Author: Duncan Pike

LG’s new M3 OLED evo TV solves a very specific problem. Don’t you hate it when you spend tens of thousands of rands on a new high-end TV to go in your professionally designed living room only for the unsightly cables running out the back to ruin the feng shui? We can only imagine how awful that must be. Thankfully, this terrible plight is easily solved with the new 77in LG M3 wireless OLED evo TV — all it takes is a big enough wall and R130,000. LG M3 OLED TV wins cable hide-and-seek The LG M3 OLED evo is…

Google’s AI-focused subsidiary, DeepMind, recently announced SIMA, its new “instructable game-playing AI agent.” SIMA, which stands for Scalable, Instructable, Multiworld Agent, is currently still in its research phase and is being trained to learn a broad range of gaming skills across a variety of scenarios — instead of just destroying humans at StarCraft II. Through partnerships with video game developers Hello Games, Embracer, Tuxedo Labs, Coffee Stain, and others, SIMA is learning how games work and how to apply what it learns to games it’s never seen before. DeepMind’s eventual aim with SIMA, other than furthering natural language AI model…

Choosing a smartphone is about to get a little more difficult with Honor launching its Magic V2 and Magic 6 Pro in South Africa next week. While the Magic V2 isn’t exactly new — it launched in China in July last year — it could still prove disruptive to the local foldable smartphone market. When it lands, it’ll claim the title of being the thinnest and lightest folding smartphone in the country against Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 5 and Huawei’s Mate X3. The Magic 6 Pro, on the other hand, is entirely new and was only recently announced at MWC…

Microsoft has implemented changes to the guardrails that govern prompts in Copilot after one of the company’s AI engineers wrote to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last week regarding concerns they had with the platform’s image generation abilities. Some of the now-blocked prompts include “pro choice,” “four twenty,” and “pro life” after the platform was found to produce “demons and monsters alongside terminology related to abortion rights, teenagers with assault rifles, sexualized images of women in violent tableaus, and underage drinking and drug use,” according to a CNBC report. Stuff can confirm that when provided with those prompts Copilot Designer…

HP’s All-In Plan is supposedly the future of “hassle-free” printing and on the surface, it might even seem reasonable. For a monthly subscription, customers receive a printer of their choice*, automatic ink delivery**, 24/7 live support***, and access to next-business-day replacements****. Doesn’t that sound great (if you ignore all the asterisks)? For those who do loads of printing, the benefits probably seem enticing. If you’ve ever had to print something in a hurry only to find you’ve run out of ink or the printer jams halfway through the job, you might even welcome a subscription plan like this. At least,…

Microsoft has unceremoniously announced it is ending official support for Android apps on Windows 11 and has already started pulling the plug. The Amazon Appstore, the only officially supported avenue for downloading Android apps on Windows devices, is no longer available for download from the Microsoft Store. Thankfully, currently installed Android apps will still function and, depending on the developer, can still receive updates until the underlying system is deprecated on 5 March 2024. If you’re one of the few who regularly use Android apps on Windows, it’s time to look for alternatives. Microsoft kills WSA  When Microsoft launched Windows…

It’s not often you find a sequel that can stand up to or eclipse what came before it. Yet that’s exactly what director Denis Villeneuve delivered with Dune: Part Two, the highly-anticipated sequel to his 2021 adaptation of the first half of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel. Whether you’re a fan of the books, encountered the Dune Chronicles for the first time with Villeneuve’s previous film, or a complete newcomer, we highly recommend you see the first film (if you somehow haven’t yet) and this one immediately after. Dune: Part Two is to Dune: Part One, what The Godfather II and…

Ever since people started connecting things to the internet, others have sought to abuse those connections. At Kaspersky’s ninth annual Cyber Security Weekend in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia earlier this week, a host of cyber security experts provided insights on past trends, how things currently look, and future cyber threats, with a particular focus on the META (Middle East, Turkey, and Africa) region. Surprisingly, Kaspersky’s research showed that the number of overall cyber threats in South Africa decreased by 29% in 2023 compared to the previous year. That could mean cyber thugs are getting bored or it could mean their old…

OpenAI recently announced Sora, its new generative AI model designed to create shockingly impressive videos from text prompts. It’s built on Dall-E 3, the company’s image-generation model which itself uses a version of the company’s GPT large language model. This isn’t the first text-to-video tool to emerge from the generative AI boom but, based on the examples shown, it generates the most realistic videos we’ve seen so far. While Sora hasn’t received a full release yet, it is already capable of creating “complex scenes with multiple characters, specific types of motion, and accurate details of the subject and background,” while…

Are your award-winning tech senses tingling? That means they’re working because it’s time for another edition of the Stuff Gadget Awards. We’ve poked, prodded, bent, knocked, squinted at, smelt, listened to, felt, sat in, played with, and pondered all the best gadgets from 2023 and come with a few we thought deserved an award. In between all that we also managed to touch some grass, test more tech, and had fun doing it. We hope you have as much fun reading about it in the February-March 2024 issue of Stuff. Looking back at the best tech of last year is…