Author: Duncan Pike

Last night, Asus announced its new ROG Strix Scar 18, the latest flagship gaming laptop under its Republic of Gamers sub-brand. It follows the ROG Strix Scar 17 SE, which we reviewed last year. Asus announces ‘new’ laptops every year. Some are actually new. Others are just slight revisions with the latest specs from Intel, AMD, or Nvidia. This year, the ROG Strix Scar 18 is both. Strong arms and deep pockets The ROG Strix Scar is Asus’ flagship gaming laptop range so they only feature the best-performing components. This year, that’s in the form of Intel’s 13th-gen Core i9-13980HX.…

A24’s The Whale, from director Darren Aronofsky, marks the unanimously welcomed return of Brendan Fraser to the big screen. He’s joined by a relatively small and mostly effective cast of Hong Chau, Sadie Sink, and Ty Simpkins. The storyline, based on the stage play of the same name by Samuel D. Hunter, follows Charlie (Fraser), a morbidly obese reclusive English literature teacher. Despite the best efforts of his one and only friend Liz (Chau), Charlie is either unwilling or unable to stop eating himself to death. With alarmingly high blood pressure and congestive heart failure imminent, Charlie desperately attempts to…

Well, that didn’t take long. Google only just debuted Bard, its AI-powered chatbot, on Monday. But that was apparently enough time for the bot to lose parent company Alphabet around $100 billion in market value. The dive happened on Wednesday after the chatbot provided inaccurate information to a prompt during a promotional video posted to Twitter. Bard is singing, but its the wrong song Bard is an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA. Built using our large language models and drawing on information from the web, it’s a launchpad for curiosity and can help simplify complex topics → https://t.co/fSp531xKy3…

‘If you can’t beat ’em, integrate their competition’ seemed to be Microsoft’s take on the proverb when the tech giant announced plans to use OpenAI-powered tools to improve its search engine and web browser, Bing and Edge. On Tuesday, at the company’s Washington HQ, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella remarked, “this technology is going to reshape pretty much every software category.” We’re glad to see he’s keeping expectations low. Bing and ChatGPT sitting in a tree The revamped Bing search engine will use a different, more advanced OpenAI language model than the GPT-3 model used in the popular ChatGPT bot. Bing…

Google has jumped its own gun by announcing its in-house consumer-facing AI platform, called Bard, to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT a day before its live-streamed event, beating Microsoft’s AI-related announcement (scheduled for later today) by a few hours. But instead of a relatively descriptive name, Google has opted for something a little more obscure. Have you got your coins ready? Okay Bard, toss a coin ChatGPT, the chatbot powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3 proprietary language model, can be found down almost every avenue of the internet. It makes headlines daily (here’s another one), for better or worse. Google’s premature announcement comes direct…

Anyone looking to buy a new laptop, especially if they’re after something premium, will have come across Dell Technologies and its snazzy laptops. We recently reviewed a model from the Inspiron range, the Inspiron 16 5620, as well as Dell’s Macbook competitor, the XPS 13 Plus. Laptops are generally what most people after a PC are after because they’re so versatile. But while laptop performance has improved by leaps and bounds, prospective new PC buyers with a specific set of requirements might find a desktop suits them better. If that’s you and your specific requirements have anything to do with…

Internet service provider RSAWeb has confirmed that the major network disruption it faced last week – and is still dealing with today – was caused by a “highly sophisticated cyberattack”. That’s according to a MyBroadband report which cites a letter from RSAWeb CEO Rudy van Staden sent to the provider’s clients on Sunday evening. The truth doesn’t always set you free RSAWeb, and by extension all of its customers, hasn’t had a great February so far. Last week Wednesday, 1 February, the ISP reported a “service-impacting event” affecting its core systems, fibre, web hosting, mobile, and VoIP and PBX (private…

PC gaming peripheral maker Razer has announced the next member of its Viper gaming mouse family, the Viper Mini Signature Edition, or Viper Mini SE, if you’re short on time. Razer’s intentions with the Viper Mini SE should be immediately obvious. It has changed focus from trying to offer the most sensitive mouse with the highest possible CPI (counts per inch), to the lightest mouse it can muster. Either that or Razer saw what FinalMouse was charging for its over-hyped mice and thought it could do better. And who’s to say it can’t? The Viper Mini SE isn’t for trypophobists…

This probably hasn’t been a good week for you if you work at or rely on internet service provider RSAWeb. Early on Wednesday, 1 February, the ISP announced that it was “observing a service-impacting event” affecting its network. Now, two days later, the provider’s status page (last updated at 10:17 AM, 03/02) indicates that, while some services have been restored, many are still experiencing issues. The ISP provided ongoing updates throughout Wednesday’s outage – for the few that still had internet access – with a notable update at 12:38 PM to say the “major incident” was complex and that the…

South African retail giant Pick n Pay, together with partners Electrum and CryptoConvert, has expanded support for Bitcoin payments to all of its 1,500 stores across the country. That includes its regular stores as well as PnP Express and Clothing stores. If you’re tired of hodl’ing your Bitcoin, now you can spend it on groceries, snacks, clothes, airtime, electricity, transport tickets, and municipal bills. What a time to be alive. More options at Pick n Pay are good, we guess CryptoConvert, the retailer’s local crypto payment partner, announced on Twitter that its CryptoQR platform was up and running at all…