Author: Brett Venter

SpaceX gets a lot of airtime on Stuff but there’s more than one private space company out there. Blue Origin is one, but Rocket Labs is the smaller sibling you don’t really hear about all that often. But little brother is growing up, detailing plans for a new, reusable rocket called the Neutron. The first one they send into space better be called Jimmy. Levelling up at Rocket Labs Currently the company uses its Electron, an eighteen-metre reusable rocket, to send payloads of up to 300kg into orbit. This is fine for small satellites but there’s a growing demand for larger…

There are now two prominent video game properties that deal with dragon’s blood and we reckon the upcoming Dota: Dragon’s Blood is far less of an acquired taste than Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon. Last month we saw a teaser for the Netflix series based on the popular Valve-owned video game with a massive payday. This month, ahead of the 25 March launch, we’ve got a much longer look at what’s coming. And what’s coming looks like it doesn’t need 1600 hours in Dota 2 (that’s an actual Stuff total for a certain member of staff) to appreciate. It’s in…

Lego is frequently sold as a toy that can be anything you want it to be. That was taken literally just recently, resulting in this recreation of the Top Gun Maverick trailer, made entirely with Lego. More or less. Made by a Top Gun https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n9q0TNYIl0 There are a couple of versions of the Lego trailer — the original you’ll find below, while above is a side-by-side look at the real deal versus the painstakingly made clone. The creation of one Gus Danko, known on YouTube as Onbeatman, this frame-by-frame reproduction  was created “…using only a canon t6i, 2017 iMac, and…

If you’re used to getting your Xiaomi handsets from Mobile in Africa, then we may have just seen your next handset. MiA tends to be rather fond of the Redmi range of devices and Xiaomi’s new Redmi Note 10 — due to be unveiled later this week — has turned up to the party a little early. Taking Note of the details The handset’s specifics are mostly up for grabs, thanks to several leaks (one of which has since been deleted). The Note 10’s set to land with a 6.43in Super AMOLED display with a single hole-punch camera up front.…

Perhaps you remember the Dragon Age series of RPGs. You know, story-heavy single-player, extremely popular experiences? The upcoming Dragon Age sequel wasn’t going to be anything like that. Only, according to reports, now it is. We hope. The report, coming via Bloomberg, states that this welcome change is because publisher Electronic Arts is backing away from making developer Bioware stick multiplayer into another game. Citing people familiar with the matter, EA’s reportedly permitting “…the developers to remove all planned multiplayer components from the game.” Saving Dragon Age And how this change in the RPG series’ fortunes came about is an interesting…

The worst thing about laptops is that you can’t upgrade them. Much. A new startup called Framework hopes to change that, by released a laptop you can improve over time. And not just the RAM and SSD, either. Everything from the screen to the keyboard can be swapped out, and there’s a modular section that can be put to many different uses. Building a better Framework In practise, based on what we’ve seen from the company’s website, most of the upgrades look like they’d come via a much more accessible notebook chassis — think fewer annoying clips and glued sections…

Facebook (you know who they are) is transitioning to a new wake-word for voice control of its Portal and Oculus Quest hardware — “Hey Facebook” is the new phrase that users will utter to summon Mark Zuckerberg’s newest surveillance hardware from its slumber. Facebook has only made a proper announcement for the Oculus Quest, with the phrase letting you trigger all manner of voice commands for the Quest 2. Later, Facebook intends to bring the functionality to all of its Oculus hardware, which means soon every one of its VR headsets sold will have a mic listening in (and will…

Space has been in the news as of late and while both the UAE and China had missions arrive at the red planet this month, NASA offers the most spectacular footage. But China’s also got its sights set on the final frontier in a larger capacity. To that end, the country has revealed plans for a new super-heavy rocket, called Long March 9 (also known as CZ-9), which is intended to get humans from this rock we live on to other rocks, far, far away. The Long March 9 to freedom The existence of the rocket system was revealed this…

The year was 2014. It was the last time we officially saw a Samsung-made laptop in the South African market. Since then, there has been intermittent talk of the company bringing its range of computer hardware back to SA but nothing has come of it. We hope that changes. Because Samsung’s rumoured to be trying something a little different with its notebook hardware soon. It’ll still be making the conventional stuff, but it’s what’s inside that counts. And the South Korean tech-maker is rumoured to be including Exynos processors in its Windows machines soon. Surprising Samsung That’s the word according…

Let’s just start off by saying that Boston Dynamics, the company behind Spot, Atlas, and a collection of other interesting robots, isn’t happy about this. A group calling themselves MSCHF (pronounced ‘mischief’) has acquired one of the company’s Spot robots and they’re about to use it to prove a point. The point is about weapons, and police departments, and guns, and the way MSCHF is attempting to make that point is by letting the internet control Spot. Only Spot now has a paintball gun mounted on top of his head. This sounds like a fun time, until you consider the…