Author: Duncan Pike

If you were ever thinking about trying to get into the crypto craze by mining some of it yourself, please don’t begin by mining using your laptop. If you do, don’t expect to make any money from it. One developer has done exactly the opposite and turned the Toshiba T3200SX from 1989 into a miner. This relic runs on an Intel 386SX processor with a clock speed of just 16Mhz and uses the MS-DOS OS. When it first came out you would have had to fork out the equivalent of close to R97,000 for it. And that was 30 years…

Twitter makes recording Spaces available to everyone Twitter has announced a small change to its Clubhouse clone, Twitter Spaces, that could make everyone ditch the former and sign up to the latter. Or, at least, that’s what Twitter wants. The change we’re talking about was first announced in October 2021. Back then, Twitter offered the ability to record Spaces and make the recording available to listeners who might’ve missed the stream.But at first, the feature wasn’t available to everyone. Only “some hosts” could use the feature. Presumably, this was to test out if the thing actually worked properly before pushing…

2022 hasn’t been very kind to Blackberry. Well, none of the years since 2013 have, but this one in particular. Only last week the company shut down legacy services for devices running its operating systems. Specifically, BlackBerry 7.1 OS, BlackBerry 10 and BlackBerry Playbook OS 2.1. That didn’t mean you’d have to throw away your trusty device but it did mean they stopped functioning reliably. So you might as well toss them. Following that announcement, a keen-eyed user of the CrackBerry forum pointed out that the few surviving BlackBerry Android apps would be reaching end-of-life at the end of August…

About a year ago, Baby Shark overtook Despacito as the most-watched video on YouTube. Now, the song is the first video on the platform to surpass 10 billion views and we don’t know what to do about it. Currently, it has 10,007,622,245 views, we’ll check back on that in a bit. That means that everyone in the world has watched it about 1.2668 times. Okay, not really. What’s actually happened is parents all over the world that were just looking for some time to themselves queued up the song several thousand times each. We assume. They’re who we have to…

Introducing UltraRAM. It’s an idea that’s been around for a while but has never really been achievable. That is, until recently. Scientists from the Physics and Engineering Department of the UK’s Lancaster University have published a paper on the breakthrough tech that could turn RAM and hard drives into one thing. It’s happened to all of us at least once. You’ve opened one too many Chrome tabs – so, five – and felt everything you’re working on grind to a halt. That’s your PC swapping things from your RAM to the pagefile on your hard drive.  Hard drives, the kinds…

Spotify HiFi, the streaming service’s lossless tier of audio streaming is being pushed back with no concrete timeline for a release in sight. It’s almost a year after it was first announced on 23 February 2021. If the feature itself is news to you, this is Spotify’s answer to Tidal or Amazon Music’s HD tier. Currently, Spotify’s ‘very high’ quality setting only streams lossy files at a bitrate of 320kbps. Spotify HiFI would increase that to lossless CD-quality, around 1,400kbps. Anyone can see that’s quite the quality jump. A lot of people, us included, were rather excited about it. This…

The Associated Press, or AP, announced work on its own NFT marketplace, with a focus on the work of its photojournalists. It is collaborating with US company Xooa. Don’t worry, we don’t know how to say it either. The marketplace will serve as a way for collectors to “purchase the news agency’s award-winning contemporary and historic photojournalism” as a series of virtual tokens. The AP says they’ll be released at “broad and inclusive price points” but says nothing of the price points of other resellers on their marketplace. All aboard the NFT hype train The decision to jump onboard the…

For those not in the know, a Raspberry Pi is a nifty little single-board computer used for a staggering number of projects. If your project needs a computer or controller of some kind, chances are a Pi is the answer. That must’ve been the mentality the researchers at the Research Institute of Computer Science and Random Systems (IRISA) in France possessed. The team of Annelie Heuser, Matthieu Mastio, Duy-Phuc Pham, and Damien Marion turned a Pi into a new malware detection system. For the technically minded, you can read their paper here. For the rest, we’ll do our best to…

Alright Samsung, easy does it. It’s only been 11 days and the company has already released its first phone of 2022. We know the Galaxy S21 FE is coming but the A03 Core is kind of a surprise if you weren’t paying attention. Announced in November last year and released in December, the A03 Core is the latest in Samsung’s entry-level lineup to arrive in SA. With a recommended retail price of just R1,800, this one might prove popular. For your money, you get a 6.5in HD+ display with an over 80% screen-to-body ratio. There’s a teardrop that hides the…

Stuff says –  4/5 Mackie, the American brand that specialises in professional audio equipment, has entered the near-ear audio market with a range of over-ear monitors. We spent some time with the MC-250 to see if Mackie could crack the formula on its first attempt. We were rather impressed.Bring the sounds On the outside, you’re met with a mostly-black plastic construction aside from the silver Mackie logo on either earcup. No frills or RGB found here. These are budget studio cans after all and the build quality reflects that a little. The size adjuster lacks any noticeable steps so sizing…