Author: Brett Venter

South Africa’s just launched a new digital payments system, called PayShap (because of course it is) in conjunction with four of the country’s major banks. Absa, First National Bank, Nedbank, and Standard Bank are all participating in this new system which should make interbank transfers and payments a far simpler and cheaper affair. A safer affair too, if the official statements are any indication. There are currently two ways for users to receive payment. Either they can use an account number, the way folks have been doing ever since filling out those paper slips in a bank was a thing,…

Smartphones have, in recent years, become an increasing mission to repair. With the launch of its G22 smartphone, Nokia is looking to push back on that trend. The device has been designed to be simple to fix, meaning it’ll spend less time in the shop if you drop it. Or you could just not send it in at all. Smartphone repair company iFixit has partnered with the brand to release the Nokia G22 with spares and the tools you’d need to install them yourself. You know, in case anything goes wrong. Getting a fix on that G22 iFixit CEO Kyle…

Apple has dragged its feet when it comes to launching its rumoured augmented reality headset for long enough. According to a new Financial Times report, company head Tim Cook made the call to release Apple’s AR hardware to the public despite pushback from the company’s design team. This goes some way towards explaining the numerous delays from Apple despite copious amounts of information being available. According to the report, Apple has argued over the timing of its virtual reality hardware launch since the project’s inception in 2016. It’s on Tim Cook’s head Apple is all about design. It’s a major…

Volkano is known in South Africa as a budget tech brand. Side-stepping the inconveniences of load shedding in this country is expensive. You can kinda see how these two might go together. The Volkano Constant Mini Network UPS is an affordable 8,800mAh battery pack designed to keep your internet running without interruption and… you should probably go and buy one. Now. Unless you have solar, anyway. Hard to locate The slim blue box that was delivered to Stuff’s offices recently is surprisingly hard to locate in stores. That’s probably got more to do with demand than its attractiveness. Inside the…

Data centres suffer from several constant issues. The two prime problems are heat and security. An American tech startup, Lonestar, reckons that building these centres on the Moon would solve both issues. For a while, anyway. And, when considered logically, a lunar data centre isn’t a terrible idea. Building a computing device that exists somewhere there’s no atmosphere means that cooling costs are massively reduced. With no air conditioners to shut down and far less power draw, maintaining the centre would prove more affordable — once you get it to the lunar surface, anyway. The security benefits seem obvious. If…

Facebook and parent company Meta are well known for their practice of cloning features from competing services. Whether it’s grabbing audio functions from Clubhouse or reproducing new apps entirely, there are few original ideas coming out of the company. Well, here’s another one of those. The project is known internally as P92 and is supposed to be a standalone text-based app that supports ActivityPub. Which, if you’re paying attention, is the technology that underpins Twitter rival Mastodon. Getting Meta with Twitter The information on the P92 project turned up via an Indian website, MoneyControl. It was later confirmed by the…

Leaks can come from some strange places, especially if you’re Samsung. The Samsung Galaxy A54 5G has turned up yet again, this time on Samsung Macedonia’s website. Did you know Samsung had a Macedonian website? It’s not the device itself, so the incoming specs aren’t entirely confirmed. Yet. The leak shows a flip cover for the upcoming mid-range smartphone but it also includes an official look at the device itself. Based on that, the renders seen last year were accurate so there aren’t any visual surprises coming. This is the Galaxy A54 We’ve grabbed an image (above) in case Samsung…

Active noise-cancelling headphones are the standard now but not everyone can afford to place the tech in or on their ears. Until now, that is. South Africans will be familiar with Volkano, a budget brand that makes audio tech and other odds and ends. The VolkanoX Silenzo is from the company’s more advanced lineup but these over/on-ear headphones don’t move beyond budget pricing. There is, of course, a reason for this. They absolutely are budget headphones but this comes across mostly in terms of performance. The VolkanoX brand has its look, feel, and features down so well that you’ll be…

Translator, Microsoft’s answer to Google Translate, has just added a new batch of African languages to the service, bringing the total number of supported languages to 124. Of the thirteen new languages, four are native to South Africa and its immediate neighbours. The newly supported languages are chiShona, Hausa, Igbo, Kinyarwanda, Lingala, Luganda, Nyanja, Rundi, Sesotho, Sesotho sa Leboa, Setswana, Xhosa, and Yoruba. A Translator for Africa Of these, Sesotho, Sesotho sa Leboa, Setswana, and Xhosa are official South African languages. They join the company’s support for the Zulu tongue, which was added to the service along with Somali in…

NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) is a satellite the space agency launched in 2008, while SpaceX was still taking its first steps in the launch industry. Its job is to keep an eye on the boundaries of the solar system. It tracks energetic neutral atoms (ENAs) formed when solar winds meet the colder winds of interstellar space. It’s an important job. Unfortunately, IBEX stopped doing it a while ago. Something went wrong with the fifteen-year-old probe that forced the space agency to reset it. This has happened before. Only, this time, IBEX failed to reestablish communication. NASA uses the firecode…