Author: Brett Venter

It’s not the greatest time to be Chinese and a fan of cryptocurrencies, though we can’t say we didn’t see this coming. Signs have, for months, pointed towards the Chinese government taking some sort of adversarial action towards bitcoin mining in general. But last week while most of South Africa was off for the day, Chinese officials went and made all cryptocurrency transactions in the country illegal. Pour one out for crypto The news comes by way of the Financial Times, but it’s hardly surprising. The country effectively banned bitcoin mining back in May this year, so smacking crypto right…

Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule isn’t having a very good time. Its first flight into space ended with a software error that torched the test Boeing was conducting, the follow-up test was first delayed by a Russian software error that nudged the International Space Station (ISS) out of place, and then another fault, this one with a set of valves on the craft, sent the capsule back for additional maintenance. Matters haven’t improved, yet. Boeing is still attempting to figure out what’s up with the oxidiser valves on the craft. Since this is rocket science, we reckon there’s probably not a…

Look, chances are you’ll never purchase one of these James Bond-themed Aston Martin DB5 replicas for your kids. For starters, they cost £90,000 — which is a wallet-demolishing R1.8 million here in South Africa. We don’t know about you but we don’t hate our kids that much. If we had that much money to throw around we’d throw it in the direction of an education. But maybe you’ve got Bezos or Musk money lying around. We’re not gonna ask where you got it — maybe it’s totally legit (from Bitcoin or something) or maybe the Zondo Commission is going to…

DStv’s getting all kinds of interesting just lately. There are rumours of the company unbundling its offerings (kinda) to create a Flex option, it’s just launched internet access for subscribers and, for this Heritage Day weekend, the entertainment provider has opened up access to SuperSport to… well, everyone. Okay, everyone with a DStv subscription, but that’s still a lot of people who normally wouldn’t have access to the likes of… well, all this: DStv doing you a solid See, Heritage Day is supposed to be all about celebrating South African culture. It just so happens that pretty much all of…

We’ve known that Airbus was working on its flying taxi idea as far back as 2016, when details emerged about the aeronautics company’s Vahana project. That project seems to have borne some fruit, just in time to run face-first into everyone else’s flying taxi project — everyone from NASA to Joby Aviation to Rolls-Royce is looking at competing in the so-called urban air mobility space very soon. Meet the CityAirbus NextGen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFR3iUnMs-4 This is Airbus’ attempt — the extremely buzzwordy CityAirbus (because it works in a city, yeah?) NextGen (because the tech world is like an SABC soap opera these…

So you want a shiny new OLED-packing Nintendo Switch, do you? We’ve been awaiting pricing information for South Africa ever since the hardware was announced. Well, the inevitable has happened — you can now pre-order an OLED Switch in SA. The question is: should you? Come on, Nintendo Switch it up See, whether you opt for the colourful or the dour white version of Ninty’s portable console, you’re going to wind up spending R8,000 for one, with an official carrying case setting you back an extra 600 bucks. That’s… a whole lot of money, especially when you consider that not…

We’ve got quite a history of making fun of Facebook’s range of Portal devices and the new Portal Go, announced last night, is no different at all. We’re sure they’re very nice devices if you meet them in person but they seem, largely, to be all about scooping up more data for Mark Zuckerberg’s volcano-based, all-encompassing advertising AI. Portal Go somewhere else But for the first time, the surveillance tech made by Facebook has become a properly portable Portal. The Portal Go, which retails for about R3,000 (or $200, if you’re somewhere you can actually buy one), is a fabric-covered…

Amazon’s 10th-gen Kindle Paperwhite, released back in 2018, is very nearly the perfect eReader but that doesn’t make Jeff Bezos more money so the company’s got something new on the way. How do we know this? Well, Amazon mucked up and posted the details to its website a little early. Here’s what we (already) know, ahead of anything like an official announcement. Spotted in the Amazon  Website Good eReader spotted an updated product listing on Amazon Canada’s website, a listing that has since been disappeared from the internet. The comparison shows that there’s a Kindle Paperwhite 5 (which would be…

Samsung’s range of Frame TVs are just like its regular television sets, with a very slight difference — they don’t look like TV sets. Instead, they’re rather cleverly disguised as picture frames (provided you’ve got it mounted on a wall somewhere), capable of showing all manner of artwork. Well, the range just got a little larger, thanks to a new partnership with the Musée du Louvre. Samsung, but French Which means, if you own one of the company’s Frame TVs, you no longer have to travel to Paris to take in artwork like The Mona Lisa or The Wedding at Cana…

As with Samsung’s last folding smartphone, let’s get the worst part of the Galaxy Z Fold 3 out of the way right up front — at R38,000, it’s still far too expensive for most users. That said, two things have happened since 2020. Many things have happened since 2020 but only two of them matter in this context: Samsung’s folding hardware has become R12,000 cheaper and the overall experience has also improved. That doesn’t mean that it has become an essential buy — that day will come, but it’s not today. But if you’ve got a) the budget and b)…