Saturday 1 August 2015

Lenovo ThinkCentre M73 Tiny Desktop

Lenovo ThinkCentre M73 Tiny Desktop

Lenovo’s new office PC doesn’t need any floor space to deploy

Having seen plenty of amazingly small PCs in the past few years, my first reaction to Lenonvo’s ThinkCentre M73 Tiny Desktop is that it isn’t the smallest PC I’ve seen. However, compared with a standard ATX case, the M73 Tiny is small enough to be VESA mounted to a monitor, or placed out of view on the side or back of a desk.

Ricoh SP3600DN

Ricoh SP3600DN

Forgoing colour, Michael Fereday checks out a mono laser printer

The Ricoh SP3600DN is a mono laser printer that has been developed to replace the company’s SP3500N, SP364510DN and SP4100DN models. As you might suppose the 'DN' section of the product’s model number refers to the fact that this printer has duplex and network capabilities.

Salircu Line Interact 700VA SPS ONE Tower UPS

Salicru Line Interact 700VA SPS ONE Tower UPS

It’s big and red, and without it your PC could be dead

Salicru, as was news to me also, is a Spanish business that’s been around since 1965 making systems to maintain electrical supply. It makes a wide range of DC converters, voltage stabilisers and Uninterruptable Power Supplies (UPS). The scope of its products is quite amazing, in fact, because at one end it's got the SPS Home range – that starts with a 600VA capacity – and at the other end the SLC Adapt, with the potential for a whopping 900000VA.

Play Time

Play Time

What happens when we lose track of ourselves and put too much into playing videogames? Chronoslip – and potentially fatal consequences

Chen Rong-Yu died in two places at once.

At 10pm on Tuesday, January 31, 2012, the 23-year-old took a seat in the farthest corner of an Internet café on the outskirts of New Taipei City, Taiwan. He lit a cigarette and logged into an online videogame. He played almost continuously for 23 hours, stopping occasionally only to rest his head on the table in front of his monitor and sleep for a little while. Each time that he woke he picked up his game where he’d left off. Then, one time, he did not raise his head. It was nine hours before a member of the café’s staff tried to rouse the motionless man, in order to tell him that his time was up, only to find his body stiff and cold.

Critical Mass

game developer

With consumers able to exert more pressure on developers than ever, how is the game industry responding? And is the customer always right?

On March 12, 2012, a disgruntled fan of the Mass Effect series posted a message on the official BioWare forum outlining the reasons why he was frustrated with the Shepard trilogy’s ending. The post is addressed to Mass Effect 3’s developers and writers and outlines, under a series of bolded headings, a litany of their supposed failings. Some of the author’s frustrations sprung from the shortfall between the promise of making meaningful choices across three games and the reality of how players’ actions affected the three endings provided. Other grievances were based on perceived inconsistencies in the science fiction. In conclusion, he wrote, “BioWare… this game deserves a better ending. We know you can do better than this. Please, do not let us down in this way.”

Rise Of The Robots

Horizon: Zero Dawn

The studio behind Killzone is making a very different kind of beast in open-world action RPG Horizon: Zero Dawn

Four years ago, Guerrilla Games moved offices. Its previous home was a little farther down Amsterdam’s Herengracht canal, in the Dutch equivalent of a listed building. No substantial modifications could be made to the structure without jumping through a series of hoops designed to be so complex that there wasn’t any point in trying to do so. So the company was faced with a choice: stay the same forever, or go somewhere else entirely.