Author: Brett Venter

If you’ve been paying attention to the skies, you’ll know that China recently launched its Tianhe space station module into orbit. The living section has already played host to astronauts, who moved in to get the place running. The country’s presence in space is about to get more complicated, however. Over the weekend, a China-made Long March 5b rocket took off from the Wenchang Space Launch Center. It was carrying the country’s Wentian lab module, bound on a mission to Tianhe. When the two connect… well… Not so Tianhe anymore The two bits, Tianhe (heavenly river) and Wentian (quest for…

Almost every kid goes through a dinosaur-crazy phase. Well, six-year-old you would be doing backflips if they knew about this. Sotheby’s, the staid auction house, is selling a triceratops skull this week. That’s right, the entire thing. It’s not fragments that have been combined to make up a whole skull. It’s a single unit of stone and bone, excavated from the Hell Creek Formation in South Dakota. Triceratops of the charts You’re not just buying a dinosaur’s dome, though. It’s a substantial chunk of rock, weighing in at 200kg. So you’ll also get a stand along with it. It’s not…

At Stuff, we’re always on the search for interesting-looking gear. Occasionally, we find some. The GravaStar Mars Pro is one of the more remarkably-designed Bluetooth speakers we’ve ever encountered. That’s because the Mars Pro looks like an articulated robot of the sort that would prove irritating in a video game. You know, the type of enemy that relied on swamping players in numbers before exploding. Or a surveillance droid that clambers around on the walls and ceiling, where you can’t see the little buggers. GravaStar of the show Sure, it looks like a plasma grenade or a Seeker in a…

Amazon is a very, very large company. It might even be too large, given how it treats workers in order to make that magical line go up for shareholders. Well, it’s about to get larger still, in a somewhat unexpected direction. Amazon has, according to the Wall Street Journal, dropped R66 billion ($3.8 billion) on a company called One Medical. You only get one guess about what it does. If that guess was “One Medical operates more than 180 medical offices in the US,” well done. That was an awfully specific target to nail. Amazon Medical It’s not really an…

Games companies are battling with NFTs, mostly because players… really don’t seem to like them. Occasionally they’re forced on players. Sometimes NFTs are tried, but not especially hard. Square Enix has gone a slightly different — and pointless — route. The Japanese games company has chosen to kinda, sorta release an NFT, by releasing a physical product. It just happens to be NFT adjacent. A figure of Final Fantasy VII’s Cloud Strife is set to launch in November 2023. When it does, it will (probably) include an NFT. Specifically, the certificate of authenticity will appear as an NFT. You know,…

Car brands and tech go together like spaghetti and custard. Occasionally, you run into a good version of it. Time will tell whether Master & Dynamic and Mercedes-Benz getting together to release headphones is a good idea. Odds are, they’ll sound fine. But it’s a couple of the design choices we take exception to. Mercedes and Master & Dynamic are launching five different sets of headphones, as well as a wireless charging pad. Of these, two are… shall we say, creatively badged. The MW65 over-ears and MW08 earbuds feature absolutely massive Merc logos. Like, visible across the street logos. Just…

Multichoice really wants to make the likes of Netflix create more local content. Netflix, it seems, is getting involved in just that. Ludik is the streaming service’s first Afrikaans series. As with any other South African language, you can’t just get those actors anywhere. They tend to be local. One of those actors is Arnold Vosloo, one of SA’s most recognisable film exports. Behind Charlize Theron, who’s probably more American than anything else at this point. Who is Ludik? There’s currently no trailer available for Ludik. There is, however, a website for a company called Ludick Trailers (which is entirely…

The folks at Stuff have long appreciated Nanoleaf’s collection of modular lighting from afar. Because that’s what you do when products aren’t available in South Africa and importing is a bother. But now, Nanoleaf’s range of kit is in SA, and we finally got a chance to play with some of it. Specifically, we got our hands on Nanoleaf’s Shapes Hexagon and Elements Hexagon kits. Since the two are functionally the same, and the Shapes set is a little more advanced, we’ll stick to the first one for this review. Now that the disclaimers are out of the way, here’s…

Chances are you’ve got at least one over-the-hill notebook stashed away at your house somewhere. You know how it is. It just gets too slow to keep up. Instead of putting it out of its misery, you just… keep it. You never know when you’ll need an emergency word processor. Well, Google’s new ChromeOS Flex hopes to give your older notebook hardware a new lease on life. It’ll do this by turning your plain old archaic computer into a Chromebook. Google’s Chromebooks aren’t known for being resource-heavy, so conversion should work in many (but not all cases). It’s as simple…

There’s cheeky and then there’s cheeky. Eskom, South Africa’s ailing state power generator, is asking the country’s energy regulator for another increase. The National Energy Regulator of South Africa (NERSA) is being hit up for a 33.66% price increase, according to reports. Additionally, if Nersa gives Eskom what it wants, the utility will then ask for a further 10% increase. Because, as we all know, the major obstacle to keeping the country’s power on is money. Funding Eskom The last time our country’s wonderful electricity provider asked for more cash, it was an increase of 20.5%. NERSA gave it 9.61%.…