Author: Duncan Pike

Today is the big day, if you’re an Apple stan. Tonight at 20:00 SAST, Tim Cook will stand on his stage, in his field, or in front of his fancy building. Or maybe he’ll be inside the fancy building if he’s feeling bold. He’ll tell us about Apple’s newest products and then we’re going to go out and buy them – when they’re available. There have been mentions floating around online about what uncle Tim will unveil since before the date was even confirmed. We covered those here. But the folks at Apple weren’t going to let us rest easy,…

You know those virtual ‘friends’ you have at home? That one you call ‘Alexa’. Well, like those other friends who enjoy tik, it may not be a good idea to allow them into your home. Academic researchers at Royal Holloway University in London and Italy’s University of Catania have found a working exploit that allows pranksters (or people up to no good) to commandeer your Amazon device and use it to issue commands to itself. Researchers have called this exploit “AvA” for Alexa versus Alexa, because it’s pitting the device against itself.  This attack isn’t even very sophisticated. It uses…

A wordle that speaks to you If you’ve gone through our round-up of Wordle clones – there are way more than you think – and you still have time on your hands then you’re in luck. This one is different enough from the other clones but still retains the bits that make Wordle so fun. ‘Heardle’ is Wordle but with songs instead of words. So maybe ‘Songdle’ might’ve been more appropriate but Heardle works too, we guess.In Heardle, users also have six attempts to guess the song of the day. But here they aren’t given clues based on the letters…

BMW is currently holding its national media launch for the almost all-new 2 Series Coupé. We’ve got boots on the ground (well, in the car), hands on the steering wheel, and eyes on the road while we put them through some driving to see if they’re any good. For this refreshed line up here in SA, we’ll be getting the 220i, 220d, and the M240i. We’re holding out hope that a refreshed M2 shows up at some point but for now, this is it. We’ve only had the chance to drive the 220i so far. We’re not convinced. Interior designer…

We’re still in the early stages of the ray-traced generation but Sony is looking to speed things along. The company recently filed for a patent in which Sony engineer Mark Cerny lays out a method to add dedicated hardware that would deal with some of the heavy computational load that ray tracing (RT) introduces. This can only mean good things for Sony’s consoles. Currently, only Nvidia GPUs with the RTX branding use dedicated RT cores to handle these rays. While the AMD RX 6000 series GPUs and the chips in the PS5 and Xbox Series X leverage AMD’s RDNA 2…

You must’ve heard about Wordle by now, right? Well, if you hadn’t, we’re sorry for wasting your day. It’s about to consume you for a while. If you have heard of it but the five-letter word game is getting stale, then you’ve come to the right place. Be warned. Once you start playing it’s more difficult to stop than you might think. Especially when you see people posting their blocks and only getting it after five or six guesses. ‘It can’t be that hard’, you’ll murmer as you push aside whatever important thing you were busy with. The next thing…

Today at Mobile World Congress 2022, Oppo unveiled three new charging technologies it’s bringing to market. Future Oppo and OnePlus smartphones could feature 150W Supervooc flash charge, 240W Supervooc flash charge and something it calls ‘Battery Health Engine’ (BHE). Your first thought might be the same as ours, “Well, there goes that battery health”. But that’s where the BHE comes in. According to a press release, Oppo claims its 150W Supervooc flash charge with BHE can maintain 80% battery health after 1,600 charge cycles. That’s double the current industry standard of 80% after 800 charge cycles. We’ll need to get…

Google disables live traffic data on Maps in Ukraine temporarily On Sunday, Google confirmed that it temporarily disabled some Google Maps tools for users in Ukraine. Those tools showed info like live traffic conditions and where the busiest places are. The reasons for this should be obvious but just in case you haven’t been watching the news for the past week, Ukraine is dealing with some unwanted occupants.A professor of California’s Middlebury Institute of International Studies tweeted at 3:26am on Thursday morning 24 February 2022 that Google Maps data showed there was a traffic jam in the wee hours of…

There’s no such thing as a free lunch, which is why you should always be suspicious of any strip club with a buffet. By the same logic, when someone on the internet offers you a free way to bypass the hashrate limiter on Nvidia’s Low Hash Rate (LHR) GPUs – something Nvidia called “unhackable” –  you should probably be a little sus. It’s almost certainly malware. A tool released on GitHub, called ‘Nvidia RTX LHR v2 Unlocker’, claimed to completely bypass the limiter on Nvidia’s LHR cards. Well, that’s been found to contain multiple malicious viruses. Tom’s Hardware and PC…

When Samsung launched its latest Galaxy S22 devices, it made a fuss about the upgraded charge speed of the Galaxy S22+ and S22 Ultra. Those two come support 45W fast-charging, up from the 25W of the S22 base model and the whole of the S21 range. Turns out, the 45W charging claim was mostly just a marketing ploy. By which we mean, Samsung’s 45W fast-charging block isn’t actually fast-charging at 45W at all. Tests show that it’s performing a little more effectively than the 25W charge block, but it’s not getting the full 45W. It’s more like 30W, or a…