Author: Brett Venter

Load shedding is the bane of South Africans. And with what feels like a murderously cold winter approaching, adding the Anker 535 Portable Power Station (to give it its full title) to your arsenal sounds like a plan. It won’t warm your home — it’s not rated for that — but it’ll at least keep you entertained enough that you won’t think about how blue you’re turning. Backup power solutions, like cameras, really depend on what you have on hand. Anything is better than nothing when the lights go out. Just have a little power bank for charging your smartphone?…

If you’re a fan of Lego — and many are overly fond of the Danish plastic brick brand — and fit into one of two other geeky subcultures, you’re in for a treat next month. The company is launching something new for fans of retro gaming and interplanetary travel come June. Specifically, fans can expect two weighty new sets to drop. One is a semi-functional Pac-Mac arcade machine and the other is a Technic replica of NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover. You know, the one that dropped off that Martian helicopter we’re all so impressed with? Lego of my bank account…

Nokia devices have always had a certain sort of charm. They weren’t the flashiest things around but they were among the most desirable. Tablets like the Nokia T10 prove that little has changed since the company’s first cellular phone rolled out of the factory in 1992. If you’ve been paying attention over the last decade, you’ll know that’s not strictly true. But history has a way of travelling in circles, especially if there’s money involved. In this specific case, money’s a factor but there’s not all that much of it. That’s good for you, if you’re in the market for…

Tesla announced, back in 2022, that it would be bringing a humanoid robotic assistant to market some time in… well, the future. Optimus, so named because Elon Musk loves a pop culture reference, was supposed to have a working prototype out towards the end of 2022. It hasn’t turned up but it’s moving along. Literally. Tesla shared a brief update video showing the Optimus robot’s current state of development. They’re presently able to shamble around like the cast of The Walking Dead but with, if that’s possible, even less life in them. What would Tesla say? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiQkeWOFwmk As with many…

There’s a term that you don’t often hear when it comes to Asus’ Republic of Gamers (ROG) brand. Affordability. That’s what the ROG Cetra True Wireless gaming earbuds hope to provide. If you thought that a set of wireless gaming earbuds would find some way to jam in a little RGB action to boot, you’re absolutely right. We’ll get to all that in a moment, however. What you’re looking at here is a set of really quite affordable in-ears with active noise cancelling. You don’t need to be a gamer to consider a pair. In fact, it might be better…

South Africa is ahead of its climate emissions targets. But, as with many occurrences in the twenty-first century, it’s somewhat of a left-handed gift. In order to have emissions, you need industry. For industry to function, electricity is required. You can probably see where this is going. That’s correct, Eskom is the reason South Africa is ahead of its 2025 climate target. The country’s coal-burning power stations are spending loads of time inoperable, reducing the country’s carbon footprint. Then, up to ten hours of outages a day also limits how much factories and other entities are able to emit carbon…

Earlier this month, when Samsung banned its Korean staff from using generative AI like ChatGPT for internal company work, we speculated that the tech-maker would quickly be developing its own internal AI system. That speculation was one of the easiest predictions Stuff has ever made. A report out of Korea claims that Samsung is joining forces with Naver, a South Korean company that operates its own search engine, to develop its own generative AI competitor to Bard, ChatGPT, and whatever Microsoft’s thing is actually called. Which, in light of the current gold rush, makes perfect sense. Nothing artificial about Samsung’s…

Choosing between a laptop and a tablet is becoming increasingly more difficult. Devices like the stunning Microsoft Surface Pro 9 just illustrate how blurred the line between the two devices is becoming. Okay, so there are some challenges that laptop wannabees like this slate have to overcome. Turns out, it’s really easy to do that. But it still leaves you with a choice to make. Do you grab the shiny Microsoft tablet that needs a keyboard cover but puts far less weight on your back or do you opt for the shiny Microsoft notebook that doesn’t have the detachable bits?…

If you were any kind of fan of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order then Star Wars Jedi: Survivor should absolutely be on your to-be-played list. This excellent sequel makes a considerable number of design choices — almost all of them good — to set it apart from the previous game but it also expands on the parts of Fallen Order that worked. The result is an experience that is, mostly, an improvement of the first game. The semi-open world mechanic developers Respawn Entertainment drop players into come with their own problems. These are minimised but they’re still present. Still, Star…

Are you in pursuit of adventure? If that inclination takes you outside, then Finnish tech maker Suunto wants you to take a new assistant — the Vertical adventure watch. Like most outdoor watches, from the Apple Watch Ultra to pretty much anything Garmin makes, Suunto’s wearable places a considerable emphasis on GPS and battery life. Which, when you’re scaling a large mountain, aren’t aspects of life you want to find yourself worrying about. The Finnish company hopes to reduce your stress levels even further. Enhanced Vertical It’ll do this by offering owners access to offline maps, globally. These maps include…