Table of contents for October 2016 in Maximum PC

VIRTUAL REALITY: two words on the tip of the tongue of every tech journalist this side of the Pacific. And with good reason: As far as technological advances go, this is the biggest development in screen technology we’ve seen since CRT was retired in favor of LCD. But there’s one caveat, and it’s a big one: the price. It’s a heavy commitment—$800 for a headset, and $1,400 or more for a rig capable of powering it. Is it any wonder why we—and the critics— are holding our breath on this one? What does VR need? In short, more uptake and a lower price point. We now know that there are over 40 separate headsets currently making their way to market, including more affordable—yet still high quality— products from the likes…

One of the biggest contradictions with passwords is that they need to be unique, strong, and hard to crack, yet somehow easy to remember. Thankfully, password managers are built specifically to aid with this process—you set up a vault containing all your passwords, then unlock it with one master password, ensuring you only need to remember that to effectively gain access to all the rest. Our favorite password manager is LastPass. We recommend the Premium version ($12 a year), which syncs across all your devices (mobile and desktop), and offers two-factor authentication, as well, which means that even if someone hacks your password, they still can’t get at your vault. LastPass is installed as a browser add-on or standalone app, and offers to save passwords as you enter them for…

SOUND: IT DEFINES OUR WORLD. It’s the birdsong in the early morning hours, the rumble as those eight cylinders roar into life, the hum of the waffle iron as it, er, irons waffles. Unequivocally, it’s one of our most important senses. Life is not over without it, but losing it is a devastating blow to most. And that is why you should enjoy it as best you can, whenever you can. Once the din of the day’s work has subsided, and the hustle and bustle ebbs away as the big city rests its weary head, the best thing you can do is sink into a good chair, slide on your favorite pair of cans, slap on some high-resolution acoustics, sit there, and just listen. Therapeutic? Most definitely. Sennheiser’s latest HD…

BY DEFAULT, Debian requests an IP address from your router using DHCP. This means, though, that on the next reboot, it may well end up with a different IP, which will make SSHing in from elsewhere on the network a challenge, and also flummox any port forwarding arrangements later. Some broadband routers enable you to reserve an IP for a machine based on its MAC address, which is one way of solving this problem, but we can also just set up a static IP on our server. We need an address that is of the same shape (by that, we mean belonging to the same /24 subnet) as that of your router—the IP address it has already assigned you is a perfectly good choice. You can find this out by…

ONE OF THE MOST noble duties any home server can perform is sharing files. Whether it’s to store the gigabytes of bangin’ psytrance tunes you’ve amassed, or just a place to put things when you can’t find a USB stick to throw at your cohabiters, having some central and communal storage space is incredibly useful. Unixlike OSes have their own file sharing protocol called NFS, which has been around since the 80s. This is certainly an option, but not one we’ll indulge today. Instead, we’ll use Samba, which is an implementation of the sharing protocols used in Windows. This has the advantage that our server will be accessible to any Windows machine or Mac, as well as any iOS or Android devices. Before we set up Samba, it’s a good…

About iFixit iFixit is a global community of tinkerers dedicated to helping people fix things through free online repair manuals and teardowns. iFixit believes that everyone has the right to maintain and repair their own products. To learn more, visit www.ifixit.com. BACKGROUND Some months after its initial release and lukewarm reception, the Pixel C has found its way back into the news, with a hefty discount to developers who want to try out the new Android N operating system. Sounds like it’s teardown time! MAJOR TECH SPECS • 10.2-inch LTPS LCD with a resolution of 2560x1800 (308ppi) • Nvidia Tegra X1 64-bit quad-core processor paired with a 256-core Maxwell GPU • 3GB LPDDR4 memory • 32GB or 64GB storage options • USB Type-C • 8MP rear camera and 2MP front…

YOU’LL NEED THIS AFFINITY DESIGNER Download the beta for free from http://affinity.serif.com. ADOBE PHOTOSHOP Subscribe at www.adobe.com. A SUITABLE PHOTO You need a portrait to work on. SHEPPARD FAIREY’S FAMOUS, maybe even iconic, poster from the 2008 US presidential election became so well known it even has its own Wikipedia entry. The original is based on a 2006 photo by former Associated Press freelance photographer Mannie Garcia, and a version of it was added to the Smithsonian collection in 2009. Showing Barack Obama in blue, red, and beige, the original wording was “Progress,” but it was changed to “Hope” before release. In these times of international turmoil, we could all do with a little hope, so here’s how to recreate the poster’s look with your own photo. We’re going to…

SHOCKINGLY, near-future Mars turns out to be not a great place to live. Not only have the corporations assumed the roles of states, and are fighting over water and resources (and if that’s not foreshadowing, we don’t know what is), but everybody has their face frozen in such a way that only their mouth can move. Spiders, French developer of Mars: War Logs back in 2013, and 2014’s Bound By Flame, has woven a new sci-fi RPG using a modified version of Sony’s popular free-touse PhyreEngine. Technically, it’s more of a hit than a miss, as the sharp output brings a brutalist art style to the fore, even if it is all rather brown. Huge halls extend into the distance without blurring, while the details of crossed hammer carvings and…

Built to Last I’ve subscribed to the magazine for a few years, and I’ve built two computers. I am not a gamer; I read to keep up with the latest technology. Could you make a list for me of a rig that will last a good number of years? I mostly use the computer for Internet purposes (streaming especially). I love blue lighted fans with the big window on the side. Nothing flashy, either. –Peter H SENIOR EDITOR JARRED WALTON RESPONDS: The “Blueprint” near the back of each issue is a good place to start for parts lists, but it sounds as though you’re wondering about the gaming—or, more specifically, nongaming— aspects of building a PC. Truth is, outside of professional applications and games, there aren’t a lot of things…

TWO OF THE BIGGEST music streaming services are locked in a nasty fight over fees, and it has serious ramifications for everyone, but especially Apple. iTunes takes a straight 30 percent cut of any in-app purchase, and offers no access to alternative billing systems. The spat was triggered when an updated version of Spotify’s iOS app was rejected. It was rejected because it bypassed Apple’s billing system, and sent you to Spotify’s instead. Spotify claimed Apple was trying to “diminish the competitiveness of Spotify on iOS and as a rival to Apple Music.” Apple said the updated version violated its App Store rules, which are applied equally to all, whether or not they happen to be rivals. Spotify accused Apple of using its approval process as “a weapon to harm…

1 PREP FOR YOUR BUILD IT’LL PROBABLY come as no surprise, but the best way to build a rig is to plan it well. The first and most crucial aspect of creating your new PC is setting up your build area. Make sure that wherever you decide to construct your machine, the area is free from distraction. Ensure you have all the tools you’ll need to put your wee beastie together (usually a Phillips screwdriver, some scissors, and a set of needle-nose pliers for the fiddly bits). And, last but not least, try to find a static-free area—avoiding woolly socks and carpets is usually best. If you’re paranoid, you can buy an anti-static strap, but if you can’t find one, or are feeling stingy, ensure you regularly touch the casing…

Hackers are always looking for weak spots to exploit, and often find them in the underlying code that makes up Windows and all the programs (and associated extras, such as browser add-ons) on your PC. When vulnerabilities are found, hackers use “zeroday exploits” to take advantage of them. Most good anti-malware software has built-in behavioral protection against these exploits—it works by monitoring your PC’s processes for suspicious behavior that could point toward a zero-day attack, and takes steps to block it. It’s not foolproof, though— some false positives can be found, and other exploits can go unnoticed. As always, the best form of protection is prevention, and that means keeping your system up to date. It’s one of the reasons why Windows 10 now forces its updates down your throat,…

Many instances of ransomware are delivered through malicious advertising— or “malvertising.” This is the process of injecting malicious malware-laden ads into legitimate online advertising networks and webpages—since 2012, billions of ad impressions have been hijacked, including trusted sites. This malware gets through defenses, and can silently infect users’ systems—no interaction required. So, how do you protect against these ads? Your anti-malware software should have some protection—both Norton and the Premium version of Malwarebytes have defenses against malicious websites built in, and you’ll see a steady stream of alerts as sites are blocked, not just from your browser, but other apps, such as Skype, too. Make sure you’re running the latest version of your browser and Adobe Flash, as some malvertising targets vulnerabilities, as we discussed in the “Importance of Being…

THE NEXT STEP is to set up a software RAID array using mdadm. Let’s suppose we have two 1TB drives, which can be had for about $50 a pop nowadays. There is a natural aversion to sacrificing capacity; it would be tempting to have two large partitions (one on each drive), but if one drive fails, you lose half your data, and by Murphy’s Law, it will be the good half. You could be even more reckless, and conjoin multiple drives together (JBOD) into a single logical volume, but here, if one drive fails, you lose all your data. Don’t hate your data. There’s also a common misconception that your drives have to be identical for RAID. This isn’t true—in fact, there’s a reasonable argument for using different drives, or…

BEING ABLE TO ACCESS your server from anywhere in the world can be very handy, but running Internetfacing services carries risks. If we allow outside access to the SSH service, then we really should have strong passwords, or (better) use keys. It’s reasonable to disable access to the root account (if you set a password for it during the install; otherwise, it’s already disabled), and logging in as a lowly user, using sudo for privileged operations. This is controlled with the PermitRootLogin setting in /etc/ssh/sshd_config, which you can set to No , or, if you want to allow root to log in using a key, prohibit-password (the default on Debian). It’s probably a good idea to check that SSH is working first, though, so try to log in from another…

WE’VE DONE MOST of the groundwork required for any server, but we haven’t really considered security, and it’s worth saying a few words about this. Having only SSH visible to the outside world is a good start, especially if only key-based access is possible. If the key is stolen, though, or the password is guessed (if you were lazy and allowed password access), your whole machine is vulnerable, because that user has sudo rights. Some people only allow non-sudo users to log in, but this then precludes being able to do grown-up tasks. Trade-offs between security and convenience are commonplace. Having our services only visible to the LAN relies on the fact that our network hasn’t been compromised. Certainly, as long as our home network is IPv4-based, our server is…

YOU’LL NEED THIS RASPBERRY Pi 2 The brilliant mini-computer costs under $45. See www.raspberrypi.org. Pi MUSICBOX Go to http://bit.ly/MopidyPiMusic BoxAnswers for a whole heap of help. AIRPLAY REMAINS a great way of wirelessly piping music through your home, but even basic AirPlay speakers come with a hefty price tag attached. In many cases, you’ll already have a perfectly serviceable stereo system in place, so why spend a fortune on another speaker (or pair of speakers), when you can put together your own wireless AirPlay receiver for around $65? Better still, why limit yourself to AirPlay, when your receiver can do so much more? We were inspired to try this project by a desire to make full use of a 25-year-old Pioneer stereo system that sounds as good as the day…

1. PREPARE YOUR MICROSD CARD Connect a microSD card to your PC via a USB adapter. If you get an error about exFAT, you need to format it as FAT32. Open Disks from the Dash, and select your card. You’ll see an exFAT partition—select it and click “-” to delete it. Click “+” and set the partition size to 2048MB, choose “FAT,” and click “Create.” 2. DOWNLOAD PI MUSICBOX You need a specially built Pi Zero-friendly build of Pi MusicBox— download the 350MB image from http://bit.ly/pimusiczero. Once saved to your Downloads folder, open Nautilus, browse to the folder, right-click “20150116-RPi0.zip,” and choose “Extract Here.” Now open a Terminal window, and enter df -h . 3. WRITE PI MUSICBOX IMAGE Identify your card’s 2GB partition (“/dev/sde1” in our example), and type…

ALL BAD JOKES about the online merger aside, we have to admit that, as far as gaming goes, this truly is the year to be a PC gamer. Just look at what we’ve seen over the last 12 months: Skylake, Broadwell-E, Pascal, and Polaris. And with Zen round the corner, enjoying those triple-A polygons dancing across the screen as you decapitate your latest foe has never been so much fun. But the GTX 1080 and 1070 only tell part of the story. The true battle will be at the mid-range: the 1080p and 1440p cards; the grunts of both graphics companies’ armies. The flagships bring the prestige, but it’s the midrange that wins the war. Anyway, here we have Nvidia’s latest Founder’s Edition graphics processor, in the form of the…

ORION BROWN is surely the alter ego of some DC superhero. Armed with a minimal set of powers and, inevitably, a skin-tight black catsuit, Cherry Girl fights crime in a city overrun by gigantic metal monsters capable of firing colored lasers everywhere they go. Tortuous metaphors aside, what Logitech has produced here is a… keyboard. It’s black and rectangular, the keys sit on a choice of Cherry MX Red or Brown switches (ours has Browns, hence the name), rather than the home-made Romer Gs seen elsewhere in the range, and there's a couple of media keys at the top-right. This positions it squarely in the all-rounder bracket—the MX Brown switches having a click that gives feedback for gamers, as well as being perfectly comfortable to type on. Even enjoyable, because…

TRUST US, you don’t want this spoiled for you. It would be easy to reveal Inside’s story by accident, and we agonized about the images that accompany this review because we didn’t want to give anything away. Inside isn’t long, and it’s not particularly complex, but this boy’s journey is best enjoyed cold. Swedish indie developer Playdead made a game before—you might remember it. Limbo saw a silhouetted boy travel through a dangerous monochrome forest, and Inside channels a great deal of that game. The 2.5D art style is what immediately strikes you, all muted colors, creepy shadows, and shafts of light. The lack of faces on any character makes the boy you control a suitably empty vessel to empathize with, while on everything else it becomes a horror film…

Approximate Price: $794 SAY GOODBYE to the R9 series. In this build, we’re introducing AMD’s RX 480, with a reference model from XFX. One important thing to note is that this is the 4GB model. To keep our total below $800, we had to go with that instead of the 8GB model. Don’t get us wrong: The 4GB model will perform just fine, with a significant improvement over the R9 380. However, if you’d like to make room for some of those bigger textures, the 8GB rendition might serve you better. The RX 480 is still primarily a 1080p card, though it accomplishes its task with relish. We also chose to change up the power supply to an EVGA model. The reason for this was price, as both EVGA and…

TRIUMPHS + POKEMON GO SETS RECORDS Nintendo’s shares are looking healthy as Pokémon Go becomes the most successful mobile app of all time. + MICROSOFT COMES TO STEAM Microsoft is to start putting games on Steam. Whether Steam also gets the big premium titles alongside Windows Store remains to be seen. + SEGA SATURN CRACKED An engineer has cracked the DRM on the Saturn. It took three years, but enables you to run games direct from images on a USB drive. TRAGEDIES - JAIL SENTENCE FOR HACKER A Chinese hacker has been given four years in jail for his part in attempts to steal military jet secrets. - $3 BILLION IN DAMAGES Oracle has to pay Hewlett Packard Enterprises huge damages for lost profits after it reneged on a contract.…

1 The tool-less 3.5-inch bays make it incredibly easy to install any additional hard drives you might have, allowing for a total of three. 2 BitFenix even includes 5.25-inch tool-less bays. If you really do need an optical drive, you could throw one in here with relative ease. 3 A modular power supply would have been nice here, but the EVGA 600B is brilliant value, and comes with a great warranty. 4 The Neos also has support for two 120mm fans in the front of the chassis, which is ideal for a hot system, like this one. SO, WE COME TO the big question—the one on everyone’s lips: Does this machine meet the VR-ready specification? Has the impossible been achieved? Has Polaris and the 14nm manufacturing process finally made budget…

Make sure your email provider supports secure methods for sending and receiving email—for webmail providers, that means ensuring you’re always logging on through https:// to prevent your password being sniffed out by hackers. In the case of major providers such as Google, this should now be the default, but also look for other ways in which to protect your account—see the “Protect Online Accounts” box over the page. If you use a traditional email account, check with your provider that it supports SSL, and verify you’re using those settings in your mail program to send and receive messages. This ensures your password and the content of your emails are encrypted when sent to or received from the server. As things stand, however, the content of your email isn’t encrypted during…

What happens if you receive a ransomware demand? First, identify its type—there are those that block access to your PC, and others that encrypt data, then demand a ransom to release it. The former usually tries to trick you by claiming to have found unlicensed software or other illegal material on your PC, while the latter is more upfront. Make a note of the Bitcoin wallet address used for payment demands, plus the filelist of encrypted data—should the private keys used by the criminals ever come to light, it may give your data. Next, verify you have a recent backup that’s safe and uncompromised (check on another PC). Finally, you need to clean your system. Try running scans with your anti-malware tools to see if they can remove the infection.…

A MEDIA PLAYER, such as VLC or mpv, will happily open a file on your server remotely. But try skipping back and forth, and you’ll discover that SMB is not a particularly good way to stream media. Especially if you envisage streaming to multiple users. Emby, on the other hand, is a media server that can serve content from your server or DLNA (the most horrible acronym ever created: Digital Living Network Alliance) devices. Emby delivers streams via HTML5, and it can dynamically compress them according to the current network conditions. Note, however, that this can use a lot of CPU power, so serving a few users simultaneously might result in jittery (or outright stalled) playback. Emby can use GPU acceleration for this purpose, though, provided the appropriate drivers are…

DIM YOUTUBE’S BORDER Are you a regular YouTube viewer? Do you find its piercing white background too bright? Especially at night? There’s a simple fix: Magic Actions is a nifty Chrome extension that adds a light switch to the top-left corner, enabling you to swap between the standard template and a gray alternative. It also comes with auto-wide features, auto-HD to your specifications, and other options that will make your video-watching life even better. ZAK STOREY STAFF WRITER OEM M.2 SSDS PCIe NVMe SSDs are undoubtedly the drives to have right now. Take a quick look at any of those small form factor Samsung SSDs, and you’ll soon realize why they’re so desirable: 512GB of storage, read speeds up to 2,150MB/s, and writes at 1,500MB/s. They’re faster than a triple-SSD…

YOU’LL NEED THIS RECUVA Download this free app from www.piriform.com/recuva. WE’VE ALL DELETED FILES BY MISTAKE, and immediately panicked, because while deleting them is easy to do, recovering them isn’t always that straightforward. The good news is that when you empty the Windows Recycle Bin, the files aren’t really destroyed. In fact, what Windows does is earmark the space occupied by the “deleted” files as empty space for new data. This makes it possible to recover the files, so long as new data hasn’t already been written over the space. Recuva is a free, feature-rich tool that helps recover accidentally deleted files. In addition to hard disks, it can also be used to recover data on USB drives, SD cards, and smartphones connected to your computer. It can recover data…

1 This was one of the trickier builds to work in with regard to cable management. You might notice it becomes particularly cramped when installing both the 8-pin EPS power (see bottom-middle) and the 24-pin—an easy trick to unhook these is to use a key. Simply wedge it down from the top of the notch, press down, and pull the cable up and out. 2 There’s going to be a fair amount of tension on that tubing when you’re installing the AIO liquid cooler. But don’t worry too much about it—Corsair assured us that the H80 is designed to take this level of strain, thanks to the cable braid that surrounds those water funnels. 3 The advantage of having a large fan like this is that it’s exceptionally quiet, relatively…

WHEN MOST PEOPLE think of a laptop, their mind usually goes to the same place: a lightweight, portable notebook that can fit, well, on their lap. Xotic PC’s GT72S is indeed portable, and it is a notebook, but it’s definitely not a laptop. This is not a notebook that you’ll see anyone try to bust out on a cramped coach seat on an airplane, or pull out of a trendy messenger bag after they lock up their fixed-gear bicycle. This thing is a heavy, portable gaming rig that’s much closer to a desktop replacement than it is a laptop such as the Razer Blade 14. The PC’s innards are reason enough to set it apart from most other mobile computers. The PC is based on MSI’s GT72S G-041, whose specs…

FANS ARE TRICKY. To most people, as long as they spin and keep air flowing, they mean very little. To others, they’re a statement. They’re about gaining every inch of ground possible in the cooling or silence battle. They’re about accenting your build, adding an element of movement in an otherwise lifeless and solid-state system. And we’ve come a long way in the last 10 years—from air towers and 82mm fans spinning at 3,000rpm, to super-quiet, specialized fan blades designed to spin at lower and lower revolutions per minute, while still pumping out the same amount of air and pressure. Alongside Noctua, Corsair has been at the forefront of cooling technology for some time. Although often slightly behind the legendary Noctua NF-F12 in terms of overall performance, it’s hard to…

WITH THE ADVENT of SteamOS and livingroom PC gaming, it was inevitable that we’d see the rise of a variety of gaming peripherals developed to enhance your couchmaster gaming experience. Whether that’s Corsair’s Lapdog, Razer’s Turret, or Roccat’s Sova, we’re well served by gaming gear designed to transfer the accuracy and versatility of signature peripherals into the world of the big-screen TV. Corsair’s meticulously designed Lapdog is a highly advanced form of locking tray. The overall style follows the nowlegendary K70 aesthetic: Thick, brushed aluminum panels litter the frame, giving the Lapdog a premium feel. The mouse mat is a reinforced hard plastic, mimicking Corsair’s MM400 gaming surface, yet it’s still just a cover hiding yet another aluminum plate below it. The Lapdog sits on a memory foam-formed cushion, specially…