Author: Brett Venter

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before. Heinz and car manufacturer Ford are getting together to look into using tomatoes, specifically tomato fibers, in “…developing sustainable, composite materials for use in vehicle manufacturing.” Riight, tomato-based car parts could really be a thing in future. But it seems it’s real, if this press release from Ford is any indication. The company isn’t looking to create any moving parts from tomato-sauce by-products though, instead they’re investigating whether it’s possible to create a sustainable plastic that could be used in car interiors. Using the aforementioned leftover sauce bits, of course. Ford plastics…

If you’re a TweetDeck user you might have noticed a slight outage of Twitter’s platform yesterday evening. Since everything is back and working at the moment (we checked and so have they), Twitter has fixed the problem but the downtime was the result of a security vulnerability that could have allowed some users to execute malicious code through tweets, potentially spreading to other accounts by retweeting themselves through TweetDeck or performing undesirable actions on an account. https://twitter.com/TweetDeck/statuses/476784927791280128 It seems that the exploit didn’t get out of hand, with Twitter shutting down TweetDeck when a security fix didn’t work right off…

Chances are, if you’re a dyed-in-the-wool football fanatic, that you’ve already armed yourself with apps and bookmarks that will augment the time you’re going to be spending (late, late at night we might add) in front of your favourite method of viewing sports for the next few weeks. But maybe you’re new to this, perhaps you’re only partaking in the mania for the big event or maybe you’re not used to the idea of keeping up to date with the scores as and when they happen. Well there are a couple of ways that you can stay abreast of the…

Lending a bit of credence to the idea that Google is planning on launching a fleet of satellites of their very own is a new acquisition by the search company. Skybox, a satellite imaging outfit that launched their own orbital photographer last year, has been picked up by Google for the sum of $500 million, according to Skybox. Just what Google has in store for Skybox hasn’t been made clear but looking at Earth from space has its uses. Skybox said in a blog post that the two company’s are related by more than just proximity (they’re based in the…

If you’re thinking of adding a third-party keyboard to your Android smartphone, chances are that the first one that comes to mind is SwiftKey, one of the oldest and best-rated keyboard alternatives on Google’s Play Store. Now you have a chance to try it out for yourself, assuming you were uncertain about plonking down cash for a feature that ships with your phone by default. That’s correct, SwiftKey have dropped the price of their Android keyboard. A more accurate description is that they’ve dropped the price from their Android keyboard, since it’s now completely free-of-charge. Don’t get too bummed if…

You may or may not be familiar with Sony’s PlayStation Vita TV, a little box that was released in Japan at the end of last year. Essentially a PlayStation Vita in a box, minus the screen and buttons, it also features functions similar to those seen in the Apple TV, though it’s very gaming-centric in its focus. And, soon it will be leaping out of the Asian market and over to the States, Europe and other PAL territories like the ones that include South Africa. It’ll be getting a rebrand and a new colour when it launches closer to home…

Don’t you just hate it when you get to where you’re going and you realise that you’ve forgotten to charge your phone and you really need to make a call, send a message or (in the case of our driving) need the GPS to find out which city you’ve accidentally located yourself in this time. What is a person to do? There are a couple of solutions, like tapping into the Eskom electricity grid from the side of the road using a transformer made from old takeaway boxes (do NOT try this at home) to buying a whole new phone…

[youtube url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjepNjgGuDU”] Smart grenades, drones, jetpacks and futuristic weapons are the highlights of this gameplay snippet from the upcoming instalment of the Call of Duty series. The video above, hosted by Gamespilot, features about eight minutes of gameplay, starting from a dropship over South Korea before entering a war-torn city populated with enough drones to make Advanced Warfare look like it is partially set inside the Matrix films. Keep an eye out for VTOL aircraft, characters using car doors as shields, the aforementioned smart grenades with several handy uses and Activision’s typical dramatic take on the battlefield. Oh, and a…

The trickle of information from Microsoft concerning the Xbox One and its place here in the South African market has turned into a gush of info. Previously we knew that the Xbox One would make an appearance in SA in September, now we have an exact date as well as a price for the new gaming hardware. 23 September. That’s the date you need to mark on your calendars for the Xbox One’s availability and Microsoft have also detailed a little of what you can expect as far as packages and pricing go. You’ll be able to snag an Xbox…

[youtube url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDUwiu4tmtg”] Tomb Raider fans, particularly those who were especially keen on the recent reboot of the series, are going to be very, very pleased in 2015. Next year will see the launch of Rise of the Tomb Raider, the sequel to the recent restart of the title. A trailer previewing what we can expect from the younger Lara Croft was premiered at this year’s E3 convention. It’s probably a good idea for you to check out the trailer yourself but it looks like the climbing axe and bow will be making a reappearance. We’re holding on for some actual…