Build your own Chromebook

Neil Mohr helps you install Google’s other OS on an old laptop

The first question in your head is “why would I want to install Chrome OS, even on my old laptop, when there are perfectly adequate awesome full-fat Linux distros to choose from?” Good question, and the answer is not everyone wants a full-fat distro, nor can everyone use a full-fat distro. Part of the success of Chromebooks — and they are successful with 5.7 million Chromebooks being sold in 2014 and 7.3 million predicted for 2015 (source: Gartner) — is their cut-down, lightweight Gentoo-based OS. If you want to give someone easy, no fuss access to Google services it should be a tempting choice.

MSI R9 390X Gaming 8G

AMD goes back to Hawaii for its ‘new’ mainstream flagship

A step down from the Fury X, AMD’s pitting the R9 390X — its new mainstream flagship GPU — against Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 980. And priced at around $100 cheaper, it just might have what it takes to seal the deal.

Stream machines

In-home game streaming has truly arrived, but it’s a Wild West of new tech. So which options work best?

Streaming games from your PC to other devices. It’s a crazy idea, right? It is if you really think about the nuts and bolts. Start with a control input from your client streaming device, whatever that may be. A precision flick of the mouse in reaction to gunfire behind you. That kind of thing. The signal has to be processed by the client box and then sent over your network to the host PC. That PC then processes the input and updates the game state by rendering new 3D frames, calculating some AI, number crunching the audio and everything else that goes into a modern game engine.

Yubikey Edge

Mark Crutch tries to improve the security on several cloud services with just one handy little device

Sites get hacked and password databases stolen, so it's wise to take additional steps to secure your logins with "second factor" authentication wherever you can. The trouble is that there are a wealth of second factor options available, and you need to make sure you have the right one for the site you're using. The Yubikey Edge is one such option, and it has some limited configurability that might enable it to do the job of several other devices.

Atom 1.0

Ben Everard's hair is beautiful - as is this lovely text editor.

GitHub primarily concerns itself with project hosting, so it came as a bit of a surprise to us when the project released a text editor. According to the Atom release announcement, Atom exists because GitHub co-founder Chris Wanstrath wanted a text editor built using modern programming techniques, "His dream was to use web technologies to build something as customisable as Emacs and give a new generation of developers total control over their editor."

Kalimba

It’s not easy being green, when there’s a purple force field between you and the next place to be, but this is why you brought your purple friend along. You can stand on his head, be propelled higher when he jumps or just observe as he negotiates the purple safely, switching places whenever you like. Wait, though. Green forcefield? That means he’s using you, too, for the equal and opposite purpose. You know what else is weird? He moves exactly as you move, all the time.