Author: Brett Venter

Huawei has been threatening this for some time but now it’s official — the Chinese company announced that a whole slew of older and new devices are incoming running its Harmony OS 2 software. These devices include some that you may have skipped (or which skipped us) over the past year, like the Huawei P40, Mate 30, Mate 40 and the MatePad Pro. Living in perfect Harmony OS 2 The list of familiar names will be some of the first to get Huawei’s Android-alternative operating system, but the company doesn’t intend to stop there. Handsets as far back as the…

NASA has serious exploration plans afoot. It’s Mars this year, it’s the Moon soon with the upcoming Artemis missions, and now it’s also Venus, according to an announcement from the space agency this week. In fact, before the end of the decade NASA intends to send two missions to Earth’s closest non-satellite neighbour. Venus rising Sometimes we think that NASA does what it does so that it can use clever acronyms as often as it does. The two missions confirmed for the planet that destroys spacecraft are called DAVINCI+ and VERITAS — respectively known as the Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation…

Fitbit has long been in the market for better health metrics, scooping up as much data as possible in order to provide that (and, very likely, to create more products that it thinks you’ll buy). There’s a new sleep-based feature in store from the Google-owned fitness brand, as revealed by the most recent version of the app — snore tracking. Goodnight Fitbit And not in the usual, lets-be-competitive sense of tracking. Like its usually-excellent sleep tracking, the new Snore & Noise Detect feature will keep an eye — or, rather, ear — on just how much noise you’re making in…

Cyberattacks are on the rise, striking more and more companies. We’ve had them here at home and we’ve seen them abroad. Hospitals have been affected and people have died as a result. And now for a large one, with its effects being felt on at least two continents — the world’s largest meat supplier has been hit with a rather nasty cyberattack. The (cyberattack) steaks are high The largest meat supplier in the world, JBS, confirmed the attack in a press release, saying that some of the servers at its North American and Australian facilities were compromised. This has led…

South Africa is a surprisingly advanced location for global astronomy. We’re part of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project and now another, called HIRAX, has finally been funded. HIRAX is the Hydrogen Intensity and Real-time Analysis eXperiment and you’re likely to hear more about the project in the near future. It’s funding of R35 million has been approved by the National Research Foundation (NRF), so now the construction of 1,024 six-metre radio telescopes can begin. I am the HIRAX, I speak to the stars https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MR8omHqly8E The project is the result of a partnership headed by the University of KwaZulu Natal…

You know what would make smartphones even more distracting than they already are? Console-quality graphics. That’s just what AMD and Samsung intend to fire at users of the South Korean company’s smartphones, thanks to a new partnership that will see AMD’s RDNA 2 graphics architecture — which you can see in action in the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 — coming to Exynos processors. Looks good for AMD This isn’t the first we’ve heard about a partnership between the two companies. There was talk in February of an Exynos-powered Samsung notebook that used the graphics company’s rendering tech. Now,…

There are several different sorts of portal in the world. There’s the Facebook Portal, which is terrifying. There’s the Portal video game, which is amazing. There’s also the Stargate, which is the most Kurt Russel portal of all. And then there’s the PORTAL: a video wall connecting two European countries together in real-time. Portal to somewhere else https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GrXTLe9ztA The weird construction looks like it was ripped right from science fiction, only you can’t step through it and instantly travel to another city. That would be pretty awesome, though. Instead, this pair of devices connecting the cities of Lublin, Poland and…

At some point, we have to start asking if Elon Musk is a for-real supervillain. The head of SpaceX (for the purposes of this article) tweeted over the weekend that construction has started on Deimos, the first SpaceX ocean spaceport. Who has an ocean spaceport? Honestly? Elon Musk, apparently. And what is it? It’s an offshore facility that the private space agency intends to use to launch and land its Starship rockets. SpaceX at sea https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1399088815705399305?s=20 Which is a really great idea, in theory. In the event of a crash or an explosion, having the event take place over the…

The 2021 Mars mission aside, NASA’s Artemis project is the next big thing in space exploration. The American space agency intends to set up a more solid presence on Earth’s moon, and it’s roping in several companies to make that happen. SpaceX has been contracted to create the lunar lander for NASA (though there’s some ‘debate’ on that point), and now the fate of the new Artemis rover has been decided. NASA shoots for the Moon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5869l2cKLZw General Motors (GM) has announced that it is partnering with Lockheed Martin to create the new Artemis lunar rover. Only ‘rover’ is the…

We’re not entirely sure how we’re supposed to take this news, but Amazon is installing ZenBooth meditation rooms in its warehouses as part of the company’s WorkingWell initiative. These are little spaces where its warehouse workers can escape for a few minutes to “…watch short videos featuring easy-to-follow wellbeing activities, including guided meditations, positive affirmations, calming scenes with sounds, and more.” They sound positively terrifying. Why do you need a ZenBooth? They’re terrifying because you’re not supposed to have to take frequent wellness breaks in a dedicated room in order to work at a warehouse. Lately Amazon has been under…