HOW TO BUILT THE ULTIMATE tECH HOME

Scenario #1 You want a single app-controlled security cam
The most cursory of Google searches will reveal that there are several home security cameras out there. Most also have rich forum threads attached, where people swap advice on how to get them working properly. Not so the Belkin Netcam HD Wi-Fi (£100, belkin.com/uk): you merely download the app to your iOS or Android device, then view the feed from the camera on your phone’s screen. There’s no motion sensing, but it does have infrared illumination for dark rooms, and you can save its video to your device. Effortless.

Scenario #2 You want a smart, expandable home security system
Of all the emerging new wave of easy fit-and-forget systems, Piper(from £520, getpiper.com) is one of the neatest. You can fit it with plug-and-play wide-angle cameras, then set them up IFTTT-style to perform different actions depending on what they see, or hear. They also measure temperature and humidity and can be combined with wireless Z-Wave accessories such as door sensors or smart switches, so you can get sit back safe in the knowledge that your house is secure. Not that you can afford anything worth stealing anyway.

Scenario #3 You want a next-gen smoke alarm
Smoke alarms: for ten minutes of your life, they're indispensable. For the remainder, they're either mute, or unnecessarily loud and annoying. Nest, known for its net-connected thermostats, has made a smarter smoke alarm. If the Nest Protect (£110, nest.com) detects smoke or carbon monoxide, it'll speak its worries out loud, giving you a chance to silence it with a wave if you’ve merely burnt the roasties. It'll glow if its batteries are dying, rather than chirp annoyingly, it’s smartphone connected and even acts as a nightlight if it sees you staggering around in the dark.

INCOMING
Smart security gizmos will rule 2014. Well, in so much as a low-key white box can rule anything. Look out for these soon.

Ninja Sphere
These thingternet pioneers have gone up-tech with a device that interacts with your other gadgets.
ninjablocks.com

Canary
A one-box sensor that keeps an eye on your house using audio, video and movement. Due summer 2014.
canary.is

SmartThings
A wireless hub that sends info on your home to your phone. Works with third-party wireless doodads.
smartthings.com

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GARMIN DASH CAM 10

In anideal world, we'd all have Google Street View cameras on top of our cars, constantly hoovering in 65MP, 360°footage of absolutely everything happening around our beloved motor. But then we’d need a whole bunch of heavy servers in the boot and the fuel consumption would be a drag. Instead, we’ll have to make do with Garmin’s rather tidier Dash Cam, that suckers itself to the windscreen and, when the inbuilt accelerometer feels that something exciting is happening, saves the pertinent bit of its continuously looping 1080p video. The footage is time-stamped and, if you get the £200 Dash Cam 20, GPS geo-stamped too.


£170 / garmin.com/uk

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XCOM: ENEMY WITHIN

FIRAIIS ADDS A NEW LAYER OF COMPLEXITY TO ONEOF OUR FAVOURITE GAMES OF RECENT TIMES

In these days of quick-fix DLC it is rare to encounter a proper expansion pock, one that takes an original game and builds on it in new ways, creating on experience greater than the sum of its parts. Enemy Within is such a product, adding a new layer of complexity to the already stellar XCOM: Enemy Unknown.

At heart this complexity comes from the newly discovered Meld resource, which plays a big part in the turn based strategy combat of Enemy Within, On most maps you will come across Meld containers. Once Spotted, these have a limited number of turns 'before they decay, and you want to get your troops to them 05 quickly 105 you can, This adds a new degree of pacing to the game, forcing you to take chancesr and occasionally rush long distances to secure the meld, unsure of the enemies that await.

Once researched, Meld can be spent in two major areas. It can be used to genetically modify your soldiers, or to turn them into giant hulking mechs, The sheer brilliance behind this mechanic is that, clue to its limited supply, you can't have it CILL - you'll effectively need to choose a path and stick to it, or you'll find yourself out of meld and with severely reduced options.

"It is enough to provide a fresh experience for even the most played out fans."

Meld also odds another level of tension over your soldier's rate of survival, Unlike normal troops, who solely level through experience, your genetically or mechanically enhanced soldiers ore an investment, Mechs are tough, and are often at their best wading into the middle of a room and opening fire, but despite their bullet-soaking abilities, losing one is tough, with both the enhanced soldier dead and the mach frame in need of repair. That all means spending more Meld, so if you are too reckless you'll run out of supply.

Alongside this mechanic is a new secondary storyline that has you combating a shadowy group of humans called EXALT. Your run-ins with them involve sending out covert operatives, and then providing an extraction with your Learn. These human enemies provide a great change of pace from the usual roster of aliens, and adds greatly to the variety of experiences delivered by the game.

We were really quite stunned at how comprehensive the additions are in Enemy Within. Frorn these new mechanics through to c much greater variety of maps and environments, it is enough to provide a fresh experience for even the most played-out of Enemy Unknown fans.

While the game is still, at heart, the some, Firaxis has managed to revamp the entire experience, while also focusing on increased replayability rather than just a short-lived new bit of story. Deciding which path to take your soldiers down when spending meld is a decision that lives with you throughout the game, and more than ever this feels Like a game of managing decline, of holding on against inevitable failure just long enough to turn the tide.

Not only does it have this effect on the macro level base management side of the game, but it dramatically changes your tactics and gameplay on the ground as well. Mechs play quite differently to a SHIV hem weapons platform for example, being much more agile and packed with more strategic options like the ability to deliberately destroy cover. Genetic modifications, on the other hand, change the way in which you deploy existing classes, with options like stealth skin and the ability to leap onto roofs having a huge flow-on into the way in which you combat the alien threat.

XCOM: Enemy Within is just plain wonderful. It takes a truly great game and makes it better, adding depth and complexity without ruining the core concepts that made Enemy Unknown such, a standout. Finuxis has yet again demonstrated that it is a developer at the top of its garnet and we can't wait to see what comes next for the XCOM brand.

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WD BLACKS DUAL DRIVE

"This is a 2.5in drive targeted firmly at enthusiasts, one that combines a 120GB SSD with a 1TB HDD in a single package"

It is pretty safe to say that we don't see a huge amount of consumer-facing innovation in the hard drive space. Most of the significant advancements over the past few years have revolved around fitting larger and larger capacities into smaller and smaller form factors.

This peaked midway through 2013, when both Seagate and WD announced new single-spindle drives, designed to fit into Ultrabook sized PCs. While these lacked the speeds seen with the standard low capacity SSDs found in such devices, they had the expansive storage that a Lot of people find lacking when using an Llltrabook as a primary PC.

This Lack of space is a major driver of storage, especially as development focused more and more on mobile, Oftentimes space means a trade-off between performance and capacity, and apart from the bulkier gaming laptops, most only have o single spot to install a 2.5in hard drive (assuming they aren't solely built around mSATA drives.

It is this kind of quandary that Western Digital's latest enthusiast drive is designed to tackle. The Black2 Dual drive started out life when WD was testing its hybrid drive solutions, and has turned into quite a fascinating product, Hybrid drives have become more and more common in recent years, and use a small amount of flash memory in combination with caching algorithms to deliver performance somewhere between that of a mechanical drive and an SSD. But Like most hybrids, this means a compromise, and WO found itself being asked why users couldn't just directly address the flash memory.

WD took this and ran with it, creating the WD Black2 Dual Drive. This is a 2.5in drive to firmly at enthusiasts, one that combines a 12DGB SSD vvith a 1TB HOD ina single package. It sports a single SATA connector, and is do signed for those who are comfortable with juggling files to take advantage of the tuvo drives.

The drive itself conies in a beautifully designed package, containing not only the drive but also a SATA to IJSB adaptor and a cardboard LISB key that, when loaded, takes you to website so you can download software.

It works best with a fresh Windows install, When you do this you'll only see the SSD portion of the drive; however once Windows is up and running, you can fire up the WD software and this exposes the mechanical drive as well. It is a one-time deal, and if you are so inclined you can even move Windows to the mechanical drive once the software is installed.

This process went smoothly, although we would have preferred WD to actually ship the software on the USB key rather than requiring a download. This is 0 relatively minor issuer however, and our installation was hassle free.

Performance was excellent, although the 120GB SSD is a little on the small side for our liking (a 256GB option would be nice, but we understand that WD wants to start out small with this product), This, and the rather significant price tag, means that despite our initial fantasising about different uses for the drive, it is at its best value for money when being installed in a laptop with a spare 2.5in bay.. This is where you'll get most bang for your buck, especially if you are moving from a mechanical drive. You'll see the speed boosts that come from the SSD, but you won't have to worry about where your bulk &Ito lives This, in and of itse[f, rnokes the WD Black2 Dual Drive a real standout product, one that makes a heck of a lot of sense.

If you don't hove o laptop to upgrade, however, you'll probably struggle to see the value. Even Mini¬ITX chassis now have ample room for a few SSDs and 3.5in drives, and they will prove much better bang for your buck than going with this integrated wonder.

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Awesome Social Apps in 2014

Tweetbot 3

The recently updated Tweetbot is still the best Twitter client we've come across, although its developers have started to cash in on that status. The recent version 3 update was little m.ore than an PDS 7 rest in, and even removes a couple of handy features - such as triple-tapping on tweets to reply - yet they cheekily decided to charge afresh.

That said, it's still smartly presented and feature-laden, with options to mute users for a particular period of time, a wysiwyg-style tweet composer, and a hugely useful auto-suggest for sending messages to the people you follow. Better still, tweet timelines are synchronised, so you can pick up where you left off when switching from iPhone to iPad - although, again, you have to pay for both. It's a must-have, but there's nothing to convince us to upgrade from the old version.

There are separate versions for the iPhone and iPad, plus a dedicated Mac edition, so you can use it across your Apple devices.

Redditting

Navigating the morass of news, memes and endless discussion threads that comprise Reddit is no mean feat, but Redditting does a brilliant job of boiling it down. It effectively turns Reddit into an FOSS reader, allowing you to browse your favourite subreddits, filter out sources or contributors, and read the source article beside the comments in spilt-screen. The setting that allows you to filter adult content could make Redd it palatable at your place of work.

Flipboard

Flipboard received a significant makeover last year, allowing anyone to become their own "magazine editor", curating content from websites and other social networks and sharing it with the public at large in a smartly presented, flickable virtual ma.gazine. It remains one of the few apps to neatly collate posts from different social networks, including Facebook and Twitter, providing a one-stop shop for those looking to catch up on their friends' activity, be it posts to news articles, status updates or recent photos_ Unlike many rival apps, it also now supports tablets and laptops running Windows 8.1.

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