Author: Brett Venter

Sega announced the Mega Drive Mini (or the Genesis Mini, if that makes you feel better) Sonic. Sonic 2. Mortal Kombat 2. That weird Dragon Ball Z game. A whole list of other games involving robots and strange animation and other unusual stuff you don’t see much these days. Those were the heady days of the Sega Genesis, from a time when we had no idea that you could play a console game off a compact disc and DVDs were far in the future. You will be able to head back to that time soon with the launch of the…

Read More

Facebook has begun informing its users which of the 87 million of them had their information gathered and used by Cambridge Analytica for… oh, various unpleasant things, like influencing votes and elections and things of that nature. But you don’t have to wait for Facebook to broadcast a warning at the top of your news feed, which is how the company is going about it. There are other ways that you can find out whether you were one of the estimated 60,000 South Africans effected. The shortest possible way to see if Facebook shared your information with Cambridge Analytica is…

Read More

Look, we all know that just about nobody works all day, every day. Time is taken up eating, making coffee, drinking coffee, checking social media, and the like. It’s time for something different. Something like… Jelly Mario. Jelly Mario is the creation of developer Stefan Hedman, who took the Super Mario Bros. that we all know and love and… warped it. The Koopas and Goombas that you’re so used to seeing traipse along the familiar 2D stage now tend to jolt along but that’s okay. Mario can’t walk straight either, and pretty much everything he hits will deform or change…

Read More

Toys, like tech, are constantly evolving. Not as fast as, say, smartphones do but they do take strides from time to time. Microsoft’s Research division may have shown off the future of toys with the unveiling of Project Zanzibar, an object-sensing mat featuring tech in keeping with the company’s Mixed Reality focus of late. Unlike the Hololens, Project Zanzibar deals more in the tangible. Zanzibar is an object-sensing mat able to recognise and track the positions of several objects at once. It’s able to recognise basic shapes and is, with the addition of an NFC sticker, also able to cope…

Read More

After the world finds out Zuck can do it, Facebook announces “unsend” feature for users Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, until recently, had a special Facebook power. The power to delete messages he has sent from other user’s inboxes. And he’s been using that to unsend messages. Which, given how much trouble Facebook’s been in lately, doesn’t look too good. At all. Which might be why Facebook has announced a new ‘unsend’ feature that will be rolled out for all users in “several months” time. This sounds an awful lot like they’re going to have to start working on it now, post…

Read More

Facebook hasn’t been having the best time of late, what with the Cambridge Analytica scandal which saw some 50 million (as was originally reported — see below) Facebook users having their data siphoned and then used to influence events like the British Brexit vote and the American presidential election in 2016. This was followed by the revelation that Facebook was harvesting far more data than most users were aware of, including large amounts of call and SMS information via the Android Facebook app. The iOS equivalent didn’t have these issues, since Apple blocks access to this data for third-party apps. Facebook’s…

Read More

Just how much space do you need to create a compete working computer? If you’re IBM the answer to that is “Not much at all”, which might explain how the company has managed to create the world’s smallest functional PC. That header image above? That shows 64 of the computer’s motherboards sandwiched together on a single chip. Unveiled at the IBM Think conference, this little critter measures just 1mm by 1mm but it’s got the computing power of an x86 processor from the nineties… which isn’t a lot, before you point that out for us, but it does take up…

Read More

Fancy-tasting coffee at the push of a button is no longer the sole domain of people with soft hands, air conditioning and an office kitchen. Now, thanks to power tool maker Makita, you’ll be able to enjoy fancy java even if you’re usually found wandering around construction sites crushing bricks with your bare hands. Even better, you can use the battery for your cordless power tools to create said caffeine jolts. Japanese company Makita has come up with the CM501DZ, a rugged coffee machine that looks as though it belongs on a construction site or in a workshop. Especially since…

Read More

Oculus Go could launch from Facebook as soon as this May Facebook has been sitting on the standalone Oculus Go headset for a while, with no announcement in sight for when it’ll drop on the VR-craving masses. Well, VR-craving users — we’re not quite ready for ‘masses’ just yet. A new report claims that we’re going to see the Oculus Go unleashed on the world rather soon, though. Facebook is planning on dropping their affordable VR gear on 1 May, at the f8 developer conference that Facebook hosts every year. That is according to sources “familiar with the company’s plans”…

Read More

Fitbit’s got a lot of competition in the wearables market these days, from Apple in particular but also from everyone else who’s decided to put a collection of microchips into a wristband. Their answer to the latest lot of challenges is the Versa, the company’s second shot at an honest-to-goodness smartwatch. And the Versa does a lot of things right. It’s cheaper than its immediate predecessor (and the competition), it’s better looking, it contains a lot of the features you want (and need). Here’s what you need to know. It’s a bit like the Pebble, visually The Pebble Time Steel,…

Read More