Author: Brett Venter

If at first you don’t succeed, object to the process. If that doesn’t work, offer to pay to be allowed in. If that doesn’t work, go to court about it. That seems to be the battle plan Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is following in its attempt to secure the NASA Artemis lunar lander contract (the HLS, or Human Landing System) the agency awarded to SpaceX earlier this year. Someone told Jeff Bezos ‘no’ Which, yes, does mean that Blue Origin has taken its objections to Elon Musk’s SpaceX being awarded the lunar lander contract to the courtroom. A suit was…

Earlier this year it was announced that LG was pulling out of the smartphone business, the company citing heavy competition and a desire to focus on other areas of its business. It would fulfil its final obligations and then they’d be done. So what is the company doing instead? LG does what it knows Turns out, the South Korean company isn’t heading too far away from the smartphone industry. It’s investing a substantial amount. — 3.3 trillion won, or a touch over R41 billion — in new OLED production facilities. Specifically, it’s investing in small to mid-sized OLED panels, an…

Social media companies like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube had their work cut out for them limiting the damage caused by Western extremists and anti-vaccination proponents of late, but now they face a new challenge — what to do about the Taliban’s online activities as the religious group takes over Afghanistan. Talibanned? In case you have somehow missed world news over the past week, the United States has pulled its troops out of Afghanistan after twenty years and, pretty much immediately, the Taliban have moved in to take over the country. Depending on who your government is, the religious extremists are…

When it comes to smartwatches in South Africa, we’re far more used to items from Samsung and Huawei than we are to seeing stuff like the TicWatch Pro 3 GPS. Learning that Mobvoi, the Chinese company behind the TicWatch series of devices, is officially in the country made for a nice change of pace so we got our hands on a R6,000 TicWatch Pro 3 to see how it measures up. Typically we love to compare what we’ve got with what has come before but that’s impossible in this case. The previous models never officially launched here, so we’re measuring…

Didn’t we say that 2021 was space’s year? NASA has two new exploration projects on the boil: Lucy, a spacecraft launching this year with plans to explore the Jupiter Trojan asteroids and the Dragonfly, which is set to take off in 2027 bound for Saturn’s moon Titan. Lucy goes first Lucy has a 23-day launch window this year, starting on 16 October. The Lockheed Martin-created spacecraft itself was dropped off at the Kennedy Space Center at the end of July. It’s set to undergo final checks and fuelling but, once that hurdle is passed, it’ll be blasting off on a…

Any plan for human colonisation of another celestial body includes the idea that we’ll use what we find there as construction material. A 3D printer, obviously, is our best chance at turning whatever we find on the surface of the moon or Mars into buildings. Why fly a bunch of bricks into space when we can just make ’em when we get there, after all. American space agency NASA is investigating just how possible it would be to ship over a 3D printer to the moon with its upcoming Artemis missions by sending a regolith 3D printer (part of the…

Facebook, the final resting place for all the information on the planet (if Mark Zuckerberg gets his way), might be forced to get rid of one of its more recent acquisitions. Last year, the company bought Giphy — and if you don’t know what they do, we hope you’re enjoying your first day on the internet — for $400 million. Now, a major source of user information might disappear into the arms of another. Tech company, that is. Facebook wants the CMA to Giphy them a break The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the UK’s competition regulator, says that it…

The Boeing Starliner crew capsule was supposed to get its second attempt at a test flight in July this year, an event that was set back by an issue with the International Space Station (ISS) being knocked around by a misfiring thruster. Now it turns out that the unintended delay may have been a good thing, as the Starliner test has been set back further by issues with the oxidiser valves on the capsule’s propulsion system. (Still) reaching for the Starliner The issue turned up during prelaunch checks and Boeing has said that it’s now working with both NASA and…

Social media is a powerful thing. Whether that’s good or bad really depends on the situation but it’s powerful enough that Zambia, which yesterday conducted its general elections, was reported to have shut down the country’s access to WhatsApp, Twitter, and Facebook’s suite of apps as voting was taking place. What happened in Zambia? https://twitter.com/netblocks/status/1425817892482818059? Several groups, including Access Now and NetBlocks, reported that the country had blocked access to WhatsApp and other social media platforms. That the Zambian government was considering taking this step during its elections was first reported last week by the Lusaka Times. Initially, Zambia’s government…

It’s a fact that mobile platforms live and die by their app support, which means you need mobile developer buy-in. Huawei’s own mobile ecosystem might have been forced on them by a certain orange person but they’re attempting to make a serious go of it. Part of that is the company’s ongoing HMS App Innovation contest — and, if you’re a local dev, you’ve still got some time to get your entry in. Maxing out mobile developers Why do you want to do that? Well, Huawei’s giving each region (there are five) a total of $200,000 (a shade under R3…