Innehållsförteckning för June 2019 från TechLife

I’M STILL TOTING about a Samsung S8+ as my trusty, day-to-day phone. It’s served me well as a phone, but even more so as a camera. It’s travelled from the Sahara to Iceland, and has taken some cracking shots in its time. But it might also be getting just a touch over the hill. It’s the first phone I’ve owned where I’ve managed to crack the glass, and a few pixels are starting to give up the ghost. It’s annoying in a phone so expensive, but hey – it’s been a round the block a time or two. My upgrade options, if I want to maintain that level of photographic power are looking a little... excessive. Sure, whatever I get will almost certainly be on a plan, but it’s more…

FACEBOOK’S MARK ZUCKERBERG had made promises after the fiasco that was the 2016 US Presidential elections, but the Australian branch never got the memo. Zuckerberg promised that “every advertiser who wants to run political or issue ads will need to be authorised”, and tools to increase transparency around political advertising is already available in many countries. In Australia, however, Facebook says those tools will be made available in June, when they roll out globally. Instead, the social media giant has temporarily banned foreign political ads and introduced third-party fact-checking to safeguard the Australian Federal elections. The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) also set down rules to minimise voter influence and control the spread of misinformation. It requires Facebook political advertising to be clearly authorised to help users identify who is behind…

60,000 NUMBER OF MICROSOFT PATENTS THAT HAVE NOW BEEN MADE OPEN SOURCE, AFTER IT JOINED THE OPEN INVENTION NETWORK. THE MOVE IS CHIEFLY INTENDED TO PROTECT OPEN-SOURCE PROJECTS, INCLUDING LINUX, AGAINST INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LAWSUITS. 3.2 Gen 2x2 THE NEW NAME FOR THE LATEST USB STANDARD, ORIGINALLY KNOWN AS USB 3.2. CONFUSINGLY, USB 3.0 AND USB 3.1 ARE ALSO BEING RENAMED USB 3.2 – USB 3.0 BECOME USB 3.2 GEN 1; USB 3.1 BECOMES USB 3.2 GEN 2 AND THE STANDARD ORIGINALLY KNOWN AS USB 3.2 BECOMES USB 3.2 GEN 2X2. MORE CONFUSINGLY, THE USB IMPLEMENTERS’ FORUM RECOMMENDS THAT THE THREE SPECS GET CALLED SUPERSPEED USB, SUPERSPEED USB 10GBPS AND SUPERSPEED USB 20GBPS IN SALES LITERATURE. WE JUST THOUGHT YOU’D LIKE TO KNOW. 44 PERCENTAGE INCREASE IN PAYOUT RATES TO SONGWRITERS,…

Exposing cheese to round-the-clock music apparently adds to its flavour HIP HOP PRODUCES THE BEST EMMENTAL, SAYS SWISS STUDY. A Swiss cheesemaker decided to test the effect of music on cheese while it matures and found that hip hop boosts flavour better than Mozart. Nine wheels of Emmental cheese were placed in wooden crates and exposed to music 24 hours a day via mini transmitters. The tracks included A Tribe Called Quest’s We Got it From Here, Mozart’s Magic Flute opera and Led Zeppelin’s classic Stairway to Heaven. There was also Vril’s UV while another had to put up with Yello’s Monolith. Three other wheels received soundwaves at low, medium and high frequencies, while the last one only had the sounds of silence for company. After two blind tastings, it…

Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realm War CLASH ROYALE, WARHAMMER STYLE. Free with IAP CLASH ROYALE’S IMMENSE popularity, thanks to its very clever design that works especially well on mobile, was always going to spark countless competitors attempting to put their own spin on the “real-time card strategy battler”. The benefit of quick battles, instant progression, and that little burst of serotonin when you etch out a win against a seriously difficult opponent is what mobile gaming is all about. Portable, fun and clever experiences without the hours long time investments. Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realm War takes the basic structure of a card-based strategy game – players control a specific warlord with a special “ultimate” card that reaps heavy destruction to their opponents units in some form or another, while…

IF YOU’RE LIKE me, you’ve been using a mouse for a couple of decades and that can cause seriously painful muscle ache that develops over time. For me, it manifests as a sharp pain in my right shoulder. This vertical mouse eases the load on certain muscles and tendons simply by rotating your hand position to a vertical ‘hand shake’ orientation. Logitech claims a 10% reduction on muscular strain, and having used this for a month that sounds about right – but that 10%, for me at least, was enough to almost banish the pains. So, I love this thing and it’s going to get top marks. IN THE HAND IT FEELS VERY NATURAL – AFTER YOU RETRAIN DECADES OF NORMAL MOUSE CONDITIONING. FORWARD, BACK, THE WHEEL AND LEFT AND…

THE PROSPECT OF reviewing a projector has not been particularly enticing for some years now. In a world where large, high-quality TVs are ubiquitous and low in price, the notion of having a tricky-to-setup, washed-out image delivered by a an expensive, high-maintenance device that’s not usable in daylight hours is something that only a Transylvanian Count might be interested in. But, Asus’ F1 projector turned our heads. Firstly, it’s a short-throw model, meaning that it can produce a large, undistorted image from close range. It also eschews an expensive, consumable lamp for an LED lighting array that’s capable of producing 1,200 LUMENs of brightness for 30,000 hours. There’s no need to awkwardly attach separate speakers thanks to a built-in Harmon Kardon-certified 2.1 system, and focusing and keystone effects are adjusted…

Did we mention this speaker can get really loud? Like… LOUD. The new JBL Charge 4 is louder than the Charge 3 and, along with heart-thumping bass, stupendous battery life, and the ability to charge a handheld device, the Charge 4 is one heck of a speaker. At first glance, it looks exactly like its predecessor, but the Charge 4 is a little bigger and heavier. It gets a bigger battery – a 7,500mAh one as opposed to the Charge 3’s 6,000mAh flavour. That’s up to 20 hours of playback, provided you’re not using it as a power bank. We squeezed out over 19 hours when only playing music, while we got over 15 hours when we charged an iPhone X from 36% to full. The new speaker has a…

PRIVACY IS A hot topic these days. The rise of cloud-based services has seen more users than ever trust their private information to remote servers, at a time when the security of online data has come into question following a spate of high-profile breaches. What does this have to do with Windows 10 users? Well, it might surprise you to learn in Microsoft’s Privacy Statement, the company makes clear its intention to collect your data when you ‘create a Microsoft account, submit a search query to Bing, speak a voice command to Cortana, upload a document to OneDrive, or contact us for support’. However, if you’d rather not hand over your private data, don’t worry – it’s not too late to roll back these changes. Here we’ll run you through…

UNLESS YOU’VE BEEN extra careful, it’s probably fair to say that Google knows you just about as well as you know yourself. The internet giant hoovers up vast amounts of information on millions of users, ostensibly to deliver better ads (or, more accurately, to sell that user information to advertisers in order to better target ads). This is especially true if you have a Google account. When you’re logged into your Google account, Google will keep a permanent record of: * Every search term you type into Google * Every search result you click on * Every YouTube search you perform and every video you watch * Ads you click on * A complete timeline of your movements by tracking your mobile’s GPS * Every time you issue an ‘OK…

WHILE THE DESKTOP remains supreme among many PC gamers, sometimes you just need something a bit more portable. A gaming laptop is a rig on the go, with the power to play games in a size you can take with you. But when you’re buying a gaming laptop, you’re not just looking at specs. You’re looking at a whole computer, including a built-in keyboard and display. Here, we explain all of the decisions you’ll have to make when buying a gaming laptop so you can get the best one for your needs and budget. WHAT GPU DO YOU NEED? While some games use the CPU, the majority of games are still GPU-bound, so this is one of the biggest decisions you make when buying a gaming notebook. At the moment,…

THEY SAY A picture is worth a thousands words, but an animated GIF is worth a million. Despite the rise of HTML5 video, these little animations are still hugely popular - partly because of their relatively small file size, which is friendly to mobile devices on limited data plans, and also because the format is so widely supported. Sites such as Giphy (https://giphy.com) are a great source of ready-made animations, but sometimes you can only express yourself by creating your own - and with the right tools, it’s surprisingly easy to do. If you already have a video file, skip straight to Step 5 to find out how to edit and convert it. Alternatively, you can grab and convert a video from YouTube, as explained in Step 1, or make…

IT USED TO be the case that every DNS server in the world was created equal. All the world’s DNS servers would maintain a common list of domain names and IP addresses that everybody would use. We all had the exact same view of the internet as everyone else. That’s no longer the case – and it’s a change for the better. You see, a number of developers have figured out that you can use DNS to provide a host of unique services to users. By modifying the DNS records, you can create a curated version of the internet, which can be used to block ads, filter out malicious and adult websites or redirect connections to bypass geoblocks. As a user, all you usually have to do to use such…

SAMSUNG’S 2019 TVS are now available for preorder, and with them comes a highly anticipated feature: the ability to use Amazon Alexa smart speakers with your Samsung smart TV, giving you voice control for adjusting the volume, opening apps, searching for shows and much more. But you can get older models to work with Alexa, too. With just a couple of apps, you can set up your Amazon Echo or similar Alexa-powered device to offer some voice-activated goodness on your smart TV now. ONCE YOU’VE FOUND THE DEVICE AND PAIRED YOUR PHONE TO THE TV, SELECT THE SAMSUNG SMART TV AND USE THE TOGGLE BUTTON NEXT TO ITS NAME TO ENABLE ITS USE AS A SMART DEVICE. One (big) caveat: As of now, the functionality of Alexa on older Samsung…

The TechLife team finds the best budget, value and performance products, and the latest releases in the top technology categories. If you believe there are other products that deserve the title in any of the tech categories, let us know and give us your reasons why in 50 words or less. Equally, if there’s a hot new product that’s worthy of attention, we want to know. Send your email to techlife@futurenet.com. PROUDLY BROUGHT TO YOU BY…

QUASH RESOURCE HOGGING APPS STREAMLINE PERFORMANCE WITH ASHAMPOO DISK SPACE EXPLORER 2018. FULL VERSION WORTH $20 The compact yet powerful Disk-Space-Explorer 2018 provides a detailed overview of file distribution and disk space consumption. Unlike Windows Explorer, Disk-Space-Explorer 2018 lists results based on file types and helps quickly locate potential resource hogs. The file type filters are customisable, making it easy to scan drives for specific files, e.g. video files or documents. Bar and pie charts provide visual clues as to to the percentage of disk space usage for each file type. For a more in-depth view, users can quickly navigate through folders and customise existing file type filters or create their own. With Disk-Space-Explorer 2018, users can finally find out exactly how much space their photos, songs, videos or any…

CHINESE TECH GIANT Huawei has been in some hot water in recent times for reportedly employing relaxed and potentially compromising security in its tech devices – namely its smartphones. A recent article by the Epoch Times has revealed that researchers at Microsoft uncovered a critical flaw in the security of the company’s flagship laptops, the Matebook series. Although it hasn’t been revealed at what point the flaw was initially discovered, Microsoft first published information regarding the issue on its March 25 blog post. Microsoft had succesfully fixed the loophole, allowing Huawei to release a patch removing the offending problem. The nature of the flaw is similar to the exploit used in the WannaCry ransomware attack, which allowed bad actors to get access to users’ data via a backdoor in the…

THE OLD SAYING goes that we only use ten per cent of our brains. So just imagine what we could do if we kicked the other 90 per cent into gear. Not much more, as it turns out. The ten per cent figure is a myth. We don’t know exactly where the myth came from, but it may have started as a misinterpretation of early experiments on brains. The first cause could be the fact that during brain scans, not all parts of the brain light up, possibly leading early experts to assume that the darker areas were inactive. On top of this, there is the fact that people can survive damage to certain parts of the brain following a trauma such as a stroke. We each have around 86…

People shut their eyes when they sneeze, but it’s not to prevent them from bulging out of their heads. We sneeze to clear irritants from our airways, and closing our eyes stops the same irritants from getting straight back in. It happens automatically, but if you do keep your eyes open it’s highly unlikely that anything bad will happen. In 1882, The New York Times reported a burst eyeball following a sneeze, and it’s true that straining can rupture blood vessels. A powerful sneeze or excessive coughing can cause a bleed in the eye. These injuries normally heal without any need for treatment, and they can happen whether your eyes are open or closed.…

If there’s one thing that we know for sure, it’s that a series of coin tosses will come out half heads and half tails. Wrong. Coin flips aren’t completely independent. True, the coin doesn’t know what side it landed on last time, so if you got five heads in a row, you aren’t overdue a tails. But the side that faces upwards when you make the flip influences the side it’ll land on. Researchers from Stanford University and University of California, Santa Cruz watched coin flips with a high-speed camera. They found that if you flip a coin head-side up you have a 51 per cent chance of catching it head-side up. And, for some people, the chance can be as high as 60 per cent depending on exactly how…

Activision Blizzard pays employees US$1 per day in gift cards if they track their reproductive health via an app called Ovia – and the publisher can see some of its employees’ data in an anonymised, statistical format. “Employers who pay the apps’ developer, Ovia Health, can offer their workers a special version of the apps that relays their health data – in a ‘de-identified,’ aggregated form – to an internal employer website accessible by human resources personnel,” reads a Washington Post report on the practice, which highlights Activision Blizzard as a proponent of employee health tracking. Activision Blizzard also incentives Fitbit and other tracking among employees, including “mental health, sleep, diet, autism and cancer care,” according to the article. Activision Blizzard VP of global benefits Milt Ezzard told the Post…

THE GOOD NEWS is that streaming Steam titles to your Xbox is easy. The bad news is that you need an unbelievably high-quality connection for a playable experience – but if you’ve ever used Miracast before, that should not come as a shock. THE SETUP First things first: In order to stream Steam games to an Xbox One, you’ll need a gaming PC with Steam installed, an Xbox One, and a router (Try to contain your shock.) Both the Xbox One and the PC will need to be connected to the same network. You can do it wired or wirelessly, but in my testing, a wireless connection will not be nearly strong enough for a smooth gaming experience. The gaming PC will also have to have Windows 10 installed and…

ACER’S HAD A good run with its Predator monitors, releasing some truly excellent gaming monitors to the market such as the X34 and X34P. The 27-inch XB273KP is Acer’s latest addition to the Predator range, packing UHD 4K, IPS, DisplayHDR 400 certification, Nvidia G-Sync and a 144Hz refresh rate, making it truly worthy of the Predator branding. Let’s start this review by looking at the exterior of the XB273KP, because it comes with a rather unique feature not normally seen on gaming monitors – a hood. If you’ve hung around professional photographers or graphic designers, you might have noticed a plastic frame around their displays to keep stray sources of light away and maintain colour accuracy. But on the XB273KP, Acer claims the hood is there so you can focus…

WITH ALL GOOGLE Assistant smart displays offering more or less the same experience, companies need to find something to make their product stand out. And the JBL Link View does that by offering unrivalled audio. It doesn’t look as good as the Google Home Hub or the Lenovo Smart Display, but it outdoes them both when it comes to sound quality. Even the design is based on sound: on either side of the Link View’s 8inch touchscreen is a 51mm driver, with a small subwoofer at the back. This gives the JBL smart display powerful bass that you won’t get from any other smart screen, not even the Amazon Echo Show. LIKE ANY SMART SPEAKER, YOU CAN CONNECT YOUR TUBETUBE ACCOUNT AND MUSIC STREAMING SERVICES LIKE SPOTIFY TO THE LINK…

HAVE YOU EVER bothered to go into the Google, Microsoft or Facebook account settings to download your profile, which should (in theory) contain everything the company has on you? Most people will be quite shocked if they do – the amount of data the companies collect on their users is staggering. With Google, for example, every search you’ve ever performed, every result you’ve clicked on, every time you’ve logged in (and from where), every YouTube video you’ve watched, every relationship and contact you have, the complete movements of your mobile devices and more is collected and stored forever in Google’s database, unless you explicity ask it to delete the information. And that’s just what internet services are tracking. Lots of others organisations are looking to track your online activity and…

01 Does the plan have servers in every country and region you require? Having more than one server in a country can help spread the load, but doesn’t guarantee improved performance, so don’t assume a plan with 500 servers will automatically beat another with 100. 02 Check the number of simultaneous connections supported. Typically, this is three to five, which allows you to have a PC, mobile and tablet connected at the same time. But beware, many companies say this is for a single user only, and they all have fair usage policies to prevent people hogging resources. If you let the entire family download and stream videos separately then you’ll run into trouble. 03 Some providers list the connection protocols they use. OpenVPN and IKeV2 are good choices, fast…

PRIVACY IS A hot topic these days. The rise of cloud-based services has seen more users than ever trust their private information to remote servers, at a time when the security of online data has come into question following a spate of high-profile breaches. What does this have to do with Windows 10 users? Well, it might surprise you to learn in Microsoft’s Privacy Statement, the company makes clear its intention to collect your data when you ‘create a Microsoft account, submit a search query to Bing, speak a voice command to Cortana, upload a document to OneDrive, or contact us for support’. However, if you’d rather not hand over your private data, don’t worry – it’s not too late to roll back these changes. Here we’ll run you through…

If you’re using your laptop to play games, you need to keep your laptop plugged in to get the full performance out of your GPU. And if you don’t, you’ll be lucky if your laptop lasts an hour gaming. In our testing experience, most gaming laptops last only a few hours on a charge when performing other tasks, but never as long as ultraportables without discrete GPUs. If you need something to last eight hours while you work, it won’t be a gaming notebook. Some do last long, but that’s often at the expense of the display, and you don’t want to play all your games on a dark, dim, or inaccurate screen.…

WORKING IN A studio provides exceptional control over lighting and background detail, since all elements are static and you are free from the influences of wind, rain and changeable light. However, in a smaller studio space it can be a challenge to effectively control the spread of light, to produce the impression of a focused beam. This is especially true when using larger softboxes or when there is little separation between the subject and background, which can receive unwanted illumination, thereby spoiling an attempted solid black backdrop. An effective solution is to cut ambient light completely – by turning off all of the room lights and working in near darkness, the studio strobes or remote speedlights can easily overpower the small amount that remains. This does create challenges for composition…

Feel Real AR THIS KICKSTARTER NOSE BEST. US$299 | feelreal.com We have covered FeelReal’s smellable VR headset before, but after years of development it’s time to finally stop and smell the US$4.99 Rose aroma. We’ve always felt that the FeelReal headset was a little on the nose, but the company has finally unleashed a comprehensive catalogue of olfactory sensations that range from dogs to circuses, electricity to explosions, and it’s even peppered with the previously undiscovered scents like zombies and dragons. If performing your morning mantra to the subtle scent of burning rubber isn’t your speed then you can fork out ten times more (US$50) for the Skyrim VR, Beat Sabre, or The Last Day Defence aroma sets. Death Star in Space THE EMPIRE’S FIRST STRIKE. US$160 kickstarter.com/projects/solx/death-star-in-space You are…

THE P30 PRO is a statement from Huawei, with the Chinese smartphone manufacturer declaring that its new flagship will “rewrite the rules of photography”. It aims to do that with its quad camera system which offers a 5x optical zoom, 10x hybrid zoom and huge 50x digital zoom, along with bold claims for low-light performance. Elsewhere the P30 Pro packs in the features you’d expect from a modern flagship phone including a premium design, in-display fingerprint scanner, wireless charging, plenty of power under the hood, a big screen and a decent-sized battery. Huawei has gone from strength to strength in recent years, and the P30 Pro is its most accomplished smartphone to date. DESIGN Huawei has stripped back the bezels above and below the screen to the bare minimum, reducing…

Knuckle cracking involves pulling apart the joints by stretching or bending them, which decreases the pressure in the fluid between them. This causes dissolved gases in the fluid to form bubbles, which then burst with a characteristic crack. Legend has it that this causes osteoarthritis, where the cartilage covering the ends of the bones becomes thin and roughens. But this legend isn’t true. In 1998, Dr Donald L Unger wrote a letter to the editor of Arthritis and Rheumatology. He had been cracking the knuckles of his left hand at least twice a day for 50 years, with his right hand acting as the control. He had compared both hands for evidence of arthritis and found none, but he did confess that his study wasn’t enough to debunk the myth.…

Medical students and morticians might notice cadavers with fresh stubble, but there isn’t a mysterious life force inside the follicles. It may look like new cells are growing at the roots, but appearances can be deceiving. After death, the body starts to dry out and, as skin loses moisture, it shrinks. What looks like new growth is just hair and nails that were once hidden underneath being revealed. Many of our cells do stay alive longer than us. Studies looking at the genes of animals in the four days after they died showed that many cells activated automated stress responses after death. Stem cells in particular fight to survive as long as possible.…

TABLETS – NOT counting Apple’s iPads – are getting better and cheaper. If you start at the bottom with Amazon’s Fire 7 tablet, you’ll get a sturdy design and solid parental controls for less money than it costs to take a family to the movies. Also, if you’re up for buying a pair of tablets – say, one for the kids and one for yourself – Amazon’s had a habit of discounting the price when you buy two. You can get a lot of value from Amazon with its Fire HD 8 Kids Edition tablet. The slate comes with a protective case, free kid-friendly content and a 2-year no questions asked return policy. And it’s practically never been a better time to buy a cheap tablet, as Amazon’s giving Prime…

TELL US WHAT UX TRIGGERS DOES. Imagine having the ability to upload any design, marketing material or website for a detailed market research report within minutes. UX Triggers analyses your image by breaking down the colour psychology of the composition. If you’re interested in the golden-ratio portion of design, each report also employs a set of overlays to understand where key focal points in a design exist. For marketers, UX Triggers has a premium level that utilises research data to generate market acceptance ratings by gender, age group and provides scores for quality, trust, reliability and emotional triggers like fear, courage, fun and loneliness. WHY DID YOU CREATE IT? I created the first prototype that focused exclusively on the golden-ratio tool about ten years ago. It was used over 15,000…

A rather intriguing file has been dropped on Pastebin, which claims to be from a European game developer working on a PS5 launch game, and was created back in December. It lays out when PS5 could be announced and when it might arrive, some potential specs for the hardware (including a PS VR followup), and a few games that could come out in its early launch period. According to the Pastebin, PS5 will get a “small reveal” sometime from April to June this year – though not at E3 itself, because Sony is skipping E3 2019. The console will then arrive in March or November of 2020 for US$499, which would be US$100 more than PS4’s launch price. It will arrive with backwards compatibility and a 7nm Ryzen 8 core,…

$89 | PS4, Xbox One, PC | www.sekirothegame.com SEKIRO: SHADOWS DIE Twice is the latest from Dark Souls developers From Software. It’s set in a fantasy vision of Sengoku Japan, in the middle of a conflict between the Ashina and Hirata clans. You play a rogue shinobi called Sekiro – the one-armed wolf – charged with protecting a young lord who has the coveted power to defy death. It’s more of an action game than an RPG. You pick up new prosthetic arms and learn new combat techniques, and even put skill points into a few upgrade trees. Don’t expect to be fiddling with armour stats: this is a game about brief, deadly battles in an age of kunai and katanas. Sekiro’s combat system is beautiful. Instead of chipping down…

THE UNIT WE TESTED COMES WITH A CORE I7-8565U CPU THAT OFFERS A PRETTY SOLID 1.2GHZ BUMP IN THE MAXIMUM CLOCK SPEED FORM LAST YEAR’S I7-8550U. THIS TRANSLATED INTO A PERFORMANCE BOOST OF BETWEEN 5- AND 15% ON RAW PROCESSING TASKS. DLL’S XPS 13 has been at the top of our best value ultrabook list for the past few years and it looks like Dell hasn’t changed this winning formula too much with the new XPS 13 (9380). The most stark contrast from the 2018 XPS 13 is the addition of a Frost White edition that flaunts a woven carbon fibre keyboard surround, but you’ll also probably notice that a pinhole webcam now sits at the top of the InfinityEdge display. These minor updates are great additions to a laptop…

LAST YEAR, SAMSUNG produced the best LCD TV we’ve ever seen: bright colours and superb backlight-derived contrast made it a genuine rival to all-conquering OLED rivals. The 2019 refresh focuses on inflating screen sizes although there are some image enhancements. A new Quantum Processor with A.I. improves upscaling and on-the-fly contrast processing while new screen filters provide improved viewing angles and anti-glare performance. The rear-array lighting means the TV is quite thick and heavy – our 75-inch review unit weighed a whopping 52.4kg. If your home’s infrastructure can support it, a ‘zero-gap’ wall-mount bracket can be used and this is recommended as the small, central stand is prone to wobbling if not on a rock-solid surface. While not thin-and-pretty, the excellent “Ambient Mode” effects transform it into a translucent, dynamic…

MAINTAINING YOUR PRIVACY and security online is not really that hard, but it’s a task far too many people fail it. So here are our top ten tips to get you started. USE A VPN ON YOUR PHONE AND PC 01 When it comes to personal privacy, VPNs are good for what ails ya. They have the effect of both protecting your identity from the sites that you visit and preventing anyone in between from reading the contents of your data or knowing who you’re communicating with. It stops snooping from governments, ISPs, network providers and websites. The only party that knows what you’re doing online when you’re connected to a VPN is the VPN provider, and most of those deliberately don’t keep logs. It’s not just for your PC…

Some companies now offer a basic service that won’t cost you a thing. Are the free VPNs as good as their paid-for counterparts then? Not so fast. As you’d expect, there are catches, and they typically start with a data cap. Avira Phantom VPN’s free plan limits you to 500MB a month, PrivateTunnel offers 2GB, whereas ZPN has a generous 10GB allowance – not bad at all. Free products also typically have usage restrictions. Most companies don’t want you to soak up all their bandwidth on torrents, so ZPN is typical in blocking P2P. Hide.me’s 2GB free plan also has some common limits. There’s “best effort” bandwidth, which means paying customers have speed priority and you get what’s left. And the choice of locations is limited to three: Canada, Netherlands…

01 DISABLE PLATFORM The nuclear option. Turning off Platform prevents the integration of Facebook with apps and games, disables the ability to log into websites using your Facebook ID, and stops friends’ Facebook apps accessing your personal information. Turning Platform off might be inconvenient, but its security benefits are undeniable. Find it in “Settings,” under “Apps and Websites” [Image A]. 02 INCREASE PRIVACY Facebook is finally clamping down on access to your data, but there’s more you can do to hide things. Under “Settings > Privacy” [Image B], you can change who sees your posts, with several levels of control. “Public” posts are just that – public. Anyone can see them. “Friends” means only Facebook friends can see your posts, and you can control this further by excluding people. 03…

[ WINDOWS ] File Explorer’s glitchy behaviour I’m currently having two problems with Windows 10: clicking on the Recycle Bin icon on the desktop opens File Explorer, so I can’t empty it, and if I open File Explorer from the Taskbar I’m unable to create a new folder – clicking the button does nothing. Can you help please? DAVE CARLILE Rob Mead-Green replies: We were able to ascertain that the Recycle Bin was working correctly – clicking it does simply open File Explorer, and Dave confirmed he was able to empty the recycle bin from there or by right-clicking the bin itself). The second problem is almost certainly linked to a third-party program that adds additional commands to File Explorer, typically through the right-click menu. What you need is a…

MAC USERS FALL into two groups: those who set up their desktop and workspace exactly the way they want it to make them as productive as possible. The rest of us leave almost everything as it is and promise ourselves that one day we’ll get round to setting it up properly. This tutorial is aimed squarely at the second group, The good news is that there are lots of ways you can configure your Mac so it’s easier to navigate; simpler to access the files, folders and tools you need; and make you more productive. We’ve described tips here that can be carried out without any additional software or knowledge. However, if you want to go further, there are lots of apps that will allow you to perform further customisation…