Author: Duncan Pike

There was only about 7% of 2023 left the last time we checked. That might not be enough time to finally start those New Year’s resolutions you’re still going to get around to, but it does mean you have time left to find gifts for your friends, family, and close associates. If you, or any of the people on your gift list, are the type that enjoys a trip to the cinema or can’t help but point out that Viggo Mortensen broke two of his toes in that one scene in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, here…

Don’t you love it when companies use a sensible and easy-to-understand naming convention for their products? So do we. Jabra could have called its latest flagship earbuds something obscure but we’re glad it’s sticking to the ‘bigger number means better’ convention with the Jabra Elite 10. These, along with the Elite 8 Active, are the latest silicone-wrapped in-ear headphones from the Danish company and supplant the previous flagship, the Elite 7 Pro. This time Jabra has tweaked the design and crammed more features into these tiny earbuds. Adding more features doesn’t always improve a product but at least it doesn’t…

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?…