Author: Duncan Pike

If your hunger for local content can’t be quenched, we direct your attention to the newly overhauled SABC+ streaming service. The streaming service has a new website, is sporting a fresh new look, offers higher-quality streaming options, and no longer requires an account to access. We hope Showmax is taking notes. This not-so-new streaming service has emerged from the ashes of the previous SABC+ which went down for maintenance on 01 December 2023, never to return. We specifically mean the old site, sabcplus.com, accessed through a web browser. It is gone so that sabc-plus.com can live on in its place.…

Update 30/11/23: Late yesterday, 29 November, the same Google support member who initially said the company was investigating the issue, posted an update to the Google Drive support forum. The post mostly serves to keep the “small subset” of affected users in the loop, saying the issue has now been identified as a problem for “Drive for desktop users on version 84, which only affected local file changes that had yet to be synced to Drive.” The update post didn’t come with instructions for a fix, though one is expected “to be available in the next few days.” In the…

In May this year, Haval SA gave the country its first tease of the GWM Ora at the NAMPO Harvest Day agricultural exhibition. With the tease came the price range for the Ora – also known as the ‘Good Cat’ or ‘Funky Cat’ in other markets – which secured it the title of the country’s cheapest full-sized fully-electric vehicle. That title was previously held by the Mini Cooper SE. The British 3-door hatchback offers a claimed range of 215km with a R783,500 starting price. The local 5-door GWM Ora lineup consists of four derivatives, starting with the ORA 03 300…

Established peripheral maker Logitech recently announced the local launch of the Rally Bar Huddle and Sight, devices designed to make corporate meetings in a hybrid work environment more “equitable”. It’s been over a year and a half since South Africa ended its national state of disaster in response to the pandemic. For the most part, everyone went back to the office wearing pants, whether they liked it or not. However, Logitech clearly believes that the hybrid work model that emerged from the pandemic is sticking around. There might not be as many people missing from the office now, but the…

If you’ve fallen victim to the YouTube ad-blocker restriction scrouge sweeping the world, there’s still hope that it’ll quietly go away. A European privacy expert filed a formal complaint last month with the formidable Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) regarding YouTube’s ad-blocker detection system. It’s a rather small hope but it’s there. YouTube has had its eye on increasing its Premium subscriber count for a while, probably since it launched in 2014. This year, the platform ramped up efforts to make the offering more enticing. Some of those efforts have been agreeable, like offering subscribers a higher-quality video setting without…

Yesterday saw the annual Dell Technologies Forum held at the Kyalami racetrack in Midrand, Johannesburg. You may not know this, but the tech company doesn’t only make and distribute tablets, laptops, and PCs. Some of those were on display, along with stands for its partner companies and a strategically placed McLaren. But the scope of the event was much broader and involved a lot more corporate speak. Other than an excuse for the company to throw an award party for its partners, the function of this event is to advertise all the wonderful reasons that other companies should turn to…

GPTs are the next big thing from ChatGPT developer OpenAI, revealed at the company’s very first developers conference held earlier this week. This isn’t a whole new thing from the artificial intelligence company but rather a fresh take on what they currently offer. OpenAI’s DevDay saw two rather interesting announcements. GPTs, which we’ll get to, and ‘GPT-4 Turbo’ which will be of more interest to the people who actually attended, like developers, who have incorporated ChatGPT in their workflow. The latter amounts to a few improvements to the company’s GPT large language model (LLM) – basically, it’s much better now…

Taiwanese semiconductor designer MediaTek has announced its latest flagship mobile SoC, Dimensity 9300, which it hopes will give rivals Apple and Qualcomm a run for their money. The announcement comes just two weeks after Qualcomm revealed its latest flagship mobile SoC, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, and two weeks before the company’s Executive Summit which is set to kick off next week on Thursday, 16 November. As Qualcomm did two weeks ago, MediaTek is not only promising performance and power efficiency improvements over last year’s chips but also a much greater focus on on-device generative AI processing. Performance number bigger?…

Boeing, the aeroplane manufacturer and defence and space contractor, yesterday announced that it was investigating a “cyber incident” five days after ransomware group LockBit announced it had gained access to the company’s systems. The cybercriminal group made the announcement on its leak site which was shared by cybersecurity analyst Dominic Alvieri on X. Bad news for Boeing https://twitter.com/AlvieriD/status/1717969977305673874 The post lists a 2 November deadline whereafter the group will publish the “tremendous amount of sensitive data” it stole if Boeing fails to meet its demands. The cybercriminal group claims it was able to access Boeing’s systems through a zero-day exploit.…

The Volvo C40 Recharge is one of the latest battery-powered electric vehicles to make its way to South Africa. Stuff spent a few hours behind the wheel at the local launch event in the Western Cape several months ago. Recently, we spent a little longer with it, trying to work out if this is the EV that’ll convince more folks to ditch their petrol-thirsty machines. Imagine a future where you don’t have to keep tabs on the price of petrol every month. Wouldn’t that be nice? The C40 Recharge is apparently the first Volvo to be designed as a pure…