Author: Brett Venter

You might think of Samsung as a consumer electronics company but the tech maker is also well known as a components manufacturer. It’s particularly noted for its memory chips but there’s something new on the horizon — EV batteries. Samsung has reportedly debuted its take on an electric vehicle battery at the SNE Battery Day 2024 Expo, an event so exclusive that Stuff wasn’t able to find an official website online. Perhaps it’s a Korean website or maybe Google really sucks now. It’s probably both. Samsung does batteries better Despite the lack of official communication — Samsung’s own website is…

Mention Delta Force to a certain sort of gamer (an old one) and you’ll find almost universal acclaim for the various titles in the series’ back catalogue. It’s been a while since the last game in the series graced the PC screen — fifteen years is a long time — but the wait is about to be over. The first game in a decade and a half is Delta Force: Hawk Ops and it will bring players a combination of retro and modern gameplay. Presumably, the free-to-play title hopes to capture both the olds and the youngsters when it officially…

Alternative power is important but we didn’t think we’d progressed to the point where wearable solar panels were a thing. Yet… EcoFlow has announced (and put on sale) its strangest product yet — the Power Hat. Which is exactly what it claims to be. It’s a hat. That you wear. That can power your tech. If that sounds like something you want to don on your dome, it’s currently available for pre-order. Go with the EcoFlow? What can you expect to pay for an EcoFlow solar hat? It’ll usually set you back almost R2,500 ($130) but pre-orders peg the price…

Paid-for TV providers have fiercely resisted putting sports, particularly live-action sports, onto streaming services. Venu, an upcoming American service that bundles most of the sporting events the Yanks are inexplicably ‘world champions’ at (and some regular competitions too), could be the catalyst to change all that. Venu is a collaboration between several American platforms, namely ESPN (which is owned by Disney), Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery. The upcoming platform was first announced in February this year and now there’s an approximate launch — Fall. Or, as we like to call it in the Southern Hemisphere, Spring. Quite the Venu Historically,…

Some ideas are so good that you can’t believe they haven’t been thought of before. One of these is School Time, a lockdown system that limits access to smart devices (used by kids, obviously) during predefined hours. It’s a feature that Google made available earlier this year on one of its Fitbit kids wearables. The initial rollout must have been a success (we wouldn’t know) because the search giant has announced that it will bring School Time to more devices. Some of them we might even have here in South Africa. It’s School Time On the cards for the new…

Red Bull isn’t all about extreme sports like kitesurfing, video games, and landing planes on the Burj Al Arab Jumeirah. Red Bull Basement is an international initiative designed around student entrepreneurs and, once again, South African students have a shot at international business stardom. In keeping with 2024, contestants get to involve artificial intelligence in their pitch. This happens right out of the gate, with the entry mechanism requiring that potential before they’ll even be considered. Red Bull Basement-dweller There are a couple of requirements to enter the South African leg of the Red Bull Basement challenge. For starters, you’ll…

If you’re not recycling while you’re cycling, are you really cycling at all? There’s a ‘Yo, dawg’ meme in there somewhere but we’re not about to go looking for it. But seriously, though, how do cyclists get even more eco-friendly? By recycling their bike frames, of course. Igus, an international plastics specialist with a local division, has come up with a recycled plastic bike frame that should put a few good karma points on your side of the ledger, provided you also remember to recycle it when you’re done. Bike frame-job As high-end cycling gear goes, the injection-moulded plastic frame…

We’ve seen robot dogs given some interesting purposes. They’ve been security guards, AI agents, and even sniper rifles. The VERO, a robot dog created by the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), is a vacuum cleaner. VERO stands for “Vacuum-cleaner Equipped RObot”. As acronyms go it’s a bit of a stretch. But not as much of a stretch as the design for this little critter. You might imagine a robot dog/vacuum cleaner manipulating a traditional pipe or a Roomba with legs. That’s… only sort of right. It’s a VERO. Nice https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8BqvAe-moI The IIT’s Dynamic Legged Unit designed its quadrupedal vacuum cleaner…

Yesterday saw Facebook and Instagram parent Meta launch AI Studio, a feature that lets anyone using Instagram create their very own chatbot based on… well, themselves. Today we’ve learned that the company’s previous experiment, based on actual human celebrities, has been retired. This newly-cancelled foray into AI chatbots didn’t catch anyone’s attention despite Meta replicating recognisable names and faces. The obvious move is to let everybody create the same sort of bots and hope someone is willing to talk to one of those. Right? That’s so Meta According to Meta (speaking to The Verge), “We took a lot of learnings…

If a private citizen climbing outside of a space capsule in orbit sounds like the worst idea since Stockon Rush decided to build his own submarine, maybe you shouldn’t learn more about the upcoming Polaris Dawn mission. Helmed by billionaire Jared Isaacman, who previously funded the SpaceX Inspriation4 flight, it’ll see regular folks (more or less) climb outside of a SpaceX capsule before getting back in. Exactly why you’d want to get outside of a Crew Dragon isn’t explained in excruciating detail (more on that in a second) but it should still take place this year. A little later than expected,…