III became France’s new 625-line colour TV standard in 1965, overcoming the NTSC phase-shift issue. At the same time, the Germans were also pioneering their own colour TV framework. Engineer Walter Bruch, who had developed the CCIR-B system Australia adopted for our original television standard in 1953, developed a new method to overcome NTSC’s colour phase-error. In a complex process, an analog broadcast colour TV video signal essentially has the colour information tacked onto a monochrome signal (this [given] the Australian economy, we can’t afford to be in Vietnam and in colour’ (https://www.nfsa.gov.au/latest/ colour-tv-part-1). Nevertheless, the switch to colour would never be a ‘quick fix’ – the first step was to decide which colour format Australia should adopt. Colour television began in the U.S. in 1954 and TV manufacturers had been displaying their wares to Australian decision-makers since the early-1960s. However, Australia was in no hurry and would carefully ensure it backed the right horse when choosing our colour TV standard. The U.S. National Television Standards Committee (NTSC) devised the first colour format, with RCA producing the first colour television in 1954. Unfortunately, NTSC colour suffered from an issue that resulted in subtle colour variations due to the time-delay or ‘phase-shift’ between the colour video signal and the reference ‘subcarrier burst’ signal. Consequently, early NTSC TVs came with a ‘tint’ control to allow the user to correct the colour tone and in technical circles, it gained the moniker ‘Never Twice (the) Same Color’. A Vision to Behold: The Story of Electronic Displays Part 5: See it in colour. “ A key requirement was the need for existing B&W TVs to still work – Australia’s first example of ‘backward-compatibility’. ” It was the decade of disco, but in Australia, it was also of colour television, home computers and movies at home. The centre of this entertainment revolution was the television, Darren Yates writes. 1

FEATURE | A VISION TO BEHOLD MARCH 2024 APC MAGAZINE 61 prices. Others see it as the beginning of the end for the Australian electronics manufacturing industry, with at least one account claiming that by 1980, employment in Australian manufacturing had fallen by 80,000. Colour TV industry in Australia Nevertheless, local colour TV manufacturing did begin during the early-1970s, with many famous brands of the era setting up manufacturing and assembly plants. Electronics giant Philips produced colour cathode-ray tubes (CRTs) and complete televisions in its new factory in Clayton, Victoria, while Japanese brand Sanyo set up its own manufacturing base in the border-town of Wodonga. The famed Australian electronics manufacturer 1 The Philips PM5544 test pattern was used by TV manufacturers and TV studios to test colour TV (Image credit: n.v. Philips’ Gloeilampenfabrieken, Eindhoven, the Netherlands) 2 Sony launched the Betamax VCR in May 1975 (Image credit: Public Domain) 3 The Shintom DDV8000 was a very rare double-decked VHS recorder (Image credit: kalleboo, CC BY 2.0). 4 Rank Arena was a major player in the Australian colour TV market (Image credit: Public Domain) 5 Like all TVs of the era, this 1970 European Sony Trinitron features a timber surround frame (Image credit: The Science Musuem UK, CC BY 4.0). Import tariff cuts overnight However, McMahon didn’t survive the 1972 federal election and Gough Whitlam led the Australian Labor Party to power for the first time since the 1940s. One of Whitlam’s first acts was to launch a parliamentary inquiry into colour television in late-1972, particularly the issue of tariff protections. However, the subsequent decision of the Whitlam Government to unilaterally cut import tariffs by 25% overnight on 18 July 1973 caught the business community unaware – there was no consultation, no phase-in period. How you view that decision today really depends in which camp you belong. Some see it as the decision we had to have, with the aim to reduce inflation (14% at the time) and open Australia to global competition and lower 2 3 4 5 was to allow older black-and-white TVs to remain in service and display the same video in B&W). Bruch figured out that NTSC’s colour phase-shift issue could be largely neutralised by swapping or ‘alternating’ the phase of the colour signal component after each TV line. Bruch’s employer, Telefunken, patented this system in 1962 as ‘Phase Alternation Line’, which became known to all of us as ‘PAL’. Australia decides Attempts to create a global colour TV standard in the 1960s failed and by 1966, these three competing systems were in front of Australia’s Postmaster-General, Alan Hulme. Following investigations by the Australian Broadcasting Control Board and its Technical Services Division, then directed by S. F. Brownless, it was announced in February 1969 that Australia would adopt the PAL colour standard. In reality, it was a bit of a ‘Hobson’s choice’. A key requirement was the need for existing B&W TVs to still work – Australia’s first example of ‘backward-compatibility’. That immediately bumped out a switch to NTSC. The BBC had begun broadcasting colour TV in 1967 using the PAL system – that meant it was readily available, which would further aid in reducing costs. PAL was also more technically advanced than SECAM. Nevertheless, it would still take another six years before Australia switched onto colour television. Indeed, choosing the standard would be a far simpler task than building a local colour television industry. With the decision made, ABC’s ABN2 station at Gore Hill in Sydney’s north began receiving colour studio monitors in early-1970 (an ABC broadcast technician relayed the story of how staff were able to watch the Apollo 14 moon landing in colour through the studio monitor and their own signal-switching tech built in-house). As the flow of new colour transmission technology continued to roll into the Gore Hill studios over the coming months, then-Prime Minister William McMahon announcing in February 1972 that ‘C-Day’ would be 1 March 1975.

FEATURE | A VISION TO BEHOLD 62 APC MAGAZINE MARCH 2024 Amalgamated Wireless Australasia (AWA) teamed up with British TV stalwart Thorn in 1973, producing colour CRTs in its Ashfield factory in Sydney’s inner-west. Then-Prime Minister Gough Whitlam opened the new Rank Arena-NEC joint-venture factory in Penrith in Sydney’s west in 1974. Within the first year of colour TV transmissions, more than 40 colour TV models of all makes were available to consumers and by 1976, Rank Arena had 17% of the local colour TV market. It couldn’t last However, despite the glitz and glamour of ‘C-Day’ and the high demand for colour TVs, local manufacturing could not compete with lower-priced imports and it wasn’t long before the factory closures began. The first to go was the AWA-owned ‘Amalgamated Wireless Valve’ factory in Ashfield. It ceased making TVs in late-1975, with AWA-Thorn TVs soon imported from Japan’s Mitsubishi Electric. By 1984, Mitsubishi Electric had taken over the AWA-Thorn venture and today, AWA is an ICT services company. Philips expanded the Clayton factory in 1979, but would cease making TVs and eventually sell the factory to Hoover in the mid-1980s (Hoover made ‘Admiral’ fridges there). Meanwhile, the Sanyo Wodonga factory assembled some 350,000 colour TVs within its first ten years, but by 1987, this factory, too, had closed doors. Other famous Australian brands such as Healing and Kriesler would disappear altogether by 1980. However, the Rank Arena-NEC factory opened by Gough Whitlam managed to survive, changing hands over the years until its final owners, Panasonic AVC Networks, could no longer compete with booming LCD and plasma TV imports. The Penrith factory, Australia’s last local TV factory, closed in March 2006. Some argue that global economic conditions at the time contributed more to the decline in Australian electronics manufacturing than the tariff reductions, although few who worked in the factories would agree. Many who voice their opinions 1 Colour TVs started out with just a single aerial input… (Image credit: PantheraLeo 1359531, CC BY 4.0) 2 Inside the JVC Victor HR-3300 VHS VCR, launched in September 1976. The cylindrical helical-scan head block is just above the cassette bay (Image credit: Groink, CC BY-SA 3.0) 3 The Commodore VIC-20 was one of the first home computers to feature composite-video output (Image credit: Public Domain). 4 Philips launched the first consumer VCR, the N1500 series in September 1971 (Public Domain). 2 3 “Despite the glitz and glamour of ‘C-Day’ and the high demand for colour TVs, local manufacturing could not compete with lower- priced imports and it wasn’t long before the factory closures began.” 1 2 3

FEATURE | A VISION TO BEHOLD MARCH 2024 APC MAGAZINE 63 Next time We gate-crash the 1980s and 90s, the era that cemented colour television as the home entertainment centre of the universe. From the PC to DVD and the first plasma and LCD televisions, it was the era when the audience took control. See you then. online are not shy as to where the blame lies. The reality is almost certainly that if the tariff cuts didn’t contribute, then they definitely didn’t help. Watch movies any time What made the 1970s unique was the intersection of technologies that all reached maturity at more or less the same time. Television had been around for near on 50 years, yet the idea you could do anything else with it, apart from watching free-to-air broadcasts, still hadn’t reached criticalmass. While the first video recorder made its mark in 1956, huge reels of two-inch (5cm) wide video tape weren’t exactly ‘consumerfriendly’. In 1963, Philips had solved the similar issue for audio-tape with the release of the ‘compact cassette’ and in 1972, it launched what is considered the world’s first ‘successful’ video cassette recorder (VCR) in the N1500 series. With mechanical piano-style function keys, wooden side panels and mechanical clock/timer, there was room for improvement, which Philips achieved in the next few years. Yet, the N1500’s success was moderate and couldn’t survive the Sony/JVC onslaught to come. That onslaught began in 1975 with the launch of the Sony Betamax, followed closely by the JVC ‘VHS’ (Video Home System) in September 1976. With no compatibility between them, the VCR ‘format war’ had begun. There are numerous reasons why Sony and JVC both had huge success with their respective VCRs (yes, Betamax was a success – Sony shipped in excess of 18 million, not including the professional ‘Betacam’ spin-offs). First, Sony and JVC had Philips to pave the way and kick-start interest, giving Sony and JVC a head-start. Second, the first decks operated like audio cassette decks – building on that familiarity lowered the barrier to entry. On top of that, both video-cassette formats looked just like an oversized audio cassette – again, familiarity. Throw in up to three hours’ recording time and you could fit almost any movie with ads onto one tape (by contrast, the N1500 maxed out at 60 minutes’ recording time with the initial models). But the most valuable features were the built-in tuner and RF modulator – with virtually all consumer TVs only featuring a single aerial input, adding a built-in TV tuner meant users could record independent of the TV and the RFmodulator meant their lone aerial input could still receive free-to-air broadcasts, but also view their tapes by turning to the appropriate VHF channel (typically 0 or 1). This would be a path followed by the next home entertainment revolution. The Home Computer We’ve covered Australia’s pioneering role in home computers in a previous series, but even those halcyon days of 1977 didn’t actually change things for Australian lounge-rooms. The Commodore PET, the Apple II and Tandy TRS80 Model I were all sold with their own monitors and it wasn’t until the arrival of what you might call the ‘second-generation’ of home computers in the Tandy TRS-80 Colour Computer, TI 99/4 and the Commodore VIC-20 between 1979 and 1981 that plugging a computer into your television became more common-place. The aerial input was still the only port on TVs of the era and it wasn’t until computer makers produced PAL-standard RF modulators that Australia could enjoy the home computer revolution. However, with only the single RF/aerial input, your TV now required you to swap cables between your VCR and home computer every time you wanted to change over. Manufacturers soon supplied aerial switching boxes, however, local RFmodulated video quality wasn’t as good as free-to-air TV, but given the low-resolution output of home computers at the time, it was good enough. It wasn’t until the 1980s that TV manufacturers began to catch up and offered a composite-video input. These ports were highly coveted (at least in our house). In fact, if your computer had a composite-video output, you could plug that into your VCR’s composite-input and connect the VCR’s composite-output to the TV’s composite-in port, essentially ‘daisy-chaining’ it all together. You had to ‘double-shuffle’ remotes with your VCR and TV, but it meant no more diving behind the TV to find the right cables. The search for quality By decade’s end, VCRs and home computers had given consumers an appetite not just for more inputs, but for better image quality. RF-modulated video and composite-video both suffered to varying extents from the fact that they combined the luminance (the ‘brightness’ component of the video) with the chrominance (or ‘colour’) part and were known as ‘two-wire’ systems. Professional video had long separated these two components to enjoy higher video quality. In 1979, the Atari 800 home computer became the first model to offer separate chroma and luminance video signals. However, with no consumer TV at the time having the option to accept the separate signals, little was initially made of it. Nevertheless, the next two decades would be an endless march towards ever improving port options, audio quality and image definition. 4 The right DIN plug of the 1984 Commodore Plus/4 home computer featured S-Video and Composite-video output (Image credit: Public Domain).

Make AI work for you 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 of formidable features, most of them hidden from those who don’t subscribe to ChatGPT Plus. It’s worth doing, even if only for a month, so you can evaluate the sheer power that lurks here and work out if it could make a difference to your life. ChatGPT Plus can perform hugely sophisticated data analysis, saving you from having to spend time learning how to do it yourself in applications such as Excel. It can tidy up your computer code, your emails or your PowerPoint presentations. It can hook into third-party services to plan holidays, book restaurants or scour for facts on your behalf. And that’s before we get to ChatGPT Plus’ most impressive feature: GPTs. These are mini-chatbots, personalised to a specific task that you define. They can help you to cook dinner, organise a marketing plan, create graphics for social media or learn CSS. At the risk of tipping into hyperbole, there are virtually limitless applications for GPTs, and you can create and train them without having to bash out a single line of code. They’re made with plain English commands and can be trained on your own data, so that they’re highly personalised to you or your business. In this feature, we’ll guide you through how to master ChatGPT and GPTs, unlocking the potential of the AI assistant, with practical hands-on tips and advice. Want to get more from the best-known AI service on the planet? Barry Collinsshows you how to make AI work for you. FEATURE | CHATGPT MASTERCLASS 64 APC MAGAZINE MARCH 2024

LEFT Plugins allow you to combine ChatGPT with third-party services. BELOW ChatGPT helped produce results for customer service awards. There can’t be an APC reader out there who hasn’t spent at least ten minutes noodling with ChatGPT – or one of its many derivatives, such as the Bing Copilot. While there’s plenty of AI power and much to explore with the free version of ChatGPT, the real power is unlocked when you subscribe to ChatGPT Plus. Not only does that (largely) ensure you can get access to the chatbot during the regular periods of peak demand where the free version is switched off, it also opens up extra features such as plugins and advanced data analysis. Let’s look into those two features in greater detail. Plugins Plugins allow you to combine the intelligence of ChatGPT with third-party sites or services, such as Wikipedia, WolframAlpha or OpenTable. For example, you could ask the AI to create a summary of a long article you’ve found on Wikipedia or use it to research facts. And it goes further. Ask ChatGPT to “give me the release dates of the past five versions of Windows from Wikipedia” and it will even dig out the correct answers from the online encyclopedia, without you having to wade through different articles yourself. With the Expedia plugin, on the other hand, you can ask the AI to do things such as create a three-day trip to Oslo for you, and it will come back with hotel and flight recommendations that suit your budget. It’s not perfect: it sometimes gets trip dates wrong when you click through to book flights, for instance, and it only deals with the US site, but it’s good for generating ideas and rough budgets. Irritatingly, you can only enable three plugins at a time and the Plugin Store is poorly presented and erratic. Often plugins don’t install at the first time of asking, for example. It’s a work in progress, but one that holds tremendous promise if it can be made to work more smoothly. Advanced data analysis This is arguably the best feature of ChatGPT Plus, although you may still need to dive into Settings | Beta features and switch it on first. Advanced data analysis lets you upload spreadsheets and other files and get the AI to do the hard graft that you might normally do in Excel. For example, we fed ChatGPT Plus raw survey data from the PC Pro awards in an Excel workbook. Each tab represented a different awards category, and the AI automatically figured this out, but checked this with us to ensure it was making the correct assumption. Once it had worked out the format, we could ask it to produce graphs showing each company’s performance in different categories or to tell us how company A fared against company B in different categories. We could also use it to calculate different weightings for each category, for example giving “very satisfied” responses a +2 weighting, but mere “satisfied” a +1, to see what effect that had on the overall results. All of this could be done in Excel, but only if you have the skills with pivot tables or can apply the relevant formulae. Advanced data analysis lets you do all this with plain English commands, and the results are much more reliable than they are with general chats. There are no hallucinations (at least none that we’ve seen), and it will tell you if it can’t perform a particular request or  needs more guidance on what you’re looking for. ChatGPT prompt engineering tips Although AI services such as ChatGPT are growing ever more intelligent and are remarkably capable at determining intent, there are techniques you can apply to guarantee faster, more accurate results. This so-called prompt engineering is often sneered at in tech circles, but knowing how to get the best results from AI tools is a skill – one that can pay handsomely, too, if you check the job ads. We’ve only got space to cover the raw basics here, but even these tips should help improve your hit rate with services such as ChatGPT. There are different types of prompt, the most basic of which is known as zero-shot prompt. This is basically where you give the AI a task without any clues as to the type of output you’re seeking. For example: Tell me the sentiment of the following social media post: the latest issue of APC was one of the best in years When we entered that into ChatGPT, it correctly identified it as positive. Of course you don’t need an AI assistant to tell you that, but now imagine that you’re pasting 3,000 of these social media sentiments into a spreadsheet and want to tell how many are positive – that’s a job AI will perform far more MASTERING CHATGPT FEATURE | CHATGPT MASTERCLASS MARCH 2024 APC MAGAZINE 65

RIGHT Meet the new boss, same as the old boss: Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO OpenAI, ChatGPT, GPT-4, GPT... you almost need an AI assistant to stay on top of the many confusing terms that the AI industry generates. Just to clear things up: OpenAI is the company that created ChatGPT, the infamous chatbot that’s generated more column inches than Elon Musk over the past year (heck, it’s probably written a fair few of those column inches itself). ChatGPT is partly based on the GPT-4 large language model (LLM), which OpenAI released in 2023. And a GPT is effectively a mini-version of ChatGPT, dedicated to a specific task, such as helping you plan a gap year or how to use a piece of software. You don’t need any coding skills to create a GPT. They can be created using plain English commands given to ChatGPT. That doesn’t mean there aren’t particular skills and techniques you can apply to getting the best out of them or training them better, as we reveal in our step-by-step guide. The key with GPTs is thinking of a very specific task that could benefit from AI assistance. It might be helping you to formulate your company’s annual report or buffing your Python 3.12 skills, but the more specific the better. It’s also worth noting that you can upload files or documents to GPTs to help with their training. Let’s say, for example, you’ve treated yourself to a Canon EOS R50 camera and want to learn how to better use its numerous features and functions. You can upload the PDF of the camera’s official manual to a GPT and then use your AI assistant to guide you when you want to find out how to change the flash settings or activate the self-timer. That means the AI is less reliant on the unreliable information it might otherwise source online. At a more advanced level, you can even connect a GPT to a third-party service such as Zapier and use it to query other services, such as your Google Calendar. We haven’t got space in this issue of APC to go into setting up these quite advanced features here, but it’s something we may return to in a future issue. Zapier has advice on how to set these up at zapier.com/blog/gptassistant. quickly than any human.To help improve the accuracy of results, you could give the AI clearer instructions of the output you’re looking for and provide examples. This is called a few-shot prompt. So, to elaborate on the example above, we might enter the following few-shot prompt: Tell me the sentiment of the following social media post and categorise it as either positive, neutral or negative. Here are some examples: The latest issue of APC was one of the best in years. Answer: positive Chris Szewczyk couldn’t write a bus ticket. Answer: negative The Labs was good, but I didn’t get much from features. Answer: neutral Here we not only define what output we’re seeking (positive, neutral or negative), but we give the AI something to go on with supplied examples. These are, of course, very basic examples that any AI model should be able to determine on its own, but you can apply the same technique to far more complex, nuanced scenarios where the answer might not be as clear-cut to help improve your results. In the example above, ChatGPT rightly identified the third example as neutral – it contained good and bad feedback. So now you could let it loose on a spreadsheet of many thousands of lines of feedback via advanced data analysis and let it work out the sentiment expressed in each, giving you quantitative results from qualitative data that would normally require human grunt work (in other words, how many of these social media comments on the latest issue of APC are positive?) Chain of thought prompting is another technique that can help avoid errors. Here you’re asking the AI to think through its answers step-by-step, to show its working, if you like. For example, you might ask: I’ve been offered two loans, each for $100,000, repayable over three years. The loan from ANZ has a 4.5% APR and an arrangement fee of $500. The loan from Westpac has a 4.9% APR and an arrangement fee of $600. Which has the cheapest overall cost? Think step-by-step and show your working. When we first entered this into ChatGPT Plus, it gave us a long set of workings, but that revealed its WHAT ARE GPTs? answer was based on annual payments, and not the monthly payment terms that most loans are based on. To confirm, we asked: Are you assuming payments are made monthly? It then went off and calculated the correct figures, answering that the ANZ loan would be around $800 cheaper over the three-year term (it provided more detailed answers than this). There are a few key lessons, then: 1 Be as precise as possible with your initial prompt (for example, using “APR” rather than just “interest rate”). 2 Get the AI to show its working, so that you’ve got a better chance of spotting mistakes, misassumptions or hallucinations (stuff it’s made up). 3 Challenge the AI on its methodology, so that you can be as sure as possible that the answers you’re getting are correct. FEATURE | CHATGPT MASTERCLASS 66 APC MAGAZINE MARCH 2024

1 Follow a brand guide If your company has a brand guide that must be applied to all of your internal and external comms, you can upload the guide to a GPT and then paste in documents, assets and suchlike before they’re published to check that they comply with the brand guide. The AI can even rewrite the copy for you, although proceed with caution here. 2 Help with homework If you’ve long since forgotten the difference between an abstract noun and a concrete noun, or are a bit fuzzy on the purpose of a coordinating conjunction, you might struggle to help the kids with their English homework. Instead, create a GPT, ask it to explain everything in terms a 12-year-old can grasp, and fire questions into your new AI assistant to overcome the homework hurdles. 3 Generate website images Need some stock imagery for a website you’re creating? GPTs can create AI art, too, using the DALLE 3 engine, which has come on in leaps and bounds recently. Tell the GPT what kind of website it is, the artistic style you prefer, what to avoid, and it should be much easier than trying to generate unique images every time with DALLE 3 alone. 4 Master complex games It’s easy to get lost in complex video games such as Crusader Kings III or Civilization VI, not really understanding what’s going on. On a less techie bent, maybe you’ve always fancied learning bridge or chess, but can’t make head nor tail of those symbols they publish in the newspaper puzzles. A GPT can help you learn and strategise in a particular game. Previous answers are always stored, so you can use the GPT as a reference library. 5 Deliver new data insights Finally that spreadsheet you’ve kept of your weather station readings for the past 12 years is going to come in useful! GPTs can be used to generate data insights and visualisations for specific projects. Tell the GPT what kind of analysis or graphical output you require, regularly feed it new data, and watch it do the leg work. 6 different things you can do with GPTs Finally that spreadsheet you’ve kept of your weather station readings for the past 12 years is going to come in useful! ABOVE Don’t get mad with irate customers – use a GPT to get even. LEFT A GPT is likely to be more helpful with the kids’ homework than you. BELOW GPTs can create stunning AI artwork using the DALLE 3 engine. 6 Handle rude customers If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of rude emails from stroppy readers – sorry, I mean customers – then it can be hard to resist the temptation to fire a stream of invective back. However, you can let the AI do it for you. Train the GPT on the kind of conciliatory tone you want to set in professional replies, tell it what you want to say to the customer in bullet point form, and let the AI add the calming balm. FEATURE | CHATGPT MASTERCLASS MARCH 2024 APC MAGAZINE 67

CREATE A GPT: Step by step Here we’re going to show you how to create a GPT that acts as a virtual assistant for Adobe Photoshop, providing step-by-step instructions on how to perform complicated tasks. It’s just one of many different types of GPT you can create, and the guide below is not intended to be definitive – you’ll need to mould your own GPTs to your particular needs. However, our guide will give you tips on how to create GPTs, how to test they’re working properly, how to provide feedback when they’re not, and how to tweak their performance as you go along. CREATE A NEW GPT To create a GPT you’ll need to be a GPT Plus subscriber (US$20 per month at the time of writing). Once you’re in the ChatGPT Plus interface, hit the Explore button that should appear in the top left-hand corner of the screen and you should see a selection of GPTs already created by OpenAI to give you a flavour of the kind of tasks they can perform. To make your own, hit the Create a GPT button at the top of the screen. DEFINE THE GPT’S ROLE When you create a GPT, you interact with the chatbot on the left, telling it what you want, while in the right-hand pane it builds a demo of your GPT that you can eventually test. First, ChatGPT will ask what you want the GPT to do and here it pays to be succinct but specific. For example, we tell ChatGPT that we want to build an assistant for “Adobe Photoshop 2024”, not just “Photoshop”, so it knows we want answers tailored to that version. We could have been even more specific and said for Windows rather than Mac, for example, so that keyboard shortcut instructions were issued correctly, but we’ll show you how to make such changes later. GIVE IT A NAME AND ICON ChatGPT will automatically suggest a name for your new GPT and even use the DALLE 3 image-generation engine to design an icon for it as well. If you don’t like the name it suggests, you can simply write your own. If the icon’s naff, you can ask it to have another go, or describe what you’d like the icon to contain. GIVE YOUR GPT DIRECTION Now we begin to define how your GPT will act and respond. ChatGPT will ask you a series of questions about what you specifically want the GPT to do, how it should answer your questions and even which type of personality the chatbot should adopt. This is the time to start drilling down into specifics and being very clear about what you want the GPT to do and, just as importantly, not do. Below, for example, it’s asking for “the type” of humour we enjoy and we nip that in the bud quickly. We want instructions on how to use Photoshop, not a GPT-driven Michael McIntyre. This section can be quite confusing as the GPT often asks the next question before you’ve finished answering the previous one. Don’t get flustered. Just keep answering them one at a time and feel free to add extra instructions beyond what it’s asking for. 4 3 1 2 FEATURE | CHATGPT MASTERCLASS 68 APC MAGAZINE MARCH 2024

START TESTING Once you’ve laid down the basic ground rules for your GPT, it’s time to start testing in the “playground” pane on the right-hand side. Ask the GPT a question in that right-hand pane, not the left! It’s helpful at this stage if it’s something you already know the answer to, as it gives you a feel for whether the GPT is looking in the right sort of places for information or whether it needs more guidance. Answers should appear promptly, and if you don’t like the tone of the answers, it’s not explaining clearly enough, or it’s dumbing down, provide feedback in the left-hand pane so that ChatGPT can make adjustments to your GPT’s output. CORRECT BAD BEHAVIOUR As we were building our Photoshop Wizard, we pushed our luck a bit and asked ChatGPT if it would be possible to include screenshots with its answers to help us find the right icons. This is where we ran into one of ChatGPT’s (and AI in general’s) big problems: it makes stuff up. Literally, in this case. Instead of supplying screenshots it supplied a DALLE-generated image that showed a mangled Photoshop-like interface, which was about as much use as a thesaurus to a bricklayer. Make sure to put ChatGPT straight when it veers down the wrong path. In this case, we told it explicitly we don’t want to see screenshots in any future solutions. Again, make sure these instructions are submitted in the left-hand pane, not the right, or your GPT won’t learn. ASK FOLLOW-UP QUESTIONS Don’t just test your GPT with a series of one-off questions. Ask follow-ups to see how it reacts and, again, be prepared to issue corrections or advice if it veers off course. In this example, we’d followed our GPT’s instructions on how to replace a sky in an image, but when we went to save the image it wouldn’t let us save in the JPG format, even after flattening the layers (which is normally the cause of such problems). So we asked the GPT for follow-up advice and it delivered. The second suggestion on bit depth was actually the cause of the problem. Make sure you provide feedback in the left-hand pane, so the GPT knows when it’s getting stuff right as well as when it’s wrong. ADD FILES TO HELP TRAINING If you want to add your own data to train the GPT with, you can do so by clicking the Configure tab in the left-hand pane and selecting Upload Files. You can upload a variety of files including PDFs, Excel workbooks, Word documents, HTML files and more. If, for example, your company has brand guidelines, you could upload them here and create a GPT that ensured all of your marketing materials followed the rules. In our Photoshop Wizard example, we could upload a PDF software manual (if Adobe still produced such a thing) to help steer the GPT in the right direction. Back in the chat pane, you can also steer your GPT to particular websites if you think they’re a good source of information for your needs. GPTs have live access to the web, so they fetch the latest updates. Make sure you provide feedback on the left, so the GPT knows when it’s getting stuff right as well as when it’s wrong 5 6 7 8 FEATURE | CHATGPT MASTERCLASS MARCH 2024 APC MAGAZINE 69

TWEAK YOUR STARTERS FOR TEN Every GPT has four default questions available above the prompt bar, which you can edit from the Configure menu. This is a good place to enter a question you might ask repeatedly, saving you from having to type it afresh each time. For example, if you’ve created a GPT designed to scour news sites for mentions of your brand, you might have a default conversation starter that says: “Check the news sites for any new mentions of ABC Laptops today.” Simply delete these Conversation Starters if they’re never going to be of any use. PUT THE GPT LIVE Once you’ve given the GPT a thorough test and you’re relatively satisfied that it’s behaving itself, then it’s time to publish. Don’t worry if you’ve not got everything 100% nailed down at this point, as you can still tweak and reconfigure the GPT once it’s live. When you click that Save button in the top right-hand corner, you’re given three publishing options: Only Me, Only People With A Link and Public. Only Me means only you’ll have access to the GPT, which is ideal for GPTs you might have trained on confidential data (note – if you’re using GPTs for business, you really do need to interrogate the OpenAI privacy policies carefully and never upload sensitive information such as customer contact details to ChatGPT). Only People With A Link means you can share the GPT with other ChatGPT Plus subscribers. And Public means the GPT could appear in a forthcoming GPT Store that wasn’t available at the time of writing, but might even let you earn revenue from other people buying access to your GPT. 10 Don’t worry if you’ve not got everything 100% nailed down, as you can tweak and reconfigure the GPT once it’s live 9 EDIT YOUR GPT If you find you want to tweak your GPT’s behaviour once it’s live, it’s easy to do so. Click to open the GPT from the ChatGPT sidebar on the left and then click Edit GPT from the dropdown menu that appears. Now you’re back in the familiar setup interface, where you can issue commands on the left and test the GPT on the right. Here, for example, we could specify we want our GPT to issue instructions for the Mac version of Photoshop and it will adjust its behaviour accordingly. You can also upload more files here, if you want to add new data to help train the GPT. The key thing here is to press the Update button in the top-right-hand corner once you’ve finished editing. Even if the chatbot asks you if there’s anything more you want to change and you reply “no”, it won’t save any changes unless you press Update, which is an easy mistake to make. KEEP PUSHING IT Even once you’ve got your GPT published, keep pushing and prodding it, exploring its capabilities. For example, it’s easy to forget that you can query your GPT with uploaded files as well as upload files for training. Here, for example, we ask our GPT to give us instructions on how to copy a style of a portrait by uploading the image we want to copy and one we want to convert. The GPT understands what we’re asking and issues a largely accurate step-by-step answer that delivered a decent result. Keep exploring ways you can push the boundaries of your own creations. 12 11 FEATURE | CHATGPT MASTERCLASS 70 APC MAGAZINE MARCH 2024

FEATURE | WHAT YOU MUST CHANGE ON YOUTUBE 72 APC MAGAZINE MARCH 2024 As the second most popular website in the world (after Google, YouTube doesn’t need to make huge efforts to attract new viewers. However, in the last few years, it has seemed determined to annoy and alienate existing users, especially those who threaten its business model. The most notable and unwelcome change happened last October, when YouTube started banning ad blockers – despite having no strong objection to them for the first 18 years of its existence. Although most viewers understand that adverts help creators earn money from their content, a huge proportion of videos are shared on YouTube for free (often without copyright holders’ consent) – so who’s really profiting here? But ads aren’t the only problem. YouTube has become cluttered with irritating content such as its TikTok-style Shorts clips and increasingly pushy recommendations, which distract from rather than enhance your viewing experience. It also restricts useful features – such as avoiding ads, downloading videos and playing them in the background on your phone – to its Premium subscription, which recently increased its price to a wallet-stretching $16.99 per month. Fortunately, because we still think YouTube is the best video-streaming service, there are plenty of free tools that can fix its annoyances, omissions and restrictions. In this feature, we reveal expert ways to improve how you watch every video. Some of them beat YouTube’s restrictions, but we won’t tell if you won’t. Watching videos on YouTube has become a frustrating experience – unless you pay for its Premium plan. Robert Irvine reveals expert ways to improve your viewing for free. WHAT YOU CAN DO • 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 browser • Automatically play content in 4K resolution • Normalise the volume of YouTube videos on your phone • Customise YouTube’s layout and theme What you must change on

SECTION | WHAT YOU MUST CHANGE ON YOUTUBE MARCH 2024 APC MAGAZINE 73 1 Block annoying adverts Adverts are undoubtedly the biggest annoyance on YouTube and one that’s got considerably worse in the last year. They have become more frequent in videos on the YouTube website and mobile apps, and are now longer and often impossible to skip on smart TVs. Previously, you could avoid adverts in your browser by installing an ad blocker, but YouTube now detects and blocks such tools, because they “violate our Terms of Service”. Its clampdown means that if you want to continue watching videos, you need to either disable your ad blocker, add YouTube to its whitelist of allowed sites or stump up $16.99 a month for ad-free YouTube Premium. Whichever option you choose, Google rakes in revenue, while its users – who supply most of YouTube’s content for free – suffer increasingly irritating ads or pay over $200 a year to avoid them. Thankfully, there are still several free ways to block adverts on YouTube – or at least bypass them. The brilliant content-blocking extension uBlock Origin (https://ublockorigin.com/) regularly updates its filters to circumvent YouTube’s ever-tightening restrictions and continue blocking ads in videos. To refresh these filters, right-click the uBlock Origin toolbar button and select Options then Filters. Click the ‘Purge all caches’ button ( 1 in our screenshot below) and choose ‘Update now’ 2 . New extensions have also sprung up, which either fast-forward adverts or skip them as soon as the option is available. This not only helps them evade YouTube’s ad-blocker ban, but also means that content creators still get paid. Examples include Ad Accelerator (www.snipca. com/48757), which silently speeds through ads up to 10 times faster, and Skip Ad (www.snipca.com/48758), which skips them automatically. Both can be installed in any Chromium browser – for Firefox, try Automatic AdSkipper (www.snipca.com/48759). Another option is to use an alternative interface for YouTube, which doesn’t connect to Google’s advertising servers. The most popular option is Piped (https://piped.video/trending), a free website that lets you search YouTube and play videos in your browser, without seeing any ads or other annoyances. You can create playlists (see screenshot above) and subscribe to channels without registering for an account; view videos in picture-in-picture mode; share clips with other people; and read the original user comments from YouTube. FreeTube (https://freetubeapp.io/) is another fantastic front end for ad-free viewing, though it’s a desktop program rather than a website. To avoid adverts in YouTube videos on your Android phone or tablet, install the free app NewPipe (https://newpipe. net/), which uses the same technology as Piped. It’s not available from the Google Play Store, so you first need to download the alternative app store F-Droid (www. snipca.com/48761). If that sounds too fiddly – or too risky because you need to allow the installation of ‘unknown apps’ – visit Piped in your mobile browser, a trick that will also work on iPhones and iPads. You can enjoy YouTube without ads on your TV by installing the free app SmartTube (https://smarttubeapp. github.io/), which works on Google/ Android TV and Fire TV devices. Again, this isn’t available from official app stores, but full instructions are provided on its GitHub page at https://github. com/yuliskov/SmartTube. 2 Skip sponsored messages An increasing number of YouTube videos now feature lengthy sponsored messages from the creators, which promote and endorse the products and services of third-party companies. These sponsorships appear at the beginning or end of videos, and because they’re integrated with the main content, they’re able to bypass ad blockers. You can avoid many of these sponsored messages by installing the extension SponsorBlock (https://sponsor.ajay. app/), which is available for all the main browsers, and for Firefox and Safari on Android and iOS devices. This add-on skips sponsored intros and outros that it identifies from its database of more than 15 million ‘skip segments’ reported by users. Just make sure ‘Skipping is enabled’ is switched on (see screenshot below). SponsorBlock’s developer claims it now has more than 13 million users who have saved nearly 2,363 years between them by Make YouTube less annoying uBlock Origin regularly updates its filters to beat YouTube’s ad-blocking ban. Piped lets you watch YouTube videos and playlists without seeing any ads. SponsorBlock skips paid-for promotions that your ad blocker misses. 2 1

FEATURE | WHAT YOU MUST CHANGE ON YOUTUBE 74 APC MAGAZINE MARCH 2024 skipping sponsored messages. The extension can also block reminders to subscribe to creators’ channels, the non-music sections of music videos and “other annoying parts of YouTube videos”. It lets you whitelist YouTube channels you want to support through their paid-for promotions, or disable sponsorship-skipping temporarily. SponsorBlock is built into some alternative YouTube front-ends, including Piped, SmartTube and FreeTube. You can block subscription reminders without needing to install an add-on. Click your profile picture in the top-right corner of the YouTube site and choose Settings, then ‘Playback & performance’ and untick the ‘Info cards’ option. 3 Stop videos auto-playing Some people like the fact that YouTube automatically plays a related video when the current one finishes, because it saves you having to search for something else to watch. But, for many others, autoplaying videos are more of an annoyance than a convenience, because they drag you down a YouTube ‘rabbit hole’ and divert your attention from more important tasks. Autoplay is enabled by default for all YouTube users aged 18 and over, and will continue indefinitely on your PC or for four hours on a mobile device connected to Wi-Fi (half an hour on 4G/5G). Thankfully, you can switch it off by clicking the Auto-play switch in the controls along the bottom of the video player – the icon will change from a ‘play’ symbol to a ‘pause’ one. The same switch is available in the YouTube app for Android and iOS, but appears at the top of the video player. Another way to disable Autoplay on mobile devices is to tap the You tab in the bottom-right corner of the app’s home screen and select the Settings cog, then Auto-play. Switch off the ‘Mobile phone/tablet’ option under ‘Auto-play next video’ (see screenshot above right). You can also disable the setting in the YouTube app for smart TVs, to stop videos auto-playing on your telly. To prevent previews of videos from playing automatically when you hover your cursor over them, open the ‘Playback & performance’ settings on the YouTube website and switch off ‘Video previews’. In the mobile app, disable ‘Playback in feeds’ in the General settings, and on your smart TV change the Previews setting to Off. 4 Turn off recommendations Another way YouTube tries to keep you watching longer than you should is to recommend further videos to play as soon as you finish the current one. These suggestions are based on your viewing history, but don’t always reflect your tastes – and may compromise your privacy if you share your computer. To stop YouTube recommending videos, you need to turn off your watch history. Either click your profile picture on the YouTube website and choose ‘Your data in YouTube’ or open the Settings screen in the mobile app and select the option there. Click the arrow next to ‘On’ under YouTube Watch History, ensure the options ‘Include the YouTube videos that you watch’ and ‘Include your searches on YouTube’ are ticked, then click or tap ‘Turn off’ ( 1 in our screenshot above right), and select Pause. Next, choose ‘Manage history’ 2 and select ‘Delete all time’ in the Delete dropdown menu. This will wipe your watch history so YouTube can no longer use it to recommend videos. Last year, YouTube started showing a blank homepage when Watch History was disabled, but this has now been fixed. If YouTube still shows recommendations of ‘trending’ or random videos, install the extension Unhook in your Chromium browser (www.snipca. com/48769) or Firefox (www.snipca. com/48770). This hides all manner of distractions on the site, including recommendations in its sidebar and at the end of videos. Unhook is also available on Android devices as an add-on for the Firefox app. 5 Hide YouTube Shorts videos When YouTube started losing viewers to TikTok, it decided to copy the rival service’s short-video format by introducing Shorts. These clips now appear on its homepage and in your search results whether you want to watch them or not. Because Shorts only last up to 60 seconds and are in vertical ‘portrait’ format, they’re aimed more at younger viewers (and people with short attention spans) on phones than the typical PC user, which can make them more irritating than interesting. YouTube doesn’t give you the option to hide these videos, but there are some workarounds. Install the extension ‘YouTube-shorts block’ in your Chromium browser (www.snipca.com/48771) or Firefox (www.snipca.com/48772) and it will force Shorts videos to play in the standard YouTube player rather than portrait mode. Click the add-on’s toolbar button and switch on the option ‘Play the YouTube shorts video as if it were a normal video’, then either reload the page or click the Short to change its format. Alternatively, click the three-dot icon and choose ‘hide “shorts” tab’ and ‘hide shorts video’ (see screenshot below) to avoid seeing Shorts altogether – again you’ll need to refresh the tab. Note that the ‘hide shorts video’ option is still being tested, so may not always work. NewPipe was recently updated to include Shorts videos, but you can disable them by going to Settings then Content, tapping ‘Channel tabs’ and deselecting Shorts. Stop YouTube autoplaying videos on your mobile device for four hours. Turn off and wipe your watch history to stop YouTube recommending videos. ‘YouTube-shorts block’ lets you reformat Shorts videos or hide the feature. 1 2

FEATURE | WHAT YOU MUST CHANGE ON YOUTUBE MARCH 2024 APC MAGAZINE 75 6 Play only the audio from videos Although Google would prefer us to stream music on its YouTube Music service (https://music.youtube.com), most of us still use the main YouTube website to find and play old and new songs. But when you want to listen to music in the background, the accompanying videos can prove a distraction and resource hog. You can hide the visuals by installing Music Mode (www.snipca.com/48777) in your Chromium browser or Firefox (www.snipca.com/48778). This extension blocks all videos so that only the audio content is played. It can also hide thumbnail images and skip ads. To activate the add-on and switch YouTube to jukebox mode, either click its toolbar button and switch it on for the current tab, press Ctrl+M or click ‘Hide the video’ on the YouTube player’s controls (see screenshot below). Music Mode also works on YouTube Music and YouTube videos embedded on other sites. The YouTube interface Piped has this feature built in. Simply click the headphones icon on a video to listen without watching – though you’ll still see the video’s preview image. 7 Bookmark specific moments in videos YouTube lets you save a particular moment in a video by right-clicking it and choosing ‘Copy video URL at current time’. However, this relies on you remembering to paste the URL elsewhere, and can prove tiresome if you want to bookmark several moments. A much better idea is to install Bookmark It in your Chromium browser (www.snipca.com/48782) or Firefox (www.snipca.com/48783). This lets you save multiple moments in YouTube videos, and add notes to them to remind you why they’re interesting or important. To use Bookmark It, click its toolbar button and choose Log In/Register to sign up for a free account – you can use your Google account to save time. Start playing a YouTube video and, when you get to a good bit, press the ‘b’ key on your keyboard to create a bookmark and add a comment. Press ‘Enter’ to save or Esc to cancel. You can access your bookmark collection by clicking Bookmark It’s toolbar button and click its timestamps to revisit your saved moments in the relevant videos. Click ‘Delete’ to remove the bookmarks once you’re finished with them. 8 Download YouTube videos for free Apart from ad-free viewing, the main incentive to pay for YouTube Premium is the ability to download videos. This means you can save them to watch offline on your PC or mobile device, though – for copyright reasons – you can only play them through the YouTube website or app. YouTube now provides a Download button below every video, but clicking this just prompts you to subscribe to Premium – or try it for free for 30 days. Although YouTube has clamped down on third-party downloaders, and bans them from the Chrome Web Store and Google Play Store, there are still several ways to download videos for free. The usual caveats apply about downloading copyrighted material, get it from www. snipca.com/48773, but here are the main free options. First, you could use an online tool such as Yt1s (www.snipca.com/48774), which lets you simply copy and paste the URL of a YouTube video, then click Convert to download it in MP4 format (see screenshot top right). It’s basic but works well – for the moment, at least. Then there are desktop downloaders like 4K Video Downloader+ (www. snipca.com/48775), which have more features, formats and resolutions, though some options – such as downloading more than one video at a time – are usually limited to a paid-for version. ClipGrab is completely free, with no restrictions, but make sure you click the ‘Show all download options’ link, then the tiny ‘Download version without thirdparty offers’ link on its download page (www.snipca.com/48776) or it will be flagged as risky by your antivirus. When you first run the program, click Continue to install ‘youtube-dlp’, which enables ClipGrab to download YouTube videos. You can then search for content, or copy a YouTube URL, and click ‘Grab this clip’ (see screenshot below) to save it to your hard drive. Additionally, some alternative YouTube front-ends let you download videos to watch offline, including FreeTube on your PC and NewPipe on your Android phone or tablet. Just click the Download button below the video player and choose your preferred format and resolution – unlike on YouTube, you won’t be asked to pay. 9 Capture screenshots of videos Last year, Chrome and Edge introduced a rudimentary way to take screenshots of YouTube videos: right-click the video twice, select ‘Copy video frame’ and paste the result into an image editor. As this indicates that Google isn’t averse to allowing screen grabs of YouTube videos, we can only wonder why the option hasn’t been added to the website – presumably for the standard ‘copyright reasons’. The YouTube front-end Piped confirms that this would be easy to implement: it has a ‘Download frame’ button below each button, which you can click to save the currently displayed picture as a PNG file. But to get the feature on the official Add missing features to YouTube Yt1s lets you download YouTube videos without installing any software. ClipGrab is a speedy downloader – but ensure you install the junk-free version. Switch YouTube to jukebox mode by hiding videos and playing the audio.

Show SYDNEY 2024 BROUGHT TO YOU BY SAVE THE DATE 05-07 APRIL 2024 Building on the success of the Australian Hi-Fi Show 2023

FEATURE | WHAT YOU MUST CHANGE ON YOUTUBE MARCH 2024 APC MAGAZINE 77 YouTube website, you need to install a browser extension. The simplest is Screenshot YouTube Video for Chromium browsers (www. snipca.com/48785), which adds a ‘Take screenshot’ camera button to the YouTube video player’s controls (see screenshot right). Click this to capture and download a screenshot in JPEG format, which is handily labelled with the title of the video. For Firefox, try the similar YouTube Screenshot Button (www.snipca. com/48786), which lets you save screenshots as PNG or JPEG files. On your phone or tablet, you can take screengrabs of videos by playing them full-screen and using your device’s screenshot function – on most Android devices, press the Power and Volume Down buttons simultaneously; on an iPhone or iPad, press either Power and Volume Up, or Power and Home. 10 Summarise videos using AI When you’re seeking information from a YouTube video, but don’t have time to watch the whole thing, the simplest solution is to click the ‘Show transcript’ button in the description and peruse the text version. However, because these transcripts are merely time-stamped lists of the video’s closed captions, they can seem disjointed and difficult to read. To save time, you can use an AI tool to summarise the content of the video for you. Edge has just added this option to its Copilot assistant, Brave’s new Leo chatbot offers the feature and Google’s Bard tool is now able to “understand YouTube videos” (www.snipca.com/48788). All three base their summaries on a video’s closed-captions file, so don’t work if one isn’t available, and also let you ask follow-up questions about the content. Copilot and Leo are built into their browsers, while Bard requires you to enable its YouTube extension and paste the video URL into the chat box on its website (https://bard.google.com), with a ‘Summarise this video’ instruction. Until it’s properly integrated with Chrome, you can get a video-summary feature in the browser by installing a third-party extension such as ‘Unlimited Summary Generator for YouTube’ (www. snipca.com/48793). This provides both a transcript (that’s more coherent than YouTube’s own one) and an AI-generated summary (see screenshot below), which you can copy and paste into a document or email. You’ll need to sign up for a free ChatGPT account (www.snipca.com/48796) to use the tool. LEFT Screenshot YouTube Video adds a screenshot button to the video player’s controls. BELOW You can now use AI tools to summarise the content of YouTube videos REPLACE MISLEADING VIDEO THUMBNAILS The thumbnail images for YouTube videos can often be misleading, employing clickbait techniques to trick you into watching uninteresting and irrelevant content. A Chromium extension called Clickbait Remover (www.snipca. com/48780) solves this problem by replacing YouTube thumbnails with better representative versions. Click its toolbar button and choose whether to grab images from the start, middle or end of videos (see screenshot). These will then replace the default thumbnails chosen by video creators and sharers. Clickbait Remover works on YouTube’s homepage, search results, channels, subscription pages and trending videos, and can also correct titles that use all upper-case letters to sensationalise their content. “On your phone or tablet, you can take screengrabs of videos by playing them full-screen and using your device’s screenshot function”

FEATURE | WHAT YOU MUST CHANGE ON YOUTUBE 78 APC MAGAZINE MARCH 2024 11 Adjust the playback speed When YouTube introduced a host of new features and improvements last October, it included a way to fastforward videos by long-clicking or long-pressing the player. This plays content at twice the normal speed, until you release your mouse button or finger, and complements the basic ‘Playback speed’ options in the Settings menu. To get more precise control over the speed of YouTube videos, install the Chromium extension YouTube Playback Speed Control (www.snipca. com/48801) – the Firefox version is called YouTube Speed Control (www. snipca.com/48802). This lets you increase and decrease the playback speed by either pressing the ‘+’ and ‘-’ buttons on your keyboard, or by holding down Shift and scrolling your mouse wheel up and down. The speed adjustment is shown in a tiny box in the top-right corner of the video, which also has clickable speed controls, and – whereas YouTube limits you to 2x speed – you can play videos up to 16x faster (see screenshot above). To change the extension’s keyboard shortcuts or set a default playback speed for all videos, right-click its toolbar button and select Options. The NewPipe app for Android lets you increase a video’s ‘tempo’ by up to 3x, but otherwise you’re restricted to YouTube’s default speed settings. 12 Improve the picture quality YouTube automatically adjusts the streaming quality of videos, based on the current speed of your internet connection. Provided it’s at least 2.5Mbps, the resolution should be 720p high definition, which you can try to increase by clicking the Settings cog, then Quality and choosing a higher setting. This adds several useful options to the YouTube player’s controls, including an Audio button. Click this to open an equaliser panel, which lets you move frequency sliders up and down to get the best sound possible for the current video. If you’re unsure what the different sliders do, click the dropdown Preset menu to select a suitable setting for the type of content you’re watching, or the way you’re listening. The presets include Movie, Voice, Rock, Classic and Headphone, and there’s also an option to switch on Dolby Surround 5.1/7.1. YouGears also inserts its own volume control next to the existing one, which lets you boost the sound level above YouTube’s maximum. For similar options in Firefox, try ‘YouTube Audio Equaliser and Amplifier’ (www.snipca. com/48807). The YouTube mobile app now includes a handy feature called ‘Stable volume’, which balances the audio level Enhance your YouTube experience To set videos to always stream at the best available quality, not what YouTube decides, install the Chromium extension Auto HD/Automatic HD (www.snipca. com/48804). Click its toolbar button to set your preferred quality for YouTube videos. The options go up to 2160p (4K) and 4320p (8K), but note the quality will default to 1080p (HD) on videos when 4K or 8K aren’t available. Conversely, you can also reduce the resolution if you want to conserve bandwidth. Click ‘Best available quality’ (see screenshot above) to automatically choose the highest resolution for the current video, or ‘Auto mode’ to return to YouTube’s default setting. For Firefox, install the similar add-on ‘Video Quality Settings for YouTube’ (www.snipca. com/48805). In the YouTube mobile app, you can increase the video quality by tapping the You tab and choosing Settings, then ‘Video quality preferences’. Select ‘Higher picture quality’ for mobile networks – though bear in mind that this will use more data – and Wi-Fi. To set a specific resolution, tap the Settings cog in the top-right corner of a video and choose Quality, then Advanced. 13 Enhance the audio quality The volume control on YouTube is limited to louder, quieter or mute, which is hardly a sophisticated means of adjusting the audio levels of different videos. If you want to improve the sound quality on YouTube, install the excellent Chromium extension YouGears (www.snipca.com/48806). YouTube Playback Speed Control lets you play videos up to 16 times faster. Auto HD/Automatic HD sets YouTube videos to use the best available quality. YouGears lets you adjust the audio and boost the volume of YouTube videos.

FEATURE | WHAT YOU MUST CHANGE ON YOUTUBE MARCH 2024 APC MAGAZINE 79 when you’re watching and listening to videos. This means you’re less likely to be startled by abrupt transitions from quiet dialogue to loud music and sound effects. Tap the Settings cog in the top-right corner of the video player, choose ‘Additional settings’ and ensure ‘Stable volume’ is switched on. 14 Prevent videos from buffering If the videos you watch on YouTube sometimes ‘buffer’ – which means they hang while loading or freeze during playback – the problem may be caused by a slow internet connection or a lack of available memory or processing power on your computer. Reducing the video quality can help prevent buffering but, if not, try installing the extension FastStream Video Player. Available for Chromium browsers (www.snipca.com/48810) and Firefox (www.snipca.com/48811), this tool replaces the video player on YouTube and on other sites with its own player. By using up to six concurrent connections to download and stream the current video, it significantly reduces the risk of buffering to provide smoother playback. Activate the extension by clicking its toolbar button and, after a short pause while FastStream starts loading the current video in its player, you’ll be able to enjoy uninterrupted viewing. You can set it to turn on automatically every time you visit YouTube, and turn off when you leave the site, by clicking the Settings cog and entering https:// www.youtube.com in the ‘Autoenable URLs’ box ( 1 in our screenshot above). FastStream Video Player also includes options for improving audio and picture quality 2 , adjusting playback speed and taking screenshots, while the Firefox version lets you download videos. You can check if a YouTube video is likely to buffer by right-clicking it and choosing ‘Stats for nerds’. A panel will open revealing your current connection speed and your ‘Buffer Health’, which shows you how much data YouTube is preloading to prevent playback problems. If videos keep buffering on your phone or tablet, try switching to ‘Data saver’ mode in the YouTube app’s ‘Video quality preferences’, either for your mobile or Wi-Fi network or both (see screenshot left). This will reduce the picture quality but make streaming smoother. CUSTOMISE HOW YOUTUBE LOOKS AND WORKS In this feature, we’ve highlighted tools that make specific improvements to YouTube, but you can combine their functions by installing the brilliant browser extension Improve YouTube. Available for Chromium (www.snipca. com/48812) and Firefox (www.snipca. com/48813), this add-on has more than 85 options for customising how YouTube looks and works. Improve YouTube can block ads, hide Shorts clips, disable autoplay, enhance picture quality, normalise volume, take screenshots, adjust playback speed and much more. Its features are organised into logical sections and can be switched on or off with a single click, with many controllable using keyboard shortcuts. Particularly useful are its Appearance and Themes tabs (see screenshot), which let you redesign YouTube’s interface as you prefer. You can change the size and position of the video player, descriptions, comments and sidebar, and apply a range of attractive themes that look much smarter than the site’s default dark mode. Hopefully, Improve YouTube won’t fall foul of YouTube’s strict new restrictions, as has happened with the multi-option extension ‘Enhancer for YouTube’. The latter’s developer says its Firefox version is now completely broken and the Chromium one only partially works, because of the “countless changes” made by YouTube (see www.snipca.com/48814). ‘Data saver’ mode reduces picture quality but can prevent buffering. Avoid buffering by playing YouTube videos in FastStream Video Player. 1 2

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 transparent OLED and MicroLED TVs, respectively. There’s 240Hz and 480Hz OLED gaming monitors (as Andre from JW Computers explains), MSI’s AI powered gaming monitor (as Emille from Aftershock PC explains), LED crystal films to stick on your case windows from MSI to show low resolution videos and images, further pimping your rig in a way never before seen. And then there was Sharp, which behind closed doors was demonstrating its new secret QDEL technology prototypes, the holy grail of monitor technology which they’ve apparently succeeded in developing. Quantum Dot Electroluminescence (QDEL) has all the benefits of OLED with wide colour gamuts, perfect blacks, high contrast ratios and near instant response times without the weaknesses like lower brightness levels, pixel aging and risk of image burn-in due to the organic part of OLEDs wearing out with use over time. This is achieved by removing the base light source from driving the quantum dots entirely. Instead of driving each quantum dot with a blue light immitted by the base OLED material, the quantum dots are instead directly converting electricity into the desired red, blue or green sub pixel colour. While getting this working for red and green quantum dots has been known in the industry, blue has been the sticking point up until now and Sharp is the first across the line. Sharp showed two working prototypes of QDEL TVs, a 12-inch and a 30-inch model which Sharp refused images to be taken of. This does however prove that QDEL technology can scale up to larger sizes and uses similar, cheaper, processes as LED TVs. Which means when it does come it’ll be very cost effective. Sharp didn’t reveal any timeline for mass production or pricing of QDEL TVs, but hinted that smaller displays for smartphones and smartwatches may come first, followed by computer monitors. After CES 2024, Mark Williams sees a brighter, more colourful and cheaper future ahead of us. System news WHAT IMPRESSED YOU THE MOST FROM THIS YEAR’S CES?? EMILLE, AFTERSHOCK PC: “This standout for me was the innovative integration of AI in MSI’s MEG 321URX QD-OLED monitor. This monitor boasts an impressive built in AI processor and is engineered to analyse the game being played and offer real time visual cues, such as enemy locations and character health statuses. While this feature raises ethical considerations, particularly regarding its potential to give players an unfair advantage – a debate akin to whether it constitutes cheating – it undeniably marks a significant step in the evolution of gaming technology.” ANDRE, JW COMPUTERS: “Alienware and Asus had some insane gaming monitors to show off. The Alienware AW3225QF, using a Samsung Quantum dot display at 4K resolution with 240Hz, was just phenomenal to look at. The response time, image quality and motion performance made itself very obvious. Asus on the other hand had a similar OLED monitor on display at 4K 240Hz that can also double 480Hz 1080p OLED screen. This seems like a very versatile 2-in-1 option for both vivid high-performance gaming and to give you that edge in competitive higher refresh rate gaming too.” PC BUILDER From the front lines of the Australian PC market Mark Williams is an IT professional with a strong interest in voiding warranties. 80 APC MAGAZINE MARCH 2024 “It undeniably marks a significant step in the evolution of gaming technology.”

PC BUILDER | MARKET WATCH MARCH 2024 APC MAGAZINE 81 A sampling of PC systems available this month Market Watch PLE COMPUTERS SPECTRA $2,559 tinyurl.com/APC530ple The Ryzen 5 7500F – which we regard very highly as a great value CPU – offers great value for money, especially for this price range where you want most of your budget going to the GPU to enable better gaming visuals. The RTX 4070 offers twenty percent more performance than the 4060 Ti found in the IT Warehouse system, combined with the faster CPU making this one an easy choice for a great bang-foryour-dollar pick. On top of that, it has double the SSD capacity at 2TB, roomy 32GB of RAM and a sweet case that has an integrated LCD screen that can be used to show system stats, images or even video live streams. A banging system for the price. CPU AMD Ryzen 5 7500F; COOLER ID-Cooling ZoomFlow 240 XT 240mm ARGB AIO; MOTHERBOARD Asus TUF Gaming B650M-E WIFI; GRAPHICS Zotac Gaming GeForce RTX 4070 Twin Edge OC 12GB; MEMORY 32GB GeIL Polaris AMD Edition RGB C38 5600MHz DDR5; STORAGE 2TB Kingston NV2 NVMe M.2 SSD; POWER SUPPLY SilverStone ET-750HG V1.2 750W; CASE Jonsbo D31 Mesh. AFTERSHOCK PC SHADOW MAX $3,099 tinyurl.com/APC530aft Another all-white system, this one steps it up for the more serious gamers. This one bumps the CPU up to an 8-core 7700X and pairs it with the new RTX 4070 Ti Super. Considering this is $540 over the PLE system, you are getting a good amount of extra compute. The 1TB SSD is adequate but not outstanding, obviously a cost-saving measure vs the PLE system to fit in the faster components. The 360mm AIO will easily keep the CPU cool and quiet as will the well-ventilated case thanks to the 5x 120mm fans. The faster and AMD recommended 6000MHz RAM is also found here to keep the 7700X well-fed. A well-balanced gaming system overall. CPU AMD Ryzen 7 7700; COOLER Aftershock Glacier Mirror 360mm; MOTHERBOARD Gigabyte B650 Gaming X AX; GRAPHICS MSI RTX 4070Ti Super Ventus 2X OC 16GB; MEMORY 32GB Kingston Fury Beast RGB 6000MHz CL36 STORAGE 1TB Lexar NM790 M.2. NVME SSD; POWER SUPPLY Inwin P85II 850W; CASE be quiet! Pure Base 500DX – White. JW COMPUTERS GMR OBSIDIAN $4,199 tinyurl.com/APC530jw Looking at our priciest system for this issue we have a ripsnorter of a gaming CPU here that will not only hang with AMD’s best X3D CPUs, but also trounce them in multithreaded tasks. So, if you like to work and play, this system makes a lot of sense. The 360mm AIO is basically mandatory for this CPU and with it sat in a high-end Z790 board you’ll have lots of IO available. Faster RAM and a 2TB SSD make for a great system however the CPU is overpowered for the GPU. The extra $1,100 this system is asking is only worth it if you’ll be regularly maxing out all those CPU cores. CPU Intel Core i9-14900KF; COOLER Aus TUF Gaming LC II 360 ARGB AIO; MOTHERBOARD Asus ROG Strix Z790-H Gaming WIFI; GRAPHICS Asus TUF RTX 4070 Ti Super 16GB; MEMORY 32GB G. Skill TZ5 RGB DDR5-6400; STORAGE 2TB Kingston NV2 SSD; POWER SUPPLY InWin 850w; CASE Deepcool CH560 Digital TG Black. IT WAREHOUSE SNOW WHITE TI $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 aging well) AM4 socket. This means only last-gen CPU upgrades are available and DDR4. This should all keep the price down but relative to the PLE system, this isn’t looking so hot. It matches it for a roomy amount of RAM capacity, 240mm AIO and even has a beefier PSU, but the weaker CPU paired with a weaker GPU means this isn’t very good value. Look around first before considering or wait for a discount. CPU AMD Ryzen 5 5600X; COOLER Thermaltake TH240 ARGB Sync Snow Edition AIO; MOTHERBOARD MSI B550M Pro-VDH WiFi; GRAPHICS Galax GeForce RTX 4060 Ti EX White 8GB; MEMORY 32GB Adata XPG Spectrix D50 RGB DDR4 3600MHz White; STORAGE 1TB Kingston SNV2S NVMe SSD, 2TB Kingston SNV2S NVMe SSD; POWER SUPPLY MSI MAG A850GL; CASE Thermaltake Ceres 300 Snow Edition.

PC BUILDER | BLUEPRINTS 82 APC MAGAZINE MARCH 2024 This issue’s been an interesting one for Blueprints. What we’re seeing across the industry is a slow but steady increase in SSD prices across the board. Almost every single SSD pick we had from last issue has increased by $20-30. This is likely down to those bumper New Year and Black Friday deals finally subsiding. However, we’re mildly concerned that this may be a continuing trend across the industry, depending on how NAND pricing continues moving forward. It’s one to watch, for sure. Our budget builds for this issue have remained reasonable, all things considered. Changes were minimal – we’ve swapped a few components out across the two builds, both of those cases being the memory across the systems and the primary SSD. We’ve opted for the 1TB Crucial P3 Plus PCIe 4.0 drive for our OS, as the MSI Spatium M450 had increased in price. We also changed up the memory. Teamgroup’s Elite Plus DDR5 @ 4800 had climbed by $40 for AMD, so we swapped it for the non-heatsinked Elite variant for a slightly lower price. The Patriot Viper Venom @ 5200 kit seemingly disappeared from stock entirely, so we’ve gone for a Teamgroup 4800 kit for only $8 more. Intel’s build also saw price cuts on its motherboard, though the CPU and graphics card remain unchanged. The same is true for AMD, with the Asus Prime A620-Plus WiFi ATX AM5 falling by a welcome $46. A number of AMD’s mainstream processors also rose in price compared to last issue, though thankfully not the Ryzen 5 7600 we’re running here. This could be a reaction to Intel’s 14th gen chips not being as popular as first thought, and AMD responding in kind. While that is speculative, it is interesting to note that there was no AMD keynote at this year’s CES. If you can hold off, we’d recommend waiting for Computex in June. It’s likely that both AMD and Intel will be launching new chips, which will either bring these prices down or give us new CPUs with better performance at similar prices. Value- and performance-driven hypothetical builds Blueprints Budget. A perfect balance between price and performance. AMD BUILD - Approximate Price $1,523 INTEL BUILD - Approximate Price $1,572 Case Corsair 4000D Airflow $149 PSU 600W EVGA 600 BR 80+ Gold $79 Mobo Asus Prime B760-Plus ATX $259 CPU Intel Core i5-12400F $209 GPU Gigabyte Windforce OC RTX 4060 8GB $499 RAM G.Skill Flare X5 32GB (2x16GB) 5600MHz CL30 DDR5 Expo $159 SSD 1TB Crucial P3 Plus PCIe 4.0 M.2 $79 SSD 1TB Teamgroup T-Force Cardea Z44L PCIe 4.0 M.2 $79 OS Windows 10 Home 64-bit OEM (Windows 11 Compatible) $60 Case Corsair 4000D Airflow $149 PSU 600W EVGA 600 BR 80+ Gold $79 Mobo Asus TUF Gaming A620-Plus WiFi ATX AM5 $219 CPU AMD Ryzen 5 7600 $329 GPU XFX Speedster Swift 210 Core RX 7600 8GB $439 RAM 16GB (2x8GB) Teamgroup Elite @ 4800 $90 SSD 1TB Crucial P3 Plus PCIe 4.0 M.2 $79 SSD 1TB Teamgroup T-Force Cardea Z44L PCIe 4.0 M.2 $79 OS Windows 10 Home 64-bit OEM (Windows 11 Compatible) $60

PC BUILDER | BLUEPRINTS MARCH 2024 APC MAGAZINE 83 It’s a similar story in our Midrange build, with AMD’s overall price increasing, and Intel decreasing. Again, this is speculative, but that reaction to the 14th generation of Intel chips has been fairly muted from the community and tech media alike. That said, similar to our budget builds, there’s a few extra changes across both systems this issue, with the focus being SSDs again. Sadly, the Lexar NM790 and Gigabyte Aorus Gen5 from last issue have taken a hit. In fact, it’s got so bad that we’ve had to drop down the capacity on our secondary drive, back to 1TB from the 2TB drives we were running last issue. The 1TB Corsair MP600 PRO LPX is our primary pick for the OS drive. Clocking in at $119, it’s an impressive little number. Coming with a low-profile heatsink (initially designed for the PS5), it’s a solid pick for any gaming PC, and its performance is top tier, matching the beefier MP600 Pro that launched earlier in Corsair’s MP series life cycle. It clocks in sequential reads at 7,100 MB/s and writes at 5,800 MB/s. To back that up, we’ve gone with the lower-specced Adata Legend 800 PCIe 4.0 SSD for our backup drive. At just $95, it’s an impressively valued proposition, and will be more than enough for all of our gaming needs. One additional change comes in with our AMD build, and that’s in the form of the graphics card. PowerColor’s Fighter OC Radeon RX 7700 XT increased in price, so we’ve opted to ditch it in favour of the Asrock Challenger OC variant. You can expect similar performance from the two cards (the difference seems to be within 1-2 percent, depending on the title), and 1440p gaming is in the high 80s comfortably with it (particularly if you enable FSR). It’s also a very pleasing $100 cheaper than last issue’s card, and it’s widely available. Fortunately our CPUs have remained steady, despite the increases we mentioned hitting other SKUs, which is great because the AMD Ryzen 7 7700X and Intel Core i5-14600KF bit hit the sweet spot for balanced performance for these builds. Mid-range. A game-ready machine that can also handle demanding work. AMD BUILD - Approximate Price $2,727 INTEL BUILD - Approximate Price $2,559 “Similar to our budget builds, there’s a few extra changes across both systems this issue, with the focus being SSDs again.” Case Nzxt H7 Flow $189 PSU 750W Corsair RM750e - 80+ Gold $169 Mobo MSI PRO X670-P WiFi ATX - AM5 $449 CPU AMD Ryzen 7 7700X $549 Cooler Be Quiet! Pure Loop 2 - 240mm AIO $169 GPU Asrock Radeon RX 7700 XT Challenger OC $699 RAM 32GB (2x16GB) Corsair Vengeance RGB DDR5 @ 6000 $229 SSD 1TB Corsair MP600 PRO LPX M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD $119 SSD 1TB Adata Legend 800 M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD $95 OS Windows 10 Home 64-bit OEM (Windows 11 Compatible) $60 Case Nzxt H7 Flow $189 PSU 750W Corsair RM750e - 80+ Gold $169 Mobo MSI Z790 Gaming Pro WiFi ATX $399 CPU Intel Core i5-14600KF $435 Cooler EK-Nucleus AIO CR360 Dark $245 GPU MSI Ventus 3X OC RTX 4060 Ti 8GB $619 RAM 32GB (2x16GB) Corsair Vengeance RGB DDR5 @ 6000 $229 SSD 1TB Corsair MP600 PRO LPX M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD $119 SSD 1TB Adata Legend 800 M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD $95 OS Windows 10 Home 64-bit OEM (Windows 11 Compatible) $60

PC BUILDER | BLUEPRINTS 84 APC MAGAZINE MARCH 2024 This month’s Turbo builds are a tale of price increases and decreases. Motherboard for AMD? Down by $60. The Ryzen 9 7950X3D CPU (before we changed it here to the non-X3D SKU) up by $170. The Sapphire Nitro+ RX 7900 XTX 24GB? Down by $100. Yes, it’s been a doozie of a build list, that’s for sure. Still, we’ve managed to throw in a few clever product tweaks to keep the price consistent, meaning our AMD build has decreased by $121, without sacrificing performance, and our Intel build has moved up by $41 compared to last issue (which at high end prices, is quite reasonable). The biggest change comes in the form of our CPU pick for the AMD build. We’ve ditched the 7950X3D chip and opted for its more traditional, non-3D cousin, the 7950X. This is still a potent processor, particularly if you’re looking at any form of multithreaded applications or processing. Anything rendering based, and this absolutely rips through it. Although it’s not as potent at gaming as either the 7950X3D or Intel’s offerings, it’s well within five to ten percent of its 3XD counterpart for fps in-game at 1080p, and 10-15 percent to Intel’s top dog 14900K, although this is dependent on memory frequency (we recommend pairing it with a 6,000 MT/s kit to get the most out of that infinity fabric). Speaking of memory, for AMD we’ve done exactly that, ditching the Corsair Vengeance kit in favour of the Teamgroup T-Create Expert 6000 C34 kit. It’s not as impressive as last month’s kit, as it’s got a C34 latency rather than a C30, but given the closest Vengeance kit price-wise came in at C40, it was the smarter pick of the two at 6,000 MT/s. It’s also available in black or white at the same price, and even compared to last issue comes in at $11 cheaper. No RGB, though. We kept the Intel build solidly positioned, with only one major change. Interestingly, our left-field 48GB memory pick has stayed steady on the pricing (compared to pretty much every other build and SKU), so we kept it in. The change? The graphics card. PNY’s Verto RTX 4080 went up again, and it’s a model that is a little difficult to find too, so we’ve swapped that out for the MSI RTX 4080 Ventus 3X, which is the better card anyway, and comes in at $80 less than last issue’s PNY card. High-end. A game-ready machine that can also handle demanding work. AMD BUILD - Approximate Price $5,600 INTEL BUILD - Approximate Price $5,742 Case Phanteks Enthoo Pro 2 Tempered Glass $299 PSU Be quiet! Straight Power 12 1200W - 80+ Platinum $409 Mobo Asus Prime X670E-Pro ATX - AM5 $529 CPU AMD Ryzen 9 7950X $849 Cooler Nzxt Kraken Elite 360 RGB - 360mm AIO $479 GPU Sapphire Nitro+ RX 7900 XTX 24GB $1,699 RAM 64GB (2x32GB) Teamgroup T-Create Expert @ 6000 C34 $328 SSD 2TB Corsair MP700 PCIe 5.0 M.2 $449 SSD 4TB Teamgroup T-Force Cardea Z440 PCIe 4.0 M.2 $499 OS Windows 10 Home 64-bit OEM (Windows 11 Compatible) $60 Case Phanteks Enthoo Pro 2 Tempered Glass $299 PSU Be quiet! Straight Power 12 1200W - 80+ Platinum $409 Mobo Gigabyte Z790 Aorus Elite AX-W ATX $469 CPU Intel Core i9-14900KF $869 Cooler Nzxt Kraken Elite 360 RGB - 360mm AIO $479 GPU MSI Ventus 3X OC RTX 4080 16GB $1,759 RAM 48GB (2x 24GB) G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB DDR5 @ 6800 CL34 $450 SSD 2TB Corsair MP700 PCIe 5.0 M.2 $449 SSD 4TB Teamgroup T-Force Cardea Z440 PCIe 4.0 M.2 $499 OS Windows 10 Home 64-bit OEM (Windows 11 Compatible) $60

Which N100 board? 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 in addition to Asrock’s N100- based board (the N100DC-ITX), Asus has released its own board, the Prime N100I-D D4. I can see two obvious differences between the boards: the N100DC-ITX has two onboard SATA connectors to the N100I-D D4’s one, but the Asus board works with a standard power supply like the one currently in my J4125-ITX build, while Asrock’s board has its own built-in power supply with 19V jack, into which I would need to plug in a compatible laptop adapter. Which would you recommend? Michael James APC Responds: Yes, the N100 is a stellar chip, delivering the equivalent performance of a 65-watt i5-7400 or i3-9100 in a 6-watt chip. Sadly, as you’ve identified, there are trade-offs in terms of available ports, as well as power supply choices. Ultimately, your choice may boil down to availability, as the Although difficult to source, we’d recommend seeking out an Asus Prime N100I-D D4, and while you only have one onboard SATA port, its standard 12V power connector means powering additional drives is simple using your existing PSU. You could add an M.2 Key E adapter as with the Asrock board, but that would only give you three SATA ports, so you’re better off adding more SATA ports via the PCIe 3.0x1 slot. The PCIe SATA adapter card you choose depends on how many ports you need, which in turn informs the chipset you require. For example, if you need a six-port adapter, make sure it’s based on the ASMedia ASM1166 chip, while five-port adapters should sport the JMicron JMB585 chip. A four-port adapter is usually sufficient for most, in which case make sure it’s using one of ASMedia’s ASM1064 or ASM1164 chips. One final reason to choose the Prime N100I-D D4 board: because it utilises a standard PSU, you’ll save money by reusing the one in your setup, leaving you the task of sourcing suitable RAM. The Asus board sports a single SO-DIMM slot that supports DDR4-3200 memory with XMP, but while Asus claims it only supports up to 16GB RAM, the board does unofficially support 32GB. However, if you wish to stick to Asus’s recommendations, there’s little benefit to paying extra for XMP, so consider 16GB of Kingston’s ValueRAM. Office repair Out of nowhere, I’m unable to use any Office applications. Whichever one I launch, I get the following error: ‘We’re sorry, but Word (or Excel, or whatever) has run into an error that is preventing it from working correctly. Word/Excel/etc will need to be closed as a result.’ It also offers to repair the program, but clicking Repair Now does nothing – occasionally I’m able to run the app for a few minutes, but then it closes without warning, and unless I’ve saved in the meantime, all my edits are lost. I’ve tried going into System > Apps > Installed Apps, but any attempt to repair or reset the installation has no Asus Prime N100I-D D4 is almost impossible to source from Australia – we were able to track down a couple of listings on eBay that shipped from Europe (Germany and Italy respectively) for around $350, but at time of writing there was no inventory from any Australian-based sellers. On the other hand, the Asrock N100DC-ITX can be found for $310 on AliExpress. Both boards are disappointingly bare when it comes to storage – in addition to the SATA port(s) on offer, both include a single M.2 2280 slot (PCIe 3.0x2) for running your boot drive from, so you’ll need to budget an additional $100+ for an M.2 NVMe drive, such as the NASfriendly WD Red SN700 500GB drive. Although the N100DC-ITX comes with an extra SATA port, and there’s no problem (in theory) adding two more via the M.2 Key E slot (search eBay for ‘M.2 key A+E male SATA’ for a suitable adapter for $10-15), Asrock discourages its usage with more than two mechanical (i.e., HDD as opposed to SSD) hard disks. This is down to the N100DC-ITX’s built-in PSU, which requires connecting to a 19V laptop power adapter, and the fact you need to factor in the maximum amount of power each HDD needs when starting up – a theoretical maximum of 21W per drive. We say theoretical, because in practice this rarely happens, even during startup. We monitored our own J5040-ITX rig with four WD Red HDDs and one SSD, and it maxed out at 50W during startup before eventually dropping to around 30W. Nevertheless, your power adapter must be able to handle the initial demand, which is why Asrock recommends 90-watt 19v adapters to provide plenty of headroom. However, there’s one more hurdle: because there’s no PSU involved, power is delivered to all SATA drives from a four-pin SATA_PWR1 port on the motherboard. You will need to source a splitter to connect to it, effectively daisy chaining all your SATA drives from a single power port. APC would hesitate to recommend the N100DC-ITX for connecting more than two SATA drives in addition to the NVMe boot drive. The APC team field problems across the spectrum of devices and software. Learn a new trick or fix you can use. The problem solvers HELP STATION | THE PROBLEM SOLVERS Asus produces our choice of N100 motherboard. 86 APC MAGAZINE MARCH 2024

HELP STATION | THE PROBLEM SOLVERS effect. I’ve even tried uninstalling and removing, but it still refuses to work. Aaron B Dick APC Responds: This is probably linked to a recent update where Office 365 has now been renamed Microsoft 365. In some rare cases, it ends up corrupting your installation beyond its ability to recover or repair itself. You need to source the Support Recovery Assistant tool, which can be used to remove Office from your PC before – after a reboot – offering to download and reinstall Office from scratch. The simplest way to obtain the tool you need is to type https://aka.ms/ SaRA-OfficeUninstall-sarahome directly into your browser – you’ll be prompted to download SetupProd_ OffScrub.exe. It’s a tiny 192KB download – once done, double-click it and follow the prompts. It’ll download the full tool (click Run when prompted), then launch the Microsoft Support and Recovery Assistant. Your Office installation should be detected – check this and click Next. Office will be – possibly slowly – removed from your PC, then you’ll be prompted to reboot. After Windows restarts, the assistant will offer to reinstall Office automatically for those with Microsoft 365 subscriptions (it’ll offer links to those who wish to download setup files for all versions of Office from 2010). Click Yes, verify ‘English (Australia)’ and ’64-bit’ are pre-selected, and check ‘I have saved my work…’ before clicking Install. Office will again be downloaded and installed – this can take 30 minutes or longer. Once complete, you should find Office working again, with most of your settings hopefully intact. Roll back my PC I regularly install software for testing purposes that I quickly realise I don’t want, and uninstall it. I use Bulk Crap Uninstaller, which helps get rid of most traces, but I’d like some kind of snapshot system – like that offered on my VirtualBox virtual machines – where I can magically restore my PC to a specific point in time. Can you offer any suggestions? Christopher Winkler APC Responds: One solution would be to investigate the Rollback RX series of products. If you’re willing to spend over US$80, try the trial version of RollBackRx (https://horizondatasys. com/rollback-rx-time-machine), which would fit your needs perfectly. It can be configured to take snapshots manually or on a schedule, and restoring your system to any previously taken snapshot takes no longer than a single reboot. There’s also free entry-level tool, Reboot Restore Rx (https:// horizondatasys.com/reboot-restorerx-freeware), which allows you to undo system changes by rebooting or hard resetting your PC – on every boot, a saved baseline is restored, wiping out any changes in the meantime. But while it’s possible to manually update the baseline, forgetting to do so would undo any changes made to saved documents and files. It might prove more trouble than its worth. One solution would be to employ a drive imaging tool like Macrium Reflect Home (US$79.99, www.macrium.com/ products/home) or Hasleo Backup Suite Free (free, www.hasleo.com). Both support delta restore (Hasleo added this in its recent v4.0 update), which reduces image restoration times by only restoring the differences between the backup and current system. If you were to set up a daily incremental backup plan with either, you’d give yourself a fallback where you’d only lose the last 24 hours’ worth of changes if you wanted to roll your system back. However, both allow you to take more frequent incremental updates (Hasleo users can select ‘Run at intervals’ to take hourly backups), or you can try to get into the habit of manually taking an incremental backup prior to installing software on your PC, so rolling back would create the minimum amount of collateral damage. Update Jellyfin I recently made note of Jellyfin’s blog post noting two vulnerabilities and recommending we update to 10.8.13 as soon as possible. However, despite religiously checking my Ubuntu Server 22.04 LTS system for updates, no release is forthcoming. Why is it taking so long to appear on Ubuntu? Henry Krupp APC Responds: It sounds like you installed Jellyfin through the default Ubuntu repositories. These are frozen at the point of Ubuntu 22.04’s release, so by now you’ll be several versions behind the latest available version. The fix is simple – open a Terminal window and issue the following command: curl https://repo.jellyfin.org/ install-debuntu.sh | sudo bash This will download a script to add the official Jellyfin repository, which will replace your outdated version with the latest available build. It will continue to offer you the latest release as soon as it’s available, ensuring your Jellyfin instance remains up to date and secure. Rollback RX can take scheduled snapshots of your system. Bulk Crap Uninstaller can clean out the junk. Also, it’s our favourite product name ever. MARCH 2024 APC MAGAZINE 87

WINDOWS 10 & 11 Add comments to folders Adding comments to folders in File Explorer is a handy way of reminding you what they contain. To do this, you first need to show the Comments column. Open File Explorer (press Windows key+E), then click View at the top, followed by Details. Next, right-click a column heading (Name, Date, Type etc), then click ‘More…’. Now scroll down the Choose Details box that appears then tick Comments, followed by OK. Double-click the folder you want to add comments to. In Windows 11, click the three dots next to View, and select Options. In Windows 10, click View ( 1 in our screenshot below), then Options. Next, in either 10 or 11, click the View tab, then untick ‘Hide protected operating system files (Recommended)’ 2 . Windows will warn you that showing ‘hidden’ files is risky because it can make your system unstable. But that’s only if you edit them carelessly. It’s safe to add comments using the method we’re explaining here, so click Yes to close the warning pop-up message that appears, then click Apply followed by OK. You’ll now see a file called ‘desktop.ini’. Right-click this file, hover over ‘Open with’, and choose Notepad. In Notepad, below [.ShellClassInfo], type InfoTip=Your comment. Replace ‘Yourcomment’, with anything you choose. In our example, we typed ‘Dubrovnik and Split 22 June to 29 June with the family’ 3 . Save the file. Finally, restart be given the option to blur your background, remove it, or replace it with a solid colour. In our example, we clicked Replace 2 , then chose a light red colour from the custom colour chart 3 to replace the blue sky. Click ‘Apply’ to confirm changes. Finally, click the ‘Save options’ dropdown menu, then ‘Save as copy’ 4 . WINDOWS 10 & 11 Use keyboard shortcut to peek at your desktop You can take a quick peek at your desktop using the keyboard shortcut Windows key+, (comma). Releasing the comma keeps you on the desktop, while releasing the Windows key takes you back to where you were. This is a handy alternative to the Aero Peek option, which Microsoft removed in Windows 11. File Explorer, then reopen this folder and you’ll see your comment 4 included in the Comments column. WINDOWS 11 INSIDER Remove background in Photos In September, Microsoft added a tool to the preview version of its Paint app that lets you remove the background of an image. It has now added the feature to its Photos app, available to Windows Insiders across all preview channels. Open an image in the Photos app then click ‘Edit image’ at the top left, followed by the Background tab to the right ( 1 in our screenshot right). You’ll Make Windows better HELP STATION | WINDOWS If your computer is running slowly, check whether Desktop Window Manager is to blame. This manages elements of the user interface in Windows to make your experience smoother, but it can also put your GPU (graphics processing unit) under a lot of strain. First, press Ctrl+Alt+Del, then click Task Manager. In Windows 11 click Performance on the left ( 1 in our screenshot). In Windows 10 click Performance at the top. In either 10 or 11, click GPU 2 to see a chart showing your GPU usage 3 . It should only be high if you’re doing something that requires intensive graphics, such as playing a game or editing video. If you’re not doing any of these and it’s still high, click the Processes tab (on the left in 11, at the top in 10) and look at the percentage being used by Desktop Window Manager (or ‘dwm.exe’) in the GPU column. Anything above 10 per cent could be too high. To fix this, press the Ctrl+Win+Shift+B shortcut. Your screen will flash black once as your graphics driver is reset. That hopefully will regain your PC’s lost speed. Windows 10 & 11 Reset your graphics driver Expert tips for a better experience. 88 APC MAGAZINE MARCH 2024 1 2 3 4 3 3 1 1 4 2 2

LIBREOFFICE WRITER & MICROSOFT WORD Add a ‘next style’ 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. This is useful for changing from a style you’d use to write your headers, to one you’d use to write most of your text. Click the Styles tab on the right-hand side bar ( 1 in our screenshot below), right-click the style you want to edit, then click ‘Edit Style…’ to open the Paragraph Style box. We picked Heading 2. In the Organiser tab, we clicked the dropdown arrow beside ‘Next style:’ 2 and chose Text. This means Text will be the style that we use after we tap Enter while using Header 2. You can also click the Edit Style button 3 the text, while comments appear in ‘balloons’ to the right of the page. You can change this so that revisions also appear as balloons. First, click Review on the toolbar, then select All Markup in the dropdown menu in the Tracking section ( 1 in our screenshot below left). Next, click the Show Markup dropdown menu just below, hover your cursor over Balloons, then click ‘Show Revisions in Balloons’ 2 . All changes you make to your document – not just comments – will now show up on the right 3 . ONLYOFFICE Add images to your spreadsheet header and footer Version 7.5 of OnlyOffice lets you add images to a spreadsheet’s header and footer. Previously you could only type words. Click the Layout tab at the top, then ‘Header & Footer’ ( 1 in our screenshot below). In the ‘Header/Footer settings’ box, click inside one of the three boxes representing the left, right and centre of the header. Next, click Insert, then Picture 2 . This opens File Explorer, from where you can browse to find and select your image. OnlyOffice will show &[Picture] 3 to indicate a picture has been added. to the right of ‘Text’ to change elements such as font and colour. Click Apply when you’re happy, then OK. To change the ‘next style’ in Word, click Home at the top, then in the Styles section right-click any style and select ‘Modify…’. In the box that appears, click the dropdown menu next to ‘Style for following paragraph’ and choose the ‘next style’ from the list. Click OK. MICROSOFT WORD Track changes in balloons By default, when Word tracks changes to your document, it shows revisions next to Make Office better HELP STATION | OFFICE Expert tips for a better experience. Microsoft Outlook Snooze emails so they arrive later Outlook now lets you set a time for an email to be re-sent to your inbox, when it might be more convenient to deal with it. Right-click the email, hover over Snooze ( 1 in our screenshot), then select when you’d like the message to reappear – we chose Tomorrow 2 . When you snooze an email, it disappears from your inbox and moves to the Snoozed folder 3 . MARCH 2024 APC MAGAZINE 89 3 3 3 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 2 3

HELP STATION | BROWSER TIPS CHROME Run a more thorough Safety Check 2023 was a bad year for Chrome’s security, with Google frequently rushing out patches to fix vulnerabilities in the browser. Although it’s impossible to predict which flaws may affect Chrome in 2024, you can do your bit to protect it using the revamped Safety Check feature in version 120 (released 6 December). Previously rather basic and easy to miss, the improved Safety Check provides at-a-glance information about the browser’s current security status and recommends actions you should take to make it safer. To access the new tool, which is supposed to work ‘proactively’, click ‘Privacy and security’ in Chrome’s Settings and choose ‘Go to Safety Check’. Here you’ll see three ‘Safety at a If you don’t yet have the revamped Safety Check, you can activate it manually. Type chrome://flags into Chrome’s address bar and press Enter to load the Experiments page. Search for the entry Safety Check v2, select Enabled in its dropdown menu and click the Relaunch button FIREFOX Always underline links on web pages The usual ways to indicate clickable links on web pages are to highlight their text in blue and underline it. However, many websites no longer bother underlining, because they think it makes their content look messy – especially in long blocks of text containing several links. This causes difficulties for people who suffer from vision disorders such as achromatopsia and are unable to identify coloured links. To address this problem, Firefox 121, released 19 December, added the option to force web pages to underline links, so they’re easy to distinguish from standard text. Click the browser’s three-line menu button and choose Settings, then General. Scroll down to the Browsing section and select the new option ‘Always glance’ buttons, which let you perform specific checks. The left-hand button runs Chrome’s Password Checkup to identify compromised, reused and weak passwords; the middle button ensures you’re running the latest version of the browser; and the right-hand button lets you configure Chrome’s Safe Browsing feature to use Standard or Enhanced protection. Below these buttons are ‘Safety recommendations’, such as blocking sites that send you lots of notifications, and reviewing extensions that were recently removed from the Chrome Web Store. It will also revoke permissions for sites you haven’t visited for a while, including access to your location and webcam. Browser tips Workshop Stop Edge importing your Chrome data Secret settings and best extensions Click the three-dot menu button in the top-right corner of Edge and choose Settings, followed by Profiles 1 . Select ‘Import browser data’ then click the ‘Edit preferences’ button 2 next to ‘Import browsing data at each browser launch’. To stop Edge importing your data from Chrome, click the ‘Turn off’ button 1 next to ‘Import browser data from Google Chrome on each launch’. Alternatively, you can specify the types of data the browser is allowed to import 2 . If you choose ‘Turn off’, Edge will ask you to confirm you want it to stop importing data from other browsers 1 . To delete browsing data it’s already imported, tick the ‘This will clear browsing data…’ box 2 before you click Confirm. 90 APC MAGAZINE MARCH 2024 1 2 1 2 1 2

HELP STATION | BROWSER TIPS underline links’. The change should take effect without you needing to refresh the current tab or restart Firefox. Note that the titles of pages in search results won’t be underlined until you hover your cursor over them. CHROMIUM Skip YouTube ads even faster YouTube’s war on ad blockers has spurred many developers to create extensions that provide workarounds. We’ve previously recommended Ad Accelerator (tinyurl.com/APC530ad) and now there’s an even better new tool called Ad Speedup (tinyurl.com/APC530ads, pictured above). This add-on evades YouTube’s blocking of ad blockers by fast-forwarding adverts instead (at up to 16 times their usual playback speed). It mutes the sound automatically, so you don’t hear in sync. If all your Chrome data is also available in Edge, you’ll find it easier to make the transition. But we think importing this information without your consent oversteps the mark, so we hope Microsoft changes its policy. See our Workshop opposite to check if Edge is importing data from Chrome and prevent this from happening. OPERA Disable start-up screen and sound When Opera relaunched as Opera One in 2023, it introduced several useful features – including Tab Islands and AI assistant Aria – but added one that many users have found irritating. When you launch the browser, it now sometimes displays a small start-up screen and plays a welcome sound – this typically happens after Opera has been updated or you haven’t opened it for a while. Although these visual and audio greetings confirm that Opera is loading, they’re unnecessary and feel outdated for a supposedly futureorientated browser, harking back to a time when lots of software had a ‘splash screen’. Opera doesn’t provide a setting to skip the start-up screen and sound, which means you’re stuck with them. Thankfully, there is a way to disable this annoyance. Type opera://flags into the browser’s address bar and press Enter to load the Experiments page. Search for intro ( 1 in our screenshot below) to find the entry ‘Opera One introduction’ and select Disabled in its dropdown menu 2 . Relaunch Opera and you’ll no longer be bothered by the welcome screen and sound. chipmunk- pitch sped-up audio, and selects Skip as soon as the option appears. Ad Speedup’s creator says the extension will work alongside your existing ad blocker, so you don’t need to choose one or the other. EDGE Is Microsoft importing your data from Chrome? When you start using a new browser, it’s always handy to import your bookmarks, passwords, history and other data from your previous browser to make switching as seamless as possible. It’s up to you to decide when and what to import, or you may prefer to keep your browsers completely separate. So we’re alarmed by a new feature in Edge 120, released in December, which automatically imports your browsing data from Chrome every time you launch Microsoft’s browser. This option is enabled by default – or at least it was in the beta version of Edge 120 – and includes your autofill settings, history, cookies, payment info and saved passwords, with extensions and bookmarks “coming soon”. Presumably, this is another attempt by Microsoft to lure Chrome users to Edge, by effectively keeping the rival browsers Best extension for… Opening Microsoft Office files OFFICE EDITING FOR DOCS, SHEETS & SLIDES Chrome tinyurl.com/APC530off As of January 14th, Microsoft has removed its Microsoft 365 extension from the Chrome Web Store and Edge Add-ons Store. This means you’ll no longer have easy access to the online versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Although there’s no direct equivalent, you can use ‘Office Editing for Docs, Sheets & Slides’ to view and edit Office files using Google tools instead. This lets you open Word documents in Google Docs, Excel spreadsheets in Sheets and PowerPoint presentations in Slides. Simply drag the file into Chrome and it will open automatically. You can also create a file in an Office format by clicking the extension’s toolbar button and choosing New then the desired file type (see screenshot). You don’t need a Microsoft 365 subscription. IF YOU DON’T LIKE THAT, TRY… OFFICE ONLINE OFFICEWORK Chromium tinyurl.com/APC530ooo This extension also lets you create and edit MARCH 2024 APC MAGAZINE 91 Office files without needing Microsoft tools. However, its ads and slow processing times can be annoying. 1 2

HELP STATION | MAC While Apple reserves the biggest, most newsworthy changes for its operating systems for Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch, it likes to tinker from time to time with tvOS too. And that’s precisely what it’s been doing with tvOS 17, tvOS 17.1 and, now tvOS 17.2. To make the most of the updates you will, of course, need an Apple TV 4K (From $219), and maybe even a HomePod or HomePod mini, as one of the biggest changes Apple brought to tvOS 17.1 was a Dialogue Enhancer that makes speech in TV shows and movies stand out more from background sounds, although it only works when teamed with a HomePod. The latest update, tvOS 17.2, has also deprecated two Apple-created apps: Movies (iTunes) and TV Shows (iTunes). Now when you select them you’ll see the following message: ‘iTunes Movies/TV Shows and Your Purchases Have Moved’, along with two buttons: ‘Go to the Store’ or ‘Go to Your Purchases’. Selecting either will take you to the revamped TV app, which has a number of other changes, including a brand new sidebar. Read on to find out more. Rob Mead-Green Apple’s had a teensy tidy-up – let’s take a look at what’s changed. Master the new Apple TV app IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to navigate the changes to the TV app made in tvOS 17.2 YOU’LL NEED An Apple TV running tvOS 17.2 Evxplained… The revamped TV app 1 Sidebar The new sidebar only appears in the TV app. with the current user displayed at the very top. 2 Search Select this option to type the name of a movie, TV show, cast member or more. Or use Siri to say it instead. 3 Store Select this to buy or rent movies and TV shows. Existing purchases can be found under Library. 4 Channels & Apps Gives you quick access to your favourites apps and channels. Scroll down to  see more. 2 3 4 92 APC MAGAZINE MARCH 2024 1

HELP STATION | MAC Master the new TV app 7 Channels & Apps Near the bottom of the sidebar you’ll see Channels & Apps. This could contain ‘channels’ for other streaming services, such as Amazon Prime Video, MUBI or Disney+, but it could also contain apps – games you’ve downloaded, say. 4 See Apple TV+ shows Back on the sidebar, select Apple TV+ to see the TV shows and movies currently available on Apple’s own streaming service. Some content is free to watch even if you’re not a subscriber. A subscription costs $12.99/month. 1 Navigate the sidebar When you open the TV app in tvOS 17.2, you’ll see a new sidebar, populated with easy access options for things like Apple TV+, the iTunes Store and your Library. You’ll also find your favourite apps and channels listed here too. 8 Customise the sidebar While most of the options in the sidebar are fixed, you can customise the Channels & Apps section. To do that, head back to your Apple TV’s Home Screen, then select Settings > Apps > App Settings > TV, then go to ‘Connect to TV’. 5 Visit the Store To see the latest movie and TV releases, head to the Store (from the sidebar) where you’ll be able to buy or rent them. You must finish watching a rented movie within 48 hours of starting it, after which time it will disappear. 2 Search for something From the sidebar, select Search and you’ll be able to hunt for anything that’s available to watch on your Apple TV, including those available on apps and channels that you either haven’t downloaded or subscribed to yet. 9 Connected apps Under ‘Connect to TV’ you’ll see a list of the apps you have installed with either an ‘On’ or an ‘Off’ to their right. Those labelled ‘On’ will be included in the Channels & Apps sidebar in the TV app, while those labelled ‘Off’ won’t. Easy! 6 Visit your Library Select Library from the sidebar and you’ll be able to view and choose any of your previous purchases. You can view all your purchases or narrow them down by type (Movie or TV Show) or by Category, such as Thriller or Romance. 3 Download an app Here we’ve selected Amazon Prime Video show The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power. As the app isn’t currently installed, you’ll be given the option to download it. Press the centre button on your Siri Remote to do so. How to MARCH 2024 APC MAGAZINE 93

Shell history is one of the most useful and powerful tools at your disposal if you spend a lot of time working with the CLI. While you can easily tweak the settings on your preferred shell to store 500, 2,000, or even more commands, Atuin offers something far superior. It replaces the traditional shell history with a SQLite database, but more importantly, it gives you the ability to sync your CLI history across different machines. Once installed, Atuin rebinds the Ctrl+r and the up arrow key, used to reverse look up previously executed commands and access the history respectively, with a full-screen history search interface. You can also get stats on the most executed commands, or look up commands based on exit codes and more. Best of all, Atuin doesn’t replace or overwrite your existing history file, so you can revert to it at any time should you find Atuin not to your liking. Released under the MIT licence, Atuin is a breeze to install if you already have Rust and Cargo installed and configured on your distro. Just execute the cargo install atuin command. The project also offers an installation script, which uses Cargo if available or Homebrew, depending on how your distro is configured. You can find detailed instructions on the project’s website (https://atuin.sh) and even the GitHub page (https://github.com/atuinsh/ atuin). Installation and config If you don’t already have Rust and Cargo installed, you can use your distro’s package manager to install these. The sudo dnf install rust cargo command installs these on RPM-based distributions, such as Fedora. You can similarly run the sudo apt install cargo command, which also installs the Rustc package, if you’re running Ubuntu or Debian, or one of their derivatives. Apart from the Atuin package, you also have to install a shell plugin, either Bash Line Editor, aka Ble.sh, (https:// github.com/akinomyoga/ble.sh) or Bash Pre-Exec (https://github.com/ launch Bash. You can now opt to populate Atuin with your existing shell history. This is done with atuin import <shell> . Run atuin import bash if you use the Bash shell, or atuin import zsh if you use Zsh. You can also run atuin import auto , and Atuin determines your current shell and imports the relevant history file. Atuin stores relevant files such as history in the ~/.local/share/atuin directory, while the configuration is stored in the ~/.config/ atuin/config.toml file. You can open this in your favourite text editor and make changes as necessary. We recommend you spend some time with the official documentation (https://atuin.sh/docs) before you start tweaking the settings. The setup we’ve discussed here is all you need to do if you prefer to use Atuin in offline mode. That is, your shell history is stored but it isn’t synced to be shared across different devices. Refer to the Enable Sync box (opposite) if you wish to share your shell history across multiple devices. Meaningful search Atuin defaults to a fuzzy search, but you can tweak this by editing the search_ rcaloras/bash-preexec) if you work with the Bash shell. The Atuin project, recommends Ble.sh for optimum performance. However, this isn’t a strict requirement, and you can use Atuin even without Ble.sh. If installed, Ble.sh replaces the default GNU Readline in the Bash shell and provides many functionalities such as syntax highlighting, enhanced autocompletion, and so on. While Atuin and Ble.sh offer installation instructions, you can copy the following steps to install and enable Atuin if you work with Bash and already have Rust and Cargo installed: $ cargo install atuin $ git clone --recursive --depth 1 --shallowsubmodules https://github.com/ akinomyoga/ble.sh.git $ make -C ble.sh install PREFIX=~/.local $ echo ‘source ~/.local/share/blesh/ble.sh’ >> ~/.bashrc $ echo ‘eval “$(atuin init bash)”’ >> ~/. bashrc $ source ~/.bashrc With these commands, we’ve first installed Atuin, and then downloaded and installed Ble.sh. We next added entries to the ~/.bashrc file so that Ble.sh and Atuin are loaded every time you Too busy running around shouting, “Get your arse to Mars,” Shashank Sharma thinks a strong shell history can be a real life saver. Total shell recall HELP STATION | LINUX For our money, we prefer to use Atuin without the Ble.sh plugin, but try it yourself and see if you like its autocompletion. 94 APC MAGAZINE MARCH 2024

HELP STATION | LINUX ENABLE SYNC If you would prefer to sync your history, you can either use Atuin’s server to store your history, which is end-to-end encrypted, or host your own server. To use Atuin to host your history, run the atuin register -u <username> -e <email> command. You’re prompted to enter a password and then Atuin generates a key. This key is used by all other machines to log in to the Atuin server to sync the history. The encrypted key is stored in ~/.local/share/atuin/key file but you can run atuin key to view the unencrypted key at any time. Once you’ve registered an account and obtained the key, you can log in to the Atuin account on all other devices with the atuin login -u <username> command. You’re prompted for the encrypted key file and the set password. Once you provide both, Atuin starts syncing the history. By default, Atuin syncs the history hourly; however, you can force a sync at any time with the atuin sync command. You can define a custom sync setting by editing sync_frequency in the ~/.config/atuin/config.toml file. You can alternatively host your own server if you’d rather not use Atuin’s public server. This requires PostgreSQL 14 or higher, and a very minimal configuration. Refer to the project’s documentation for config instructions (https://atuin.sh/docs/ self-hosting). mode setting in the ~/.config/atuin/ config.toml file. Your options are fuzzy, prefix, fulltext or skim. The Atuin search interface, accessed by pressing Ctrl+r or the up arrow, lists the total number of commands in history at the top-right. By default, Atuin performs a Global search, but you can press Ctrl+r again to switch to Host, Session or Directory search. That is, the search can be restricted to the current device instead of all devices, only the current session or only the current directory. You can switch between these search modes by pressing Ctrl+r. You can also search for commands with an exit code, to identify commands that executed successfully. The atuin search --exit 0 <search-term> command lists commands that were successful, whereas atuin search --exclude-exit 0 <search-term> lists commands that failed. You can also use switches such as --before and --after to define time limits when performing a search. The --limit switch can be used to restrict the number of results produced by Atuin. The atuin search --limit 5 ‘dnf install’ command, for instance, lists the last five packages installed using dnf . The --reverse switch can similarly be used to find the oldest matching result for your search query, and you can even combine the different switches to refine your search. So, to find the first package you installed using dnf , you can run the atuin search --limit 1 --reverse “dnf install” command. You’ll notice that the Atuin search UI provides a number from 0–9 for the commands listed in the interface, The numbers move up and down as you scroll through the history. You can select a command at any given number by pressing Alt+<num> (refer to the screenshot, left, for reference). During our tests, this feature worked flawlessly on our Fedora machine but not on our Ubuntu installation. For a list of your most frequently used commands, you can run the atuin stats command. Atuin supports a number of subcommands, such as search , stats , key , sync and so on. Run the atuin -h command for a complete list of subcommands. Many of the subcommands have their own switches, so run the atuin <command> -h command if you need help with those. For instance, the atuin search -h command can be a good introduction to how to get the best results with Atuin. For a list of different devices sharing Atuin history, you can run the atuin status command: $ atuin status Atuin v17.0.1 - Build rev [Local] Sync frequency: 10m Last sync: 2023-12-07 11:19:40.166157135 +00:00:00 History count: 1177 Deleted history count: 0 [Remote] Address: https://api.atuin.sh Username: linuxlala History count: 1176 Because Atuin doesn’t alter your existing shell history, you can run the atuin account delete command to delete your account on the Atuin server without affecting the local history. The project is actively being developed, with many additions and enhancements recommended by users on the Issues page (https://github. com/atuinsh/atuin/issues), such as the option of changing the password for the Atuin account. Should you run into a problem, visit the Issues page to see whether it has already been discussed and resolved by the community. We’re delighted to see that our love for nInvaders and nSnake hasn’t been outed. MARCH 2024 APC MAGAZINE 95

VIVALDI FOR iOS Free iOS tinyurl.com/ APC530viva Vivaldi’s updated iOS app lets you move its address and tab bars from the top of your screen to the bottom, to make them easier to access with one hand. Open the browser’s Settings and choose Tabs to change the position. You can also reverse the order of search suggestions when the address bar is at the bottom. PROTON DRIVE Free* Android tinyurl.com/ APC530pd Proton Drive has added a Photo Backup feature to its Android app, which automatically saves photos from your phone to your online- storage account. Backed-up pictures are protected using end-to-end encryption, but note that free users only get 1GB of space. The option will be added to iOS “soon”. AMAZON ALEXA Free Android tinyurl.com/ APC530alx iOS tinyurl.com/ APC530alxio Amazon’s redesigned Alexa app makes it easier to manage your smart devices. The Home tab now provides instant access to popular Alexa features like shopping lists, alarms and routines, while the Devices tab offers several ways to view your connected hardware. You can also chat to Alexa from anywhere in the app. ANDROID Install hundreds of add-ons in Firefox 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 Tampermonkey, the selection paled in comparison with the thousands available for the desktop browser. In December, Mozilla expanded the choice of add-ons available for Firefox for Android to more than 500, which means you can now use many of your favourite tools from the PC browser on your phone or tablet. The additions include extensions for blocking ads and annoyances on YouTube; customising websites such as Reddit, Wikipedia and Google; improving your searches and downloads; and boosting your online privacy and security. To try the new extensions, tap the three-dot button in the bottom-right corner of the Firefox app and select Add-ons. Swipe to the bottom of the screen and press ‘Find more add-ons’ to open the Add-ons store. Tap ‘See more trending extensions’ below the main list (see screenshot below left) to browse the full selection. To install an extension, tap the ‘Add to Firefox’ button under its description, then choose Add. You can uninstall an add-on from the browser by selecting it in the Enabled section of the Add-ons screen and tapping Remove. iOS Keep a private diary on your iPhone The iOS 17.2 update, which was released in December, introduced Apple’s new Journal app (tinyurl.com/APC530aj). This lets you keep a diary of your daily activities, including photos, videos, audio recordings and locations, so you can “reflect on everyday moments and special events” in your life. Brilliant things to do on your device. Phone & tablet tips HELP STATION | MOBILE DEVICES Best new apps What you should install this month *Contains in-app purchases The clever part is that Journal uses machine learning to suggest content for your diary entries when you’re short of inspiration. All the information in Journal is secured using end-to-end encryption, and you can lock the app using your passcode, Face ID or Touch ID to keep it safe from prying eyes. Launch the Journal app from your iPhone’s home screen (it’s not currently available on iPad) and tap the plus button to get started. On the Journaling Suggestions screen, tap Customise Suggestions to choose the type of content you want the app to recommend. This can include details of your exercise routine, music you’ve listened to, photos you’ve taken, places you’ve been to and people you’ve called and messaged. Press ‘Turn On Journaling Suggestions’ (see screenshot above) to save your choices, then specify whether you want the app to send you notifications. You can now create your first diary entry – tap the ‘magic 96 APC MAGAZINE MARCH 2024

HELP STATION | MOBILE DEVICES pencil’ icon in the bottom-left corner to view suggestions. When you press Done to save the entry, you’ll be prompted to protect your journal and set how many minutes to wait before it automatically locks. ANDROID & iOS Edit and share Memories in Google Photos Memories is one of the best features in the Google Photos app, highlighting pictures you took on the current date in previous years, as well as collections of shots featuring particular subjects, locations or themes. Traditionally, your ‘memories’ appear along the top of the app, but – to reflect its popularity – the feature has now been given its own tab in the main Google Photos toolbar and some useful new options. Tap the new Memories tab at the bottom of your screen ( 1 in our screenshot right) to view a scrapbook-style timeline of photos grouped into suggested memories. Tap ‘Add a title’ to give a memory a name, or change its existing name by tapping the three-dot button and choosing ‘Edit title’ 2 . You can include extra photos in a memory by tapping ‘Add missing days’ and choosing pictures from the relevant days; remove unwanted images from the memory; and make it look more interesting by selecting ‘Change layout’. It’s also now possible to collaborate on Memories with other Google Photos users, so your friends and family can add their own photos. Tap the Share button to invite people to view and contribute to a memory album. *Contains in-app purchases As you scroll through the Memories MARCH 2024 APC MAGAZINE 97 Best apps for... Protecting your email PROTON MAIL Free* Android tinyurl.com/APC530ptn iOS tinyurl.com/APC530ptni Proton Mail’s end-to-end encryption ensures that no one but you and the recipient can read your sensitive messages and open your attachments. You can also encrypt your contacts and block hidden trackers in emails (iOS only). The free version gives you 1GB of online storage and lets you send up to 150 messages a day. Best For: Encrypting your emails TEMP MAIL Free* Android tinyurl.com/APC530tmp iOS tinyurl.com/APC530tmpi Temp Mail saves you revealing your real email address when you register with websites and apps. It generates temporary addresses with accompanying inboxes, so you can receive 2FA codes and other important info, without being bombarded with spam. Pay from US$3.09 for Premium to remove ads and get extra features. Best For: Faking your email address FAIREMAIL Free* Android tinyurl.com/APC530fe FairEmail stops companies – and individuals – using hidden pixels embedded in emails to detect when you’ve opened their messages and clicked their links. It blocks these tracking pixels by default while allowing you to view non-intrusive images. The app works with most email providers, including Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo Mail. Best For: Blocking email trackers timeline, Google Photos will suggest more memories to add. ANDROID & iOS Pin important messages in WhatsApp chats WhatsApp now lets you ‘pin’ specific messages in conversations, so important information is displayed at the top of the chat. Simply long-press a message then tap the three-dot menu button in the top-right corner and select Pin. You can choose to pin the message for 24 hours, seven days or 30 days, and unpin it at any time by tapping Unpin in the menu. The person you’re chatting to won’t be notified that you’ve pinned one of their messages The Pin option is available in group chats as well as one-to-one conversations, provided the group administrator has enabled the ‘Edit group settings’ option for all members. Be aware that when you pin a message in a group chat, everyone else in the conversation will be told that the message was pinned and who pinned it. You can only pin one message in each private or group chat. WhatsApp also lets you pin entire conversations, so they appear at the top of your Chats list. Simply long-press a chat and tap the Pin icon on the top toolbar. 1 2

For better or for worse, artificial intelligence (AI) is starting to make a big impact on our lives, but there’s one undeniable positive to its growing reach: its ability to improve substandard images. One way it does this is upscaling, where AI intelligently increases the size and resolution of images while preserving their quality. There are numerous websites offering AI-powered image upscaling, but most come with strings (usually a hidden cost) attached. Instead, use Upscayl, which is free, open-source and has no restrictions. Here, we explain how to use it on your computer to upscale your images to great effect. Increase your photos without losing any quality. Upscale your old photos HELP STATION | PHOTOGRAPHY YOU’LL NEED Upscayl TIME REQUIRED 10 minutes 98 APC MAGAZINE MARCH 2024 Click ‘Select Image’ 1 to open the image you’d like to upscale – Upscayl works with PNG, JPEG or WEBP images. We’ve chosen an old black-and-white family photo, but Upscayl works just as well with colour images. Next, choose an AI model from the six initially provided by Upscayl (you can add more later – see Step 7). General Photo (Real–ESRGAN) model is the default, so leave that selected for now 2 . Click ‘Set Output Folder’ 3 only if you want to save the upscaled photo to a different folder than the original file. Finally, click Upscayl 4 . You’ll see a progress wheel and indicator (as a percentage) charting Upscayl’s progress. There’s also a Stop button should you want to end the process for any reason. The upscale can take from as little as 10 seconds to several minutes depending on your PC and the size of the image being processed, and the result is automatically saved into the folder you specified in the previous step. Once complete, the original image is displayed on the left 1 , and the upscaled image on the right 2 . Drag the vertical slider 3 left and right to compare the two versions. Click ‘Show/Hide Image Settings’ 4 to reveal options to magnify both images by up to 200% 5 . Visit www.upscayl.org and click the Download link 1 in the top-right corner of the page to jump to the Download section. Click Windows 2 followed by EXE Installer to save the ‘upscayl-2.9.4-win.exe’ file to your Downloads folder. Once it’s downloaded, double-click the file and follow the prompts to install Upscayl on your PC (no unwanted or additional software is installed alongside it). In the final window, leave ‘Run Upscayl’ unticked and click Finish. The program will launch to show its main interface. There are numerous websites offering AIpowered image upscaling, but most come with strings (usually a hidden cost) attached. 3 1 4 2 1 2 1 2 3 4 5

HELP STATION | PHOTOGRAPHY MARCH 2024 APC MAGAZINE 99 If you don’t like any of the AI models supplied with Upscayl, you can add a dozen more, all completely free to use. Go to tinyurl.com/APC530up and click the ‘Download this repository’ link (under the Using Models heading) to save the ‘custom-models-main.zip’ file to your Downloads folder (it’s a big file: 304MB). Once done, open ‘custom-models-main.zip’ followed by ‘custom-models-main’, then drag the models folder within this to a suitable location, such as your Pictures folder. In Upscayl, switch to Settings and click Select Folder under Add Custom Models 1 . Open the extracted models folder and click Select Folder 2 . The new models will immediately be accessible via the ‘Select Model’ dropdown menu. The next option – Don’t Post-Process Image 1 – should only be switched on if you encounter an error related to scaling and converting the image after it’s been resized. The Image Scale slider 2 works with AI models that let you upscale in smaller increments (2x and 3x). Switching on Image Compression 3 works best with JPEGs to reduce file size at the expense of some quality – experiment with different settings to get the best compromise between file size and quality. Flick the Overwrite Previous Upscale slider 4 to on if you want to try different settings using the same AI model – otherwise it can be left off. In addition to switching AI models and choosing between 4x and 16x enlargements, Upscayl offers several other options – flick the slider from Upscayl to Settings 1 to access them. Below the section displaying the program logs is an option to change Upscayl’s theme from a choice of 30, including Aqua 2 . Use your mouse wheel or the scrollbar to the right of the panel 3 to reveal more options, starting with a choice of save formats for your upscaled images in PNG (the default) or JPG 4 – the latter produces smaller, but lower-quality files. In our example in the previous step, the Real ESRGAN (https:// real-esrgan.com) model’s attempt to sharpen the image has created some unpleasant side-effects – namely faces that look slightly artificial. If this happens with your photo, try a different option from the ‘Select model’ dropdown menu and click Upscayl. In our screenshot, we selected the Remacri model, which makes no attempt to sharpen the photo, so the result is much better 1 . If you want to try and produce an image 16 times larger than the original, tick the ‘Double Upscayl’ box 2 and click Upscayl again. 1 2 1 2 3 4 1 3 2 4 1 1

As I write this, Christmas is happening and it’s got me thinking of my childhood. My mother bought me a small piezo-speaker piano in the hope that I would learn to play. That never happened, but I did learn to take it apart and see how it worked, and now we can do that using the Raspberry Pi Pico. In this tutorial, we are going to use a Raspberry Pi Pico or Pico W running MicroPython to create a Pi-ano. We’ll use the Solfège syllables, a music education method used in schools to teach pitch and basic music comprehension. You’ll most likely know them as do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti. We will create a piano interface using seven push buttons, and using a single buzzer and some clever coding, we will produce ‘music’ to ‘delight’ our families. Building the hardware The hardware build is split into two sections. The inputs (buttons) and the output (buzzer). There are seven buttons connected to GPIO pins on one side of the Pico. One leg of the button is connected to the GPIO pin, and the other is connected to a GND rail. We need to connect the GND of the Pico to the GND rail so that we have a common GND (0 volts reference). The GPIO pins are pulled high to 3.3V in the code and when we press the button, we connect that pin to the GND rail, the trigger to play a tone. The buzzer is connected to GP16 and GND. Use a little Blu Tack or modelling clay to secure it to the breadboard. It also helps amplification. Setting up Thonny While holding the BOOTSEL button, connect your Raspberry Pi Pico to your computer. Go to www. raspberrypi.com/documentation/ microcontrollers/micropython.html#drag-anddrop-micropython and download the version of MicroPython for your Pico or Pico W. Open your file manager, go to the downloaded file and copy it to the root of the RPI-RP2 drive. This flashes the new firmware to the Pico. Using your distro’s package manager, install Thonny. For the latest Ubuntu release, we use a Snap package: $ sudo snap install thonny Open Thonny and connect the Pico to your machine. Go to Tools > Options and select the Interpreter tab. Set the interpreter to MicroPython (Raspberry Pi Pico) and set the Port to match the location of your Pico. Click OK. Thonny now connects to the board and we can start writing code. Coding the project In a new tab, we start the code. First we import two modules: machine, used to access the GPIO, and utime, which is used to add delays to the code: import machine import utime Next we create two objects. The first is a list, used to store the GPIO pin reference for each button. The other is a variable to store the GPIO pin for the buzzer. button_pins = [6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12] buzzer_pin = 16 Using a dictionary, we store the frequency for each Solfège syllable. The dictionary has a keyvalue structure and we use the name of the syllable as the key. By looking in a dictionary for that key, it returns the value: the frequency. These frequencies are not perfect, so tweak them to your ear. frequencies = { ‘DO’: 261.63, ‘RE’: 293.66, ‘MI’: 329.63, ‘FA’: 349.23, ‘SOL’: 392.00, ‘LA’: 440.00, ‘TI’: 493.88, } Using a for loop, we create a list called buttons that sets up each of the buttons as an input, and pulls its corresponding GPIO pin up (high, 1, True). GPIO pins can be pulled up or down to GND. By pulling the pins up, we set their status to HIGH. Les Pounder is trying his best to make his mum proud by not taking apart an electronic piano! Build a Pi Pico electronic piano HELP STATION | RASPBERRY PI YOU’LL NEED • Pi Pico or Pico W • A buzzer • 15x M2M jumper wires • 7x push buttons • Large breadboard • Blu Tack, modelling clay, double-sided tape • Code: tinyurl.com/ APC530piano Our electronic piano is really seven buttons and a buzzer. The magic that makes it work is a little bit of MicroPython code. 100 APC MAGAZINE MARCH 2024