Author: Brett Venter

Samsung’s Gear S2 smart wearable has some company on the way and we’ve got a good idea what it looks like, thanks to an extensive image leak of the device. The wristwear, which lacks an official moniker but does have a model number (SM-R150), bears a striking resemblance to the S2. The circular design and rotating bezel are a bit of a giveaway. Where it differs is that it’s thought to be based on Samsung’s so-called Bio Processor, a chipset designed for use in the company’s fitness gear. The Bio Processor can, according to SamMobile, “…monitor heart rate, perform electrocardiogram as…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4e7PjRygt0 We’ve seen free-form (mostly) game Minecraft do a lot of things: Teach chemistry, accept and make phone calls, work in virtual reality or on a Raspberry Pi. But this might have all of the others beaten. YouTube user SethBling has gone and created a way for users to write and execute BASIC code inside the Minecraft environment.For those of you who don’t remember BASIC, it used to be taught in South African schools to punish those who were thought to be ‘good with computers.’ You won’t use it if you’re riding pigs and shooting arrows at Creepers, of course, but…

You know how, sometimes, you can buy something so explosive that it’ll be delivered to your house wrapped in brown paper? Some outlets will do it for you on purpose, so you don’t spoil the Christmas surprises, and there are places that will disguise your er… packages… so the neighbours don’t think you’re a massive weirdo. Weirdo. Well, the standard-looking HTC Desire 626 isn’t disguising some exciting and unusual phone beneath its rather plain exterior. Hopefully I haven’t gotten your hopes up. What you see is what you get and what you see is a quite unimaginative smartphone from HTC…

Watching the Falcon 9 rocket explode is almost hypnotic A video posted by Elon Musk (@elonmusk) on Jan 17, 2016 at 7:07pm PST So about that SpaceX barge landing… the Falcon 9 rocket has returned to Earth, having successfully sent its payload into orbit. We were keen on seeing what happened to the booster. Poor conditions and roughly fifteen foot waves made the barge landing seem tougher than ever but, if you can see the embedded video above, the Falcon booster almost nailed the touchdown. Unfortunately, one of the four legs didn’t lock in place, tipping over the rocket which…

How to remove a drone from your airspace – without using a shotgun https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvdKNBSWPyU Tokyo might be chasing down drones with nets but the boffins at the Michigan Tech Human-Interactive Robotics Lab have a much more American solution to snaring an offending drone from the skies. It’s still a net but this one is fired from the drone rather than hanging from the bottom of it. Less chance of snagging that way, you see. The net deploys like the classic movie nets do, tangling up the target drone’s rotors with the thin netting. It’s then dragged away by the robotic…

You mean we can get UHD from places other than YouTube and Netflix? A physical standard for UHD Blu-ray media is approaching at the speed of fresh social media indignation and approximate pricing for the hardware and individual discs you will have to purchase are actually starting to come in. Really? Hasn’t that already happened? We’ve already seen announcements of the first titles that will be available at retail as physical discs from some film studios but Lionsgate’s recent announcement also came with pricing attached. That’s a first. Excited UHD wannabes will be able to get their hands on the…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go8woPGOggg It’s one thing to pay for a Swiss designed and made mechanical timepiece, it’d be something else entirely to print the same thing in your own home. If you’re the proud owner of a 3D printer, you can do just that. And if you’ve already watched the explainer video above then you’ll know just how awesome it could be. This almost completely 3D-printed ‘pocket watch’ – there are a couple of metal parts – is much bigger than your usual watch, because of the size needed for the printed components. The design was done by Swiss engineer Christoph Laimer, who…

Electronic Arts launches all-you-can-play monthly gaming service but you can’t have it yet  We’ve got good news and bad news. Unusually, we’re going to start off with the good news first. Electronic Arts have launched a new Origin Access service for just $5 a month. That’s R83 a month today but tomorrow… who knows? Anyway, Origin access will get players and payers unlimited access to a “growing” roster of EA and third-party titles, discounts on games that are bought outright and early access to specific content from the company. Now for the bad news: You need to be a Windows…

Gaming in 2015 was huge. Mostly because of the massive trend in open-world gameplay, as was evidenced by Stuff’s top picks for the year. 2016 looks, if anything, to be even bigger though it seems that this could well be the year of the shooter rather than the role-playing game. As for virtual reality… that might come into it a little too. We could be in for a few surprises come E3 but for now, this is what we know. And it’s more than enough for a year’s worth of gaming already. There really is something for everyone on the…

When I was a kid I spent a lot of time reading all sorts of moral tales which were collected under the title Aesop’s Fables. They were the sorts of stories designed to instil good behaviour and thinking abilities into kids, a set of secular (more or less) parables about animals, people and inanimate object interacting. There was always the cunning creature in these ancient Greek stories (some of which stem back to around 600BC – or 6000BCE if you’re not a traditionalist), a portrayal of the animal kingdom which exists to this day. The crow was frequently intelligent, the…