Author: Duncan Pike

Chinese company BOE (Beijing Oriental Electronics) has announced a breakthrough in oxide semiconductor display technology that’s allowed them to produce a prototype gaming monitor capable of a 500Hz refresh rate. That means the screen can refresh the image 500 times per second. That’s 140 refreshes per second faster than the fastest monitor currently available. There are a few 360Hz monitors available from Acer, Alienware and Asus but this is the first time anything has been seen that’s faster.  This monitor gotta go fast This new panel is a 27in with a resolution of 1920 x 1080p, which is slightly bigger…

Want to know where Elon’s jet is at all times? 19-year-old Jack Sweeney found his 15 minutes of internet fame with one of the many Twitter bots he’s created. The former child has written a Twitter bot (@ElonJet) that uses publicly available flight info to track the private jets of those he’s deemed worthy. Of the high-profile tech individuals including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Kimbal and Elon Musk, the latter didn’t particularly like being tracked. “Can you take this down? It is a security risk,” Musk wrote in a Twitter dm to Sweeney. Not wanting to oblige and have nothing…

A SpaceX rocket has been tumbling about in space for the past seven years. It will come to an eventual, abrupt stop on the moon. By that, we mean crash. It’s going to crash into the moon. Originally launched in 2015, the Falcon 9 rocket was used in a mission to deliver a space weather satellite to a point in space over 1 million kilometres away. But after it had done most of its job the rocket found itself in a bit of a pickle. It didn’t have enough fuel to return to Earth nor enough to escape the gravitational…

Today, the team at Google in charge of this sort of thing (Google Registry) released the .day domain. The domain is intended for companies, organisations and charities that wish to bring attention to an issue or cause. Particularly when that falls on a specific day of the year. A few organisations have already started using the .day domain to increase awareness of their cause or a specific issue. Some notable examples are wildlife.day (3 March) run by the World Wildlife Fund, transvisibility.day (31 March) by Human Rights Campaign and equalpay.day by National Women’s Law Center. Some companies have even jumped…

A week ago, we reported that Pick n Pay launched a new, helpful system for renewing your car licence disks. Well, the group has just announced it’s making it a bit cheaper to use the service. It was still going through a trial period but it seems all it needed was a week. Now the service is available in 500 Pick n Pay super- and hypermarkets around the country. In case you missed our announcement last week, the system works online or in-store. You need to register with a phone number and set up your profile. To do that you…

It feels like it was only yesterday when Tim Cook was standing in a field in front of Apple’s big fancy building telling us about the new iPhone 13. But time is a fly, or whatever the saying is and we’re approaching the next big Apple event. This one could turn out to be the biggest ever. Historically, Apple’s spring (our autumn) events have been in March or April. This year shouldn’t be any different. Based on what it’s released in previous years around this time and what it’s released so far, we have a fairly good understanding of what…

Leaked Intel GPU benchmarks show promise As we get closer to the official launch of Intel’s first real attempt at consumer-focused GPUs, internet detectives are sniffing for leaks. Someone actually managed to find one. Or at least what appears to be one. TUM_APISAK uncovered some benchmark results from SiSoftware that show how the new GPU performed in some synthetic tests. If these results are legit, this could be the cause for some celebration.A few specifications reveal that these results are for the DG2-512EU model. This is the flagship model for Intel’s Arc Alchemist series it plans to release sometime this…

One of the big names in our country’s minibus taxi industry, SA Taxi, says it is planning to trial electric taxis. But don’t expect that to happen in a big hurry. The CEO of Transaction Capital, the parent company to SA Taxi, Terry Kier, said a shift towards the use of electric taxis would be a “medium- to long-term project,” according to a TechCentral report. You can’t just stick a battery in a taxi and call it a day But, again, that’s not going to happen quickly. That’s partly due to the fact that it just doesn’t make economic sense…

After some eyebrow-raising backtracking on the initial 11 January launch, Samsung has announced its latest Exynos System-on-Chip (SoC). The Exynos 2200 should’ve been announced a week ago but the announcement was pushed back to today to coincide with the S22 launch. That’s according to a Samsung official who spoke to GSMArena.  This led to some speculation circulating that perhaps the new, still-to-be-announced S22 range would feature Snapdragon SoCs. Historically, only the models released in the US came with Snapdragon SoCs. The rest of the world, South Africa included, received devices with Samsung’s usually worse-performing Exynos chips. But things might be…

Another day, another leak of an upcoming smartphone. Info on Oppo’s newest flagship has surfaced, including the name, some specs, and what it’ll look like. Oppo seems to be one of those companies that have a hard time with numbers. Its newest flagship, reportedly called the Find X5 Pro, follows on from the previous Find X3 Pro. This is according to a now-deleted Weibo post that mentioned a few specs and showed us what it’ll look like.  The biggest surprise for most is the Hasselblad branding seen on the supposedly real-world photos of the device. To go along with that…