Author: Brett Venter

Roblox, one of the most metaverse-like platforms before the term was even a thing, is joining Meta. No, Zuckerberg hasn’t opened his wallet and made its owners an offer they can’t refuse. The popular game/virtual world is adding a new platform to its ever-growing repertoire — the Meta Quest series of headsets. Roblox has been around for ages. Not as long as Second Life, one of its more similar competitors, but certainly longer than Fortnite, the gaming juggernaut with a similar appeal (but without the user customisation). Its appearance on Meta’s hardware will advance the idea that Zuckerberg’s platform is…

There are changes afoot at Netflix. That’s not new. These typically swing between updates that mostly benefit the company to those designed to keep the customer base happy. This is one of the latter and it’s about time. Engadget reports that all Netflix users now have the ability to transfer user profiles over to existing accounts. Think of a situation like a bunch of friends moving into the same house and combining all of their profiles into the same account. That wasn’t previously possible. Nice one, Netflix Combining households no longer has to mean one person must choose to lose…

The moment we took the 500W Titan Elecstor power station out of its box, we could see the problem we were going to have with it. Don’t get us wrong — the best backup battery you can own in South Africa is the most expensive one you can afford and spending R9,000 on this sort of capacity isn’t a terrible idea. But it’s also not the best idea. If you’re confined to a budget of just under R10,000, there aren’t many options for you that feature this sort of capacity but you really should know what you’re getting into. Sure,…

Why are advanced humanoid robots always named after mythical godlike figures? Boston Dynamics has Atlas, NASA has Valkyrie, and even Hanson Robotics’ Sophia is named after the embodiment of wisdom. Shouldn’t that be a little concerning? Be that as it may, we’re actually here to talk about NASA’s bipedal ‘bot. It’s been in the works since at least 2013 and now it’s about to leave home on a sort of work-release program. NASA is sending the Valkyrie to work at a power station in Australia because that’s a totally normal thing we’re doing with robots now. Ride of the Valkyrie Valkyrie…

It seems that augmented reality, along with artificial intelligence, is the theme for 2023. BMW Motorrad has unveiled its ConnectedRide smart glasses. You’re probably familiar with the concept — smart glasses display information about your surroundings that you might otherwise gather from a smartphone or a console display. These glasses, which actually look like a pair of glasses, albeit with thicker bows, will show motorcyclists the same sort of info you’d get from an in-car heads-up display (HUD). So expect speed, gear, and navigation information to be projected onto the two sets of lenses BMW will provide to bikers with…

Before the age of vertically-landing rockets, the pinnacle of the space program’s reusable ambitions was the space shuttle. NASA’s iconic re-entry vehicles once made an imposing presence when stacked on a launch platform with a fuel tank and two booster rockets. That’s now a part of history but it isn’t going to be relegated to images and video. Space Shuttle Endeavour is set to become a display at the under-construction Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center. The remarkable bit about that? It’ll be stacked as though for launch. A space shuttle at rest Currently, Endeavour is on display at the…

The first-person shooter, or FPS (which also stands for frames-per-second but we’re not talking PC benchmarks or camera hardware here), has been a staple of gaming for decades. In fact, the genre has existed for fifty years now (in case you wanted to feel old). It’s about time for a decent documentary, no? FPS: First Person Shooter aims to be that documentary when it launches online on 31 August. It’s got all of the biggest names from the biggest games in the genre’s history. Doom, Quake, GoldenEye, Halo, Deus Ex, System Shock, Duke Nukem, Half-Life, and many other titles are…

Yes, smartphone RAM is important for the smooth running of the device. Ask anyone how their 1GB-packing handset is doing these days for a blistering example of that. But cranking it up to 24GB might be stretching the ‘bigger is better’ concept a smidge. Still, that’s a thing now. You’ll have to be keen on smartphone brand Nubia’s Red Magic 8S Pro + gaming smartphone and you’ll have to buy it from China (because it’s not available here) but you can officially have 24GB of RAM in your smartphone. If you really want to. RAM it down up Nubia is…

If you know Samsung (and we do), you’d know that there was an Unpacked scheduled for about this time this year. That’s now official, with a date and time set for Samsung’s event. Unusually, it’ll take place sooner in the day than we were expecting. The date is 26 July and the official time is 07h00 ET (Eastern Time). The American timing is odd because the event is taking place in Seoul for the very first time. Here in South Africa, the event will kick off at 13h00 on the day. Generally, these things happen in the evening but we’re…

Basically anybody could have told you, once Apple revealed the pricing for its Vision Pro augmented reality headset, that the brand would have a hard time shifting units. $3,500 is a steep purchase even for American buyers. But a R70,000 price tag here at home puts it almost beyond reach — even for Apple’s die-hard fans. That news has filtered down to Apple HQ, according to a report by the Financial Times. Apple is said to be scaling back its ambitions from about a million Vision Pro headsets to somewhere in the region of about 400,000. Happily, depending on your…