Author: Brett Venter

So you’ve got your eye on a shiny new MacBook Pro, do you? Hopefully, you’ve been saving your pocket change (and car change, and shopping change and just… saving generally) — Apple’s new Magic Keyboard-toting machines will cost you at least two-thirds of an arm. Apple’s upgraded computing hardware launches this weekend in South Africa and pricing for the 13in machines starts at R29,000. That’s enough to get you a Touch Bar, a 1.4Ghz 10th-gen Intel Core i5 and 256GB of solid-state storage. Setting the Touch Bar higher There are, of course, pricier options. Every 13in MacBook Pro launching this…

Huawei’s P30 Pro — the smartphone so good that Huawei released it twice. Sound about right? That’s just what Huawei is doing with a second release of the handset, known as the P30 Pro New Edition, heading to market soon. But why? The reasons for it should be obvious. The P30 Pro was one heck of a smartphone, but it’s got the dubious distinction of being the last Huawei smartphone released (for a while, at least) with Google’s Mobile Services installed. The phone first launched in March last year, was re-released in September (with a new colour scheme) and is…

The world isn’t a very nice place to inhabit at the moment. It’s times like this that we should think back to the good times and Activision has made that a little easier by announcing a remastered Tony Hawk bundle for launch later this year. The bundle consists of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 and 2, suitably tweaked and upgraded for modern consoles. Oh yeah, you can get your grind on on PC (via the Epic Store), PlayStation 4 and Xbox One from 4 September this year, with all of the classic runs and gameplay modes. Only this time the…

Finally, someone’s gone and figured it out. Social media company Twitter is letting its employees work from home. Not for the duration of a lockdown or the pandemic but for good. Speaking to Buzzfeed, Twitter confirmed that it’s allowing staff to get the job done without going into the office. Twitter staff have been at home for the past two months but the change is being made permanent. A Twitter spokesperson said “We’ve been very thoughtful in how we’ve approached this from the time we were one of the first companies to move to a work-from-home model. We’ll continue to…

While literally everyone is taking strain during the current pandemic, it’s an especially trying time for smaller businesses. Lacking the bank accounts of larger companies, they’re basically burning cash as they wait to get back to work. And, when employment resumes, they’re going to need all the help they can get. Help that Facebook thinks it can supply. Support group The first way Facebook’s trying to give smaller businesses a leg-up in the time of COVID-19 is by launching a new *checks notes* sticker. Yeah, that’s right, a sticker for Instagram that says Support Small Businesses. Which might come in…

Lockdown continues, which means not many of us are getting out much at all. But there’s relief on the horizon. Sadly, not a lessening of restrictions (though that would be great), but literal relief, for the country’s poorest by way of the R350pm COVID relief grant. And, provided those poor folks have access to a smartphone — as much of the country does — nobody has to go out and apply for it. 

Researchers have found several hardware vulnerabilities in Intel’s Thunderbolt port which could give malicious actors to everything on your machine. The good news is that they need five minutes with your physical hardware to do it. 

Normally we’d start something like this off by saying ‘Only in South Africa’ but… zoombombing isn’t only in South Africa. This is just the most high profile incident so far. A National Assembly meeting today, hosted on video conference platform Zoom, was zoombombed using racial slurs and images of pornography, cancelling the meeting and necessitating a change of platform. Knowing is half the battle If the MPs or their meeting organisers had bothered to read Stuff, this might not have happened. There are several ways to keep your Zoom meetings (relatively) safe from intruders, provided you take the time to…

Money’s tight for everyone. If you’re lucky enough to be working from home you’re ahead of the game but just about everyone aside from remote workers and essential services have found their livelihoods curtailed. Including, lest we forget, music artists and other performers. It’s tough to make a living when your business model relies on getting large numbers of folks into the same venue. Music app JOOX has an initiative running at the moment that hopes to help artists out a little. Called Gig 2 Earn, the program isn’t a new one. It’s been around for some time but it’s…

It’s a whole new world, and not in a cutesy, Aladdin kinda way. Meeting new people largely revolves around a) not being scared to go close to them and b) wondering what they look like under that mask. Even dating services like Tinder are having to adapt. And adaptation is coming, in the shape of in-app video calls from the dating service. Expect the feature to land in Q2 2020, so before the end of… say… June? The rise of the Johnson-Cam? At first glance, this seems like a terrible idea. A dating app, where sex is at least in…