Table of contents for July 2019 in Maximum PC

DELL HAS SHIPPED million of systems bundled with its SupportAssist software. This remote support tool is there to fix things, but it has a nasty security flaw that could leave your machine open to attack. The vulnerability is a remote code execution, triggered by a visit to a compromised website, where Java scripts can get to work, and potentially install anything on your machine, from ransomware to mining bots. To work, the hacker needs to be on the same local network, but the wide use of Wi-Fi makes this easier than you might think. Patches have been issued, but not everybody takes notice of endless software patches. The hole was discovered last October, worryingly easily. As ever, we learn about it only when patches are being rolled out. It took…

WHEN AMD HAS s omething big in the pipeline, Intel always manages to seem busy, too. In the last month, we’ve had a slew of launches and announcements: 7nm chips are go for 2021—it’s official—which sounds like good news, but isn’t. Intel is lagging. There have been huge problems getting its 10nm chips going, which were to fill the gap. So much so that there have been rumors that Cannon Lake has been shelved, which Intel denies. Part of the problem is that Intel has traditionally tied new microarchitecture designs to die shrinks, which has left it producing numerous iterations of 14nm designs when the shrink stalled. From now on, it plans to design architectures that are portable between die sizes. The first of these is Sunny Cove, and we…

1 RADEON RX 590 8GB This is it: a godly 1080p gaming GPU for under $250. Our recommendation would be a Sapphire Nitro model. 2 RADEON RX 570 8GB Solid, reliable, inexpensive; AMD’s 570 provides some of the best price-to-FPS value around. 3 GEFORCE GTX 1060 6GB The big brother of the two 1060 cards, the 6GB version packs more punch for its price. 4 GEFORCE GTX 1660 6GB The first of Nvidia’s 16 series, the 1660 is barely a budget card, but it runs well. 5 RADEON RX 580 8GB One of the best Radeon GPUs—but the 590 provides greater speeds for only a marginally higher cost. 6 GEFORCE GTX 1060 3GB The 3GB model of the GTX 1060 isn’t magical, but provides some of the best value for…

BESIDES BEING ABLE TO TELL you your IP a ddress, Mycroft comes with a default set of skills, which enable it to answer vocal questions such as: “What time is it?”; “What’s my location?”; “What’s the weather like?”; and “What is the capital of Assyria?” Strangely, despite the Assyrian kingdom being no more, the latter question was the only one it got correct on our first attempt—apparently, Mycroft is not versed in Monty Python. These failings were due to the Wolfram Alpha fallback skill guessing our location and time zone from our IP address, specifically our local one beginning 192, which belongs to no one and nowhere, but which for some reason Mycroft resolves to New York. This conveniently derived the time to be three hours in the future for…

1. ENABLE THE SPI BUS The 12 LED s on the ReSpeaker are connected over the Pi’s SPI bus. This needs to be enabled before we can communicate using it. Run: $ sudo raspi-config Then select “Interfacing Options > SPI,” and select “Enable SPI.” 2. BLINK SOME LEDS Next, grab the ReSpeaker code, and install some low-level Python dependencies: $ git clone https://github.com/respeaker/4mics_hat.git $ pip install spidev gpiozero Run the demo “blinkenlights” with: $ cd ~/4mics_hat/ $ python pixels_demo.py 3. HELP US! We couldn’t get the Direction of Arrival (DoA) code from the mic_ array repo working. Changing Queue to queue in lines 4 and 25 of mic_array.py was a good start. Then this code displayed direction in the CLI, but did not light up our LED s: $ cd…

WE ALL KNOW SSDS are coming to kill old spinning storage, but for many of us, a bank of HDDs still offers the capacity we need—8K footage, a mass of multi-megabyte photos, and who knows what other encyclopedic-level storage demands the discerning Maximum PC reader has?—without totally breaking the bank. There’s no doubt SSDs are catching up with their clunky spinning brethren on capacities, but the cost of a 4TB cutting-edge SSD drive would buy you nearly 30TB of spinning storage. If only there were a way to combine the storage space of old spinning drives with super-fast solid storage…. Well, say hello to Microsoft Storage Spaces. A modern solution for an ancient problem: Where to store all your old junk without enraging the other half. Storage Spaces are the Microsoft…

For our testing, we used a bank of four 1TB Toshiba 7,200rpm SATA hard drives in a number of Storage Space configurations: Simple, Mirrored, and Parity. Alongside this we ran two mismatched 480GB SSD SATA drives. We’re only interested in an overview of performance, so we relied on CrystalDiskMark 6 for our results. We even created a couple of Spaces through the Spaces GUI to see what it would make of them, and if the PowerShell route was actually superior. *GUI-created Storage Space…

YOU’LL NEED THIS ADOBE PHOTOSHOP Subscribe to a suitable package at www.adobe.com. ONCE, IF YOU WANTED TO PAINT IN NATURAL MEDIA, you did just that. Later, when computers were invented, you used Corel Painter. Now, natural media brushes are part of Photoshop, and you can smear, smudge, and blend your way across any image, creating something that’s halfway between the art of the photographer and the portrait artist. This kind of dynamic distortion makes it easy to convey movement in a still image, but it’s easier to do so if there’s implied motion there already. Whether it’s a shot of an athlete making a jump mere mortals couldn’t consider, or just someone running along a wall, an explosion of paint effects adds a velocity and a dynamism that transcends the…

LET’S START WITH a question: Are analog keyboards an intrinsically dumb idea? The answer could depend on how well trained your left hand has become at smashing WASD as hard as it can. Most of us have developed those fine motor skills in our thumbs, not our fingers, so approaching something like the Cooler Master MK850—which marks the commercial debut of Aimpad’s long-gestating optical analog tech—might require a significant period of refactoring and readjustment. And not just when using the analog keys, because CM’s decision to put modetriggering M-keys up the left edge of the keyboard, just asking to be triggered by an errant pinkie or a mis-angled palm, is initially infuriating. This isn’t the first analog keyboard to arrive. We’ve done our share of gushing about the excellent Wooting…

A CREAKY SPACE sailing boat. An ancient language. A love of history. Giant stone feet. Heaven’s Vault presents as a complicated mystery on first contact, and as story and game unfold, it does nothing to simplify itself—it’s just a complicated mystery you understand slightly better A piece of interactive storytelling from Inkle, the studio behind the excellent cell phone game 80 Days, Heaven’s Vault casts you as an academic, an expert on history in a world that wants only science, on the hunt for a missing roboticist. You’re also the only person who can figure out the meaning behind ancient writings no one else has bothered with, even though they may contain the secrets of humans’ relationships with the robots they chip out of a concrete wall, rather than construct.…

Rage 2 is out, delivering fast-paced run-and-gun action with vehicular combat. We’re here to talk about performance, and there’s plenty to cover. We’ve tested Rage 2 on our usual suite of graphics cards and CPUs—26 GPUs and 8 CPUs, to be precise. We also discuss system requirements, all the settings, and other major features. Rage 2 can run well on mid-range hardware, but budget GPUs in particular are going to struggle. We wouldn’t plan on maximum image quality at 1080p unless you have at least a GTX 1070 or better. For budget cards, such as a GTX 1050 or RX 560 (or older GTX 760 and R9 370), you’ll probably want to drop the resolution or use resolution scaling to stay closer to 60fps. Read the full article: https://bit.ly/2HqVcke…

AMD IS 50 YEARS OLD, and to celebrate, it launched a Gold Edition processor signed by CEO Lisa Su, and threw in some free games with its Radeon cards. It has good cause to celebrate, too: Things are looking particularly rosy as it gets ready to hit the market with its Ryzen 3000 series processors, featuring the new 7nm Zen 2 microarchitecture. AMD has produced some outstanding processors in the past (remember when the Athlon hit 1GHz?), but has never managed to fully exploit its innovation in follow-up designs. No longer: Buoyant with cash from selling server chips, AMD has been productive, and it looks like it is finally going to follow one very capable chip design with another, and in short order. At CES 2019, we were treated to…

SAMSUNG’S GALAXY FOLD made it to a few reviewers before it became clear the company had blundered: The screens broke in droves. Launch events were canceled, and deliveries halted. Customers are now being asked to opt in to keep their orders active. The phone is being “enhanced,” which presumably means being fixed. It’s a pity, because when it worked, it worked well. There are no clues as to when the phone will reappear. What went wrong is unclear, but iFixit posted a teardown of a Galaxy Fold, and called it “alarmingly fragile.” This didn’t go down well at Samsung, which applied pressure in the right places to get the article pulled. Apparently, the screen is delicate, and gaps in the casing allow dirt to get underneath, causing it to crack…

SK Hynix has started sampling its long-awaited 96-layer 1Tb QLC NAND flash memory chips. QLC stands for quadruple level cell—four bits of data per cell. The result is 10 percent smaller than the previous triple level cells. They will appear first in enterprise servers; the company is talking of drives of 16TB or larger. Toshiba also has a four-cell 96-layer chip, which will be with OEMs shortly. Intel is expected to make a similar foray into 96-layer later this year. This year, the PC market for oldschool hard drives is on track to be half what it was in 2018. SSD prices, meanwhile, are falling by 50 percent year on year, with a 1TB SSD expected to be mainstream this year, at under $100. Things are due to get even…

ROUND 1 Looks There are some pretty nifty looking air coolers. Big, bold coolers with hefty heatsinks, oversized fans, and more LEDs than you can shake a SATA cable at. Heck, you can even get air coolers with programmable LEDs that you can sync with other elements of your build, such as case lighting, keyboards, and mice. Air coolers that make a visual statement? Not a problem. But for sheer visual clout with a scifivibe, nothing competes with a slick custom closed-loop water-cooling installation. What’s not to like about gleaming pipes full of brightly colored coolant? Of course, much depends on your specific implementation. A really great-looking custom water-cooling install is costly and complex. Moreover, a shonky build won’t just look cheap, it could be a recipe for disaster. As…

1 Updates Can Now Be Paused For users on the go or on a limited data allowance, Microsoft has introduced a feature to pause updates for a certain period of time. You can access this via “Windows Update.” The default delay is seven days, but you can change this from “Advanced Options.” While it’s always advisable to keep your system up to date, upgrades can sometimes contain annoying bugs, forcing you to restore Windows from a previous backup. Using this new feature, you can hold fire for a few days until you’re certain the update is free of flaws. When you reach the pause limit of seven days, your device will need to get new updates before it can be paused again. 2 Reserved Space for Updates While some users…

THE PROCESS OF installing Picroft starts the same way as installing Raspbian: writing an SD card image. There are stable and unstable versions available at https://github.com/MycroftAI/enclosure-picroft. We’ll work with the stable image for this tutorial, but do give the unstable one a shot later to see some new features (and possibly bugs). Download the image to your machine—any machine running any OS; just be aware it’s 2.2GB zipped and 4.9GB unzipped, so make sure you have enough space. The image can be burned with a graphical program, such as the multi-platform Etcher (https://etcher.io), or the old-fashioned way with dd on Linux: $ sudo dd if=raspbian-stretch_Picroft_2018-09-12. img of=/dev/sdX status=progress bs=4K Replace/dev/sdX with the appropriate device (the lsblk command will help you figure this out if you’re not sure). That will take…

MORE SKILLS can be found on the Mycroft Marketplace at https://market.mycroft.ai/skills (they’re free). Y ou can install them from there, verbally with something like “Hey Mycroft install coinflip,” or manually at the Mycroft CLI. You can also install skills from the mycroft-skills GitHub repo. You’ll also find excellent documentation on how to write your own there. If you have a Spotify Premium account, there’s a skill for that. You can either play tracks through other devices via Spotify Connect, or play them through whatever Mycroft’s running on. Add the Spotify skill from the Marketplace; you should see a message like: INFO - Will install [‘mycroft-spotify’] from the marketplace Before you can use the Spotify skill, you need to enter some credentials. In the links to the left of the Marketplace,…

Can you use drives of different sizes? Yes, but no. Clear as mud—just how we like it. The short and basic answer is that in any parity or mirrored pool, you can use any size of drives you like, but the maximum capacity of the pool is determined by the smallest drive. Take a mirror consisting of a 1TB and 2TB drive—the maximum mirrored capacity is 1TB; the 2TB drive is limited to 1TB of storage. For a parity array, take a 4TB, 4TB, and a 6TB pool of drives. The overall capacity would be 12TB, because the 6TB is limited to the 4TB of the two smaller drives, though space available for storage would be 8TB, as a third is reserved for parity data, as we’ve explained. If the…

CONTROL BRIGHTNESS IN WINDOWS 10 Like us, you might be frustrated by the removal of brightness settings in Windows 10. As a workaround, try downloading RedShiftGUI, a free piece of software that allows for straightforward manual brightness adjustment. As an added bonus, it features a more in-depth version of Win 10’s Night Mode, altering color temperature automatically based on the time of day to make late-night browsing easier on the eyes. MAKE – USE – CREATE 58 Advanced audio recording and editing in Audacity 62 Create a Pi-based information radiator with DAKboard 70 An affordable media center—the perfect living-room rig submit your How To project idea to: comments@maximumpc.com…

YOU’LL NEED THIS AUDACITY Download the opensource software from www.audacityteam.org. BIG AUDIO SUITES ARE GREAT, but they can be intimidating to say the least—sometimes you just want something that works, without having to think too much about it. Enter Audacity, from www.audacityteam.org. Audacity has become popular on all desktop platforms, and has started popping up on YouTube tutorials quite a bit. Known for its ease of use and intuitive interface, Audacity is perhaps the audio equivalent of Microsoft Paint [erm… –Ed]—it can’t do deeply complicated tasks, but then it was never intended to do so. It’s designed around simple controls that most people can guess their way around, although that doesn’t mean you can’t achieve some great results with it. 1 AUDACIOUS AUDIO Although, technically, Audacity can record multi-channel digital…

YOU’LL NEED THIS WINDOWS 10 With a Microsoft account for both you and your child. BEING A PARENT IS STRESSFUL AND TIME-CONSUMING ENOUGH, without having to worry about what your child is using their (or your) PC for, or for how long. To save you from having to constantly monitor their use in person, Windows 10 includes a powerful collection of parental control options, which can act as your eyes and ears when you are busy with other things. Using built-in parental controls, it’s possible to place restrictions on the websites that can be visited, the apps that can be run, and when the PC can be used. While you might expect the options to be configured in “Settings,” you need to visit your Microsoft account online, and from there…

Making sure you know which layer you’re on can be the difference between a successful effect and a tedious trip to the History palette to undo several steps because they’ve been painted in the wrong place. The Move tool has an “Auto Select” function, which can be changed between layers and groups of layers, and this is useful for discovering which layer particular pixels live on. Just click w ith M ove, a nd the l ayer b elow it is selected. While there’s nothing like proper layer discipline—grouping and renaming layers so there’s no ambiguity about what part they play in your composition—shortcuts like this are essential if you want to avoid getting frustrated while the creative juices are flowing. Just keep everything to a separate layer, and you’ll…

HOW MUCH ARE you willing to sacrifice for the best possible gaming experience? Resolution? Viewing angles? Stick both on the list, along with color accuracy—they’re all going to take a hit if you go for the new ViewSonic Elite XG240R. That’s not necessarily a problem. The XG240R is nothing if not unapologetic. It’s all about gaming. And not just any old gaming, but specifically esports. Consequently, its 24-inch LCD not only uses TN as opposed to IPS or VA panel tech, but it sports a mere 1920x1080 native res. But factor the sub-$300 price into the gaming remit, and those are positive choices rather than compromises. The TN tech makes for fast responses; ViewSonic rates the XG240R good for 1ms with overdrive enabled. As ever, claimed pixel response specs are…

MICE DON'T GENERALLY vary a huge amount from one to the other. There are buttons, there’s probably a wheel, and a sensor underneath. Maybe there’ll be some slightly advanced electronics controlling the sensor; perhaps there’ll be some pretty lights. So, what do we, certified by our mothers as the world’s pre-eminent mouse critics, do when a mouse comes along that checks all the boxes well enough—and even double-checks some of them—but elicits little more than a shrug under close examination? That’s what we have here, in the form of the overtitled HyperX Pulsefire FPS Pro. Nine syllables. There’s no doubt its foundation comes from a good place: Kingston’s gaming sub-brand rarely lets us down, and however dull it may be, plenty of effort has been put into the design and…

GOOGLE HAS JUST HELD its annual I/O event, and the biggest draw was the third beta for Android Q. This adds support for 5G, folding phones (if you can find one), revamped privacy settings, News story timelines, and a Focus Mode to silence notifications, among other frills. One interesting feature is Live caption, which uses AI to turn any audio into text. All the translation is done locally, so Google servers don’t know what you are up to. Yes, there was a fair bit of talk about privacy, too. Google incognito mode is to be expanded to Google Maps, so you can keep your comings and goings private. You’ll also be able to set Google to delete all your activity after three months. Google Duplex got another airing, now heading…

TRIUMPHS MOST POWERFUL LASER 10 billion million watts, and able to vaporize matter: part of the International Extreme Light Infrastructure, 10 times the quoted power of the Death Star. DETAILED UNIVERSE PIC 7,500 Hubble images have been stitched together to make a pic that includes 265,000 galaxies. SUPER SUPERCOMPUTER Oak Ridge Lab to house Frontier, 50 times faster than the current top machines, at 1.5 exaflops. TRAGEDIES WHATSAPP SPIES ON YOU Hackers got into the app just by calling your phone—you didn’t even need to respond. ANOTHER BITC OIN HEIST Binance was hit by hackers who got away with 7,000 coins worth $41 million from its hot wallet. DRAGON II EXPLODES Smoke was visible for miles, but it took a while for SpaceX to come clean. A capsule was completely…

Last fall, a bizarre and worrying story emerged about alleged “spy” chips embedded into SuperMicro server motherboards made in China. Then things went quiet, the original source for the story (Bloomberg) stuck by it, SuperMicro denied it, and its own audit found no evidence of tampering. However, customers were spooked, and sales dropped, especially in the US, where SuperMicro makes 60 percent of its revenue. The company has now asked suppliers to move production out of China, while it expands its own production facilities, including a new factory in Taiwan. Spy chips or not, customers were asking for non-Chinese boards. In 2017, about 90 percent of server boards were made in China; that figure is now around 50 percent. Whether or not there is any truth to the allegation, people…

Running executable files has always been risky; Microsoft is trying to address security concerns that may arise from installing unverified EXE files. Power users will be used to setting up and installing a virtual machine to test some files before installing them on their PC, but with the new Windows 10 update, Microsoft has come up with a neat solution: Windows Sandbox. It creates a virtual desktop isolated from your actual Win 10 desktop. The feature will be part of Pro and Enterprise Windows 10 editions. It uses hardware-based visualization for kernel isolation. This relies on the Microsoft’s hypervisor to run on a separate kernel, which isolates Windows Sandbox from its host. Each time the app is opened, it creates a lightweight (100MB) version of Windows 10. So, each time…

THE MYCROFT MARK 1 LAUNCHED IN 2016, and w as powered by a Pi 2, but things have moved on, and it now ships with a Pi 3 at its heart. It’s a stylish device, and with its friendly ET-style face, you could almost forgive it for listening in to all your living room conversations. Actually, non-creepiness is part of Mycroft’s design—any feature you find invasive or unnecessary can be disabled, thanks to its open-source nature. Mozilla’s Privacy Not Included site has a favorable write-up at http://bit.ly/lxf249mycroft. The Mark 1 device is still available for $180, but it was always designed with hackers and hobbyists in mind. A successor is on the way, and the Mark 2 will be much more consumer-friendly (but sadly no longer looks like ET), featuring…

The Seeed ReSpeaker 4-Mic Array Pi HAT is, as they say in the business, a nifty bit of gear. As well as four microphones, it has 12 LED s, which can be used to indicate audio direction of arrival, or just to flash randomly and concerningly. It has GPIO and I2C connections, so that other devices can be daisy-chained to it, or it can stack directly on to Seeed’s GrovePi hub, enabling even more sensors to be connected. It uses the AC108 codec, which at present isn’t supported by the Raspbian kernel, so we need to install a custom one. Connect to the Pi, either by SSH or keyboard, and quit the Mycroft CLI. Run the following commands: git clone https://github.com/respeaker/seeed-voicecard.git cd seeed-voicecard sudo./install.sh The install script chugs along for…

We’ve barely scratched the surface of what openHAB is capable of, but it’s just one of a number of platforms that can interoperate to one degree or another among themselves and, indeed, Mycroft. For example, there’s a Minecraft plugin for openHAB, so you can control actual devices in your house from the voxelated world of the game. It uses the popular SpigotMC plugin—look it up. You can also use openHAB to communicate with Nest devices and Amazon Echo. There’s also a Mycroft skill for controlling devices connected via the popular open-source Home Assistant platform (www.homeassistant. io), which can talk to all sorts of things such as Sonos audio systems, Alexa, Google Assistant, and Z-Wave devices. Like openHAB, Home Assistant has a smartphone app and offers a web interface. Finally, Google…

1 STANDING STILL The Ghost has no fan—in fact, it has no moving parts. Using passive cooling, Shadow claims that it will never overheat—indeed, a quick pat down after several hours of testing revealed that it was indeed perfectly cool. The result of this is an almost totally silent device. 2 PLUGGED IN At the rear, the Ghost has four USB ports for peripherals, HDMI 2.0 for connecting to a TV, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and an Ethernet port. It also has dual-band Wi-Fi, but given the nature of the device, it’s best to stick to a wired connection for higher speeds. 3 SCALE MODEL It’s a tiny unit, weighing less than seven ounces, and standing only two inches tall. The Ghost is designed to occupy any space with minimal…

1. MAIN TOOLBAR Where your primary tools are kept, such as Selection, Time Shift, Zoom, and Envelope. 2. TRACK CONTROLS Tools for muting, soloing tracks, and changing the gain and the pan. This is where you can really shape your soundscape. 3. TRACK MENU Provides a bundle of more advanced controls, such as mono-to-stereo conversion, as well as renaming and moving tracks. 4. COLLAPSE BUTT ON This squishes up any track into a kind of sliver, which then can be expanded later. 5. ZOOM CONTROLS Dedicated buttons for specific zoom functions, including zooming in to a selected portion of a wave, or zooming out 100 percent. 6. RECORDING OPTIONS Choose which audio system to use, which device to record from, mono or stereo, and change the playback device.…

YOU’LL NEED THIS RASPBERRY PI With the latest copy of Raspbian Lite and an Internet connection. THE TERM “INFORMATION RADIATOR” is a typically obscure tech way of saying “device that displays information on a screen.” This information can range from simple newsfeeds and advertisements to complex service statuses. They are typically used in hotel lobbies to display news, weather, and ads, and in tech offices, where developers need to see the status of their work at a glance. In this project, we’re going to make our own simple information radiator using DAKboard and a Raspberry Pi. The best type of Pi for this project is any of the Pi 3 models or a Pi Zero W, because they all come with built in Wi-Fi connectivity—but if you have an older…

YOU’LL NEED THIS WINDOWS 10 Access the Game Bar via the Start menu, or press Win-G. TAKING A STATIC SCREENSHOT IN WINDOWS 10 is incredibly easy: Just press the Print Screen key, and whatever you see on your screen is copied to the clipboard, ready for you to paste into an image-editing program. To do something more advanced, you can turn to Windows 10’s Snipping Tool, which enables you to do things such as just capturing an area of your desktop. But what about if you want to record the action happening on your screen? What if you want to make a video of what you see on your desktop? While you could turn to a third-party app, you might be surprised to learn that Windows 10 has its own…

SOLID STATE STORAGE prices have dropped off a cliff. We’re now talking sub-$100 for a 1TB drive, and below $50 for 500GB. That’s not far off half the price drives were going for six months ago. Insane. Or it would be if such drives were easy to recommend. Often, they’re not. Broadly speaking, entry-level SSDs fall into two categories. First are drives based on TLC NAND memory from brands you’ve never heard of. Rolling the dice on one of those is an unnerving experience. The other option is a QLC drive from a more reassuring manufacturer. Problem is, the underlying performance of QLC NAND memory is garbage. Given all such drives operate with some level of SLC cache, one can debate how often the true performance of the bulk of…

THE CITY-BUILDING GAME is surely due a renaissance, so it’s pleasing to see Ubisoft give it an industrial revolution, too. As the eldest child of a beloved islandcity magnate, your job should be to pick up where he left off. However, your scheming uncle takes over, and charges you for your father’s funeral, so you leave to start anew, on a nearby uncolonized island. Eventually, you attract workers, build a thriving civilization, complete the campaign, and seamlessly enter a sandbox mode to which there is no end. This new Anno is ridiculously complex, with each layer of systems you unlock hinting at more to come. Early sheep farms allow you to position fields individually. When you unlock zoos, you build individual enclosures for animals. Early drafts of cities are thrown…