technotes
WEAR AND TEAR
I really enjoy reading your magazine and as a 72-year-old gamer, I love to keep up with your reviews on the latest technology and gaming gear.
My primary reason for writing is in relation to headphone/headset reviews. I have lost count of the number of perfectly good headsets I have had to scrap due to the unavailability of replacement ear protectors. This is an item that invariably wears out long before the need to replace the headset.
May I humbly suggest that some background regarding replacement parts be included in your reviews if possible, either from the supplier or third parties. Jimmy Matchett
MORE UNITY PLEASE!
I managed to make three games and put them online at agentguy51.unity.io after reading your tutorial about making games in Unity. I was wondering why that tutorial hasn’t expanded into many more parts? I would have really liked to have learnt more about Unity with maybe some C# scripting.
Emmanuel Harish Menon Ed replies: The Unity guide was intended as a one-off, but we’d definitely like to do more on game creation down the track. Stay tuned.
DITCHING WINDOWS FOR LINUX
In your December issue, you included some comments and instructions about Linux. I would like to share my humble experience.
For many reasons, I decided to dump Windows. Being not even remotely interested in Apple, the answer was Linux. I was impressed and over the moon that I found an alternative. I tried many distros and found that Linux is generally brilliant.
However, Linux is still behind in one area — video editing. There are many software options to do that. I tried many of them, if not all. The best is Avidemux, which still falls behind the software available in Windows. I thought it was only me, until I read a review on Linux magazine, where the Linux experts confessed to the superiority of Windows-based software in that regard. I record movies, documentaries and other programs and I like to cut out the ads. While Avidemux can handle the job, it’s not particularly user-friendly.
Another piece of software that’s not emulated well is Microsoft Office. Kingsoft WPS seems closer than LibreOffice to competing with Microsoft’s suite, but it’s still not quite there yet. So can I drop Windows all together in favour of Linux? Not yet, unfortunately.
Dr Mohammad Hajarat
STORY SUGGESTIONS
I have a couple of requests for future articles. They may not fit under your usual editorial purview but I was wondering if you could look at: ≠≠ Software containerisation, such as Docker. Seeing there are dockers for Raspberry Pi, it may fit your editorial policy and would be interesting — a guide to setting up a Docker image and deploy to have several running at the same time. ≠≠ Cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google and so on). Maybe do a comparison of where they’re at regarding features and ease of use. Not sure how you’d justify what’s more of a corporate IT technology — maybe just as a general interest thing. I’d be keen to read the opinions on their current state and where they’re going by your experts. Stuart Boydell
Ed replies: Good suggestions, Stuart — containers is definitely something that’s on our to-do list and we’ll see if we can work a cloud-provider comparison in somewhere, too.