Author: Brett Venter

One of the nicest men on the face of the planet, William Shatner, is going to space. If you don’t know why this is significant, we have only one question: How are you finding your first week on the internet? But, Blue Origin has delayed Captain Kirk’s trip to space. Not for terribly long, mind you. But it’s still a delay. Shatner to Enterprise — four to beam up https://twitter.com/WilliamShatner/status/1447367260473987074 Blue Origin announced the weather-prompted delay on its website, saying that while all of its passengers (the company still calls them astronauts) are cleared for takeoff and that training for…

Canon has a thing for intricate-yet-functional glass of the expensive sort, and the newest bit of this is a new dual 5.2mm f/2.8 fisheye lens that’s intended for use on its EOS R cameras. Well, one EOS R camera. See, the only camera so far confirmed to use Canon’s new dual fisheye arrangement is the EOS R5, a mirrorless body that’ll set you back at least R65,000. That’s… reasonable, as high-end cameras go. But what’s the point of the thing that’s got poor Wall-E looking so worried? No longer just headCanon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJAr7SbVGBg&feature=emb_logo The Japanese camera giant calls its new 5.2mm…

Two of Stuff’s favourite companies — Jabra and SteelSeries — are getting together to make wonderful audio babies. Jabra’s parent company GN Store Nord has signed a deal with the gaming gear specialists that will allow GN to target “…the attractive upscale gaming gear market and [expand] its position in the premium audio market.” The deal was announced on GN Store Nord’s website, giving all of the details behind the acquisition. The partnership is worth 8 billion Danish Krone, which is around R18.5 billion here at home. That makes SteelSeries quite a valuable company, but it might increase in value…

Massmart, the Walmart-owned retail group that would be more recognisable to you as Game or Dion Wired (if they were still around), has added another South African company to its roster. OneCart, the local service that allows its users to purchase items like groceries from more than one location, has now joined the ranks of the people of Walmart. The deal has been in the works since August this year, reports TechCentral, but the two companies have since agreed to terms. Just what those terms are isn’t known, but OneCart fonder Lynton Peters, as well as an unnamed “minority shareholder”,…

When our main methods of communication are taken away, you can bet that it’ll be a topic of conversation for some time to come. Facebook’s recent widespread outage has provoked all sorts of comments about the social network, and now we’ve got a little more for you. Stuff’s publisher Toby Shapshak spoke to the fine folks at 5FM’s Dan Corder on the 5 Breakfast show about just what went down on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp earlier this week. On the off-chance you weren’t in your car or tuned to 5FM at the time, we’ve got the fifteen-minute segment here for…

There are only really two names when it comes to eReaders in South Africa — there’s Amazon’s Kindle and then Kobo, the other way to read books without having to convert any oxygen-producing biomass into very thin slices. On the heels of Amazon’s reveal of a new pair of readers, Kobo has revealed a fine pair of its very own. First, there’s the Libra 2, a successor to the company’s Libra H2O eReader, followed by the Kobo Sage, a high-end bit of hardware that appears to be a shot across the bows of Kindle’s equally-snooty Oasis. Cobble a couple of…

It doesn’t really matter who you are, chances are you’re aware of the existence of William Shatner. Starfleet’s Captain James Tiberius Kirk is almost universally recognised and, with the rest of the Star Trek cast, is mentally linked in the greater consciousness with space exploration. Well, the 90-year-old Shatner is due to actually get out to space a little later this month. Shatner is due to take a flight on one of Blue Origin’s New Shepard rockets, specifically NS-18, on 12 October, along with Blue Origin’s Audrey Powers Let William Shatner have this If anyone deserves to travel to the…

Unless you were completely checked out last night, you will have noticed that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp all stopped working yesterday evening. Also affected was Facebook’s Oculus service. All of these things have one thing in common — they’re interdependent. And, if you thought you had a bad time last night, spare a thought for the company (yes, really). The outage also took down Facebook’s internal services, trashing Workplace and making it that much harder for the social network to get its services back up and running. What happened to Facebook https://twitter.com/dok2001/status/1445056572703625218? There were many theories as to the cause…

El Salvador has taken quite a terrific risk in becoming the first country to make bitcoin legal tender, a move that other countries have yet to take. It’s quite possible that the country has made a mistake (or has it?) but El Salvador doesn’t appear to think so. Case in point: The country’s looking at unusual methods of mining bitcoin-like using a volcano as a power source. Really, El Salvador? https://twitter.com/nayibbukele/status/1443832539496525852? One of the largest criticisms of bitcoin mining is the power draw required to mine new coins. Entire power plants are being repurposed to mine bitcoin, meaning that the…

Very few people are foolish enough to rush into a category-4 hurricane with a camera rolling (maybe Jake Paul will do it. Let’s ask him), but Saildrone isn’t a person. Saildrone isn’t even a single drone — the company behind the oceangoing drone is piloting a batch of five of them around the Atlantic Ocean. As part of a joint investigation with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Explorer SD 1045 drone was sent inside the slowly-flagging Hurricane Sam in order to capture video of the inside of the weather phenomenon. Saildrone shows some skill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQM_03zuSAI The result…