APC_Australia_Issue_442_June_2017

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Linux » OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE MTPaint Painting software with even more enhancements. FREE | GITHUB.COM/WJAGUAR We have another addition to your collection of extremely lightweight productivity applications. Meet MTPaint, a personal graphic editor written by Mark Tyler back in the days of GTK 1 and initially optimised for decent performance on machines that are a hundred times feebler than your smartphone of today. We’re not talking about ancient abandonware, though. MTPaint has been continuously developed up to version 3.40 (released in 2011), but since then, only few development versions were released. The current MTPaint 3.50 release of nowadays brings an impressive number of enhancements and new features, and, by the way, it can be safely compiled against GTK2. So you can now enjoy scripting console (Image > Script), support for multiple threads when rendering images (good for multicore CPUs), optional gamma correction for painting, much better text tools, multiple clone tool improvements, a new file format (PMM) and a whole lot more. In the meantime, MTPaint is still a classic graphic application optimised for manual drawing and working with indexed palettes. It requires as little resources as, say, Microsoft Paint from early Windows versions, but in return gives you more advanced tools. MTPaint supports layers, transparency, selections, up to 1,000 undo steps and up to 8,000% for zooming in. And even that is not the end of MTPaint’s feature-list: how about exporting your artwork to ASCII or turning a multi-layered file into a GIF animation with a few mouse clicks? Alternatively, you can set your own custom keyboard shortcuts for any menu item of the editor, and become a keyboard ninja of bitmaps. For many common tasks, MTPaint is able to replace GIMP as the main creative tool, so why not give this mighty little editor a try? Alexander Tolstoy LanguageTool A spelling and grammar checker. FREE | LANGUAGETOOL.ORG When switching from Windows to Linux, there is an abundance of choice of office suites, both open-source and proprietary. But the story doesn’t end with proper parsing of DOCX and XLSX files in Linux, because Windows users also expect the same quality of spell-checking as they are used to with Microsoft Word, which contains some proprietary language tools from third parties. LanguageTool is an extension that implements all the usual capabilities for more than 20 languages, mostly European. It comes as an .OXT file for LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice and needs to be installed using the standard extension manager (Tools > Extension Manager) from any of the suite’s applications. LanguageTool is based on Java 8 and will not work with other office apps in Linux right away. LanguageTool offers Chrome and Firefox browser plug-ins, a Google Docs plug-in, a cross-platform standalone desktop client and finally an online text input field on the project’s website. When used in an office suite, LanguageTool supersedes the default spell-checking engine and offers its own dictionaries together with the grammar check feature. You can tell it’s working by the blue underlines that emerge below missed commas, wrong prepositions, duplicate words and other errors. Of course, it won’t make your text shine as a professional reviewer could do (Boaster...! — Ed), but at least you’ll escape the most common mistakes that occur. Each LanguageTool release brings more grammar rules and enriches existing dictionaries with new terms and phrases, and the 3.7 version is no exception. Be sure to upgrade if you use Writer heavily! Alexander Tolstoy NTFS-3G A safe and reliable filesystem driver. FREE | BIT.LY/2O3PQ0Q Even though the market share of Windows is (very) slowly declining, in the mid-term, we still use various tweaks to make Linux and Windows’ interoperability easier. NTFS-3G is a fully open-source tech. The driver enables handling of NTFS partitions on any non-Windows platform that can work with user-level filesystems, also known as FUSE ( $ sudo modprobe fuse ). Along with Linux, the list includes many other OSes, from macOS to OpenIndiana. The NTFS- 3G bundle includes the basic part for mounting and the ntfsprogs package for manipulating partitions. You can read, write, resize NTFS partitions without losing data, and as long as the driver has been considered to be enterprise-ready for some time already, using NTFS-3G is quite safe. To mount an NTFS partition, use the following template: $ mount –t ntfs3 /dev/sdb1 /mnt/windows Whereas scanning and fixing possible errors goes like this: $ ntfsfix /dev/sdbX Where ‘sdbX’ is the name of your NTFS partition. The new release features a few enhancements, such as the ability to mount NTFS volumes in read-only mode in case Windows had put it into the so-called ‘hibernate’ state, better extended attributes handling, better UTF16 support and more. Generally, the driver has extra fixes and performance fixes that improve writing and reading from an NTFS volume from Linux or another FUSE-compatible OS. Version 2017.3.23 is the first major update in nearly a year so it will be worth the upgrade if you rely upon NTFS filesystem support under Linux; for instance, having Windows on a separate partition or need to work with external drives formatted with NTFS. Alexander Tolstoy 40 www.apcmag.com
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Page 1: 27in PC MONITORS UNDER $300! WHY PA
Page 4 and 5: Contents Issue 442 June 2017 42 TRA
Page 6 and 7: exclusivesoftware » HOW TO DOWNLOA
Page 8 and 9: technotes » NEED TO KNOW Windows 7
Page 10 and 11: technotes » HARRY DOMANSKI LOOKS A
Page 12 and 13: technotes » GEAR WE WANT OAXIS INK
Page 14 and 15: technotes » HOW IT’S DONE About
Page 16 and 17: technotes » EPINIONS “The NBN as
Page 18 and 19: technotes » dawn of the accelerato
Page 20 and 21: technotes » dawn of the accelerato
Page 22 and 23: thelab » LATEST REVIEWS LABS BENCH
Page 24 and 25: THE MOST FUN YOU CAN HAVE WITH YOUR
Page 26 and 27: thelab » latest reviews LABS BENCH
Page 28 and 29: The home of technology techradar.co
Page 30 and 31: thelab » latest reviews “The scr
Page 32 and 33: thelab » latest reviews WIRELESS K
Page 34 and 35: thelab » lateste reviews GAMING HE
Page 36 and 37: software » APPS FOR ALL THE PLATFO
Page 38 and 39: App Store » iOS APPS Sway Dance wi
Page 42 and 43: superguide » transformative 2-in-1
Page 50 and 51: superguide » 2-in-1 tips & tricks
Page 52 and 53: superguide » 2-in-1 apps & games V
Page 54 and 55: superguide » 2-in-1 apps & games X
Page 56: superguide » 2-in-1 apps & games C
Page 59 and 60: Monitor specs at a glance A quick r
Page 61 and 62: $250 | WWW.PHILIPS.COM.AU 23.8 inch
Page 63 and 64: Windows 10 Creators Update: all the
Page 65 and 66: Game Mode: Too good to be true? Edg
Page 67 and 68: Take Night Light, for example. It
Page 69 and 70: No sign of Cortana? This Registry e
Page 71 and 72: Recuva works happily with all kinds
Page 73 and 74: 3 5 1 SETTINGS Many of Windows 10
Page 75 and 76: WHAT’S THE NEXT MUST-HAVE ON YOUR
Page 77 and 78: How to Better control Apple’s med
Page 79 and 80: Use Disk Utility to free up space o
Page 81 and 82: Put Elementary on your Mac FIRST ST
Page 83 and 84: a modern AMD card meant that we cou
Page 85 and 86: Blu-ray keys file from the URL prov
Page 87 and 88: through S/PDIF’ with SMPLayer) un
Page 89 and 90: C getting too much mail from Remotr
Page 91 and 92:
via your server PC. If you don’t
Page 93 and 94:
BUILDING ON A SOLID CORE The Ryzen
Page 95 and 96:
1 The Antec P9 Window comes 1 with
Page 97 and 98:
The usual updates Before loading th
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In the beginning... In the early da
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and aptX HD formats also getting a
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Sony’s MDR-1000X headphones suppo
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The Serial Monitor will output the
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The more samples used in a DDS tabl
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of values that represent a single s
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Bayonetta Platinum’s ultra stylis
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The worlds are bleak and barren, bu
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