Author: Brett Venter

In the future, you’ll always be at work. That’s what this new partnership between Mercedes Benz, Cisco, and (apparently) Zoom signals. You can probably guess what it entails. If you guessed that Merc is adding the ability to have online meetings to its cars, congratulations on being able to infer from context (and your deep knowledge of the tech industry). Specifically, the 2024 Mercedes Benz E-Class is in line for some online meeting action when it launches next year. Time to ‘meet’ the Mercedes At least this means that it’s just the boss who has to log in while in…

Let’s get this out of the way right up front. The vast majority of people reading this review will never, ever own a Range Rover First Edition. If we’d known what it cost before we’d started driving it, we’d have spent a week looking nervously at every other bit of traffic and parking lot obstacle we’d encountered. It’s THAT expensive. At this point you’re looking at the header image and saying to yourself, ‘Surely it can’t cost that much.’ Oh yes, it bloody well can. Our review vehicle turned up at the Stuff offices with absolutely no optional extras installed.…

If you venture out beyond the calming waters of Spotify and Deezer, you’ll encounter strange new lands like YouTube Music. It’s not new, having occupied space in South Africa since 2019, but it does have something new going for it. The service has launched a new feature that lets listeners create their very own custom radio stations. The concept isn’t new. Most streaming music platforms offer something like it. But the Google-owned platform seems to be offering more granular control. Making YouTube Music Specifically, users can select up to 30 different artists to appear on the radio station. From there,…

In news that should surprise absolutely nobody, Microsoft is using ChatGPT to control robots and drones. Specifically, it’s attempting to make it easier for the average person (who isn’t all that complicated) to control existing robot arms and drones (which are fearsomely complicated indeed). Any time you see Spot the robot dog out and about? That critter’s… actually pretty autonomous. It has a fairly simple instruction set and it gets on with it. Boston Dynamics’ Atlas videos? That takes a considerable amount of setup and that setup requires training. Microsoft’s idea is to minimise the amount of knowledge needed to…

If the details of your life are so consistently exciting that your peers can’t keep up, the obvious solution is a newsletter. At least, that seems to be the thinking behind WhatsApp’s latest feature-in-testing. The feature, if it eventually makes it to everyone, might not be known under that label, however. Subscribe to our newsletter In terms of function, though, it’s almost identical. WABetaInfo, those folks who spend all day deconstructing WhatsApp, uncovered the new feature in the most recent Android beta version of the app (2.23.5.3). Don’t bother, the beta program is completely full. What it entails is sending…

The launch of ChatGPT spawned — or rather launched — several similar projects. Google’s Bard came out (and immediately screwed up). Microsoft launched its AI-powered Bing browser, which seems to be a little more stable. Financially, anyway. Psychologically, it appears to have issues. The company has some plans ahead for the internet browser. Setting limits, a good tactic for anyone battling mentally, is one of them but there’s also a little monetisation in the works. There always is. Taking a time-out One of the first things Microsoft is doing with its AI system is giving it a little space. In…

It’s been a long road to the announcement of Sonos’ newest speakers. The Era 300 was first known about in August last year, with a follow-up revealing many of the range’s details earlier this month. Now, ahead of anything like an official announcement, the range has leaked more or less in full. The Verge has had all of the details about the American brand’s upcoming speakers first. Hardly surprising, given the proximity of the two. It has completed the hat trick by publishing official images from the company, as well as American pricing for the lineup — before they’re even…

More changes are afoot at Twitter. The most recent of these is the folding of a previously-available feature into the service’s Blue subscription service. Amazingly, there might actually be a good reason for that beyond ‘Elon makes money from it’. According to the company’s Support account, regular users have until 20 March to enjoy getting their two-factor authentication (2FA) updates via SMS. After that, they’ll become the sole domain of folks who have subscribed to Blue. The Twitter (two-)factor Effective March 20, 2023, only Twitter Blue subscribers will be able to use text messages as their two-factor authentication method. Other…

Petrol cars are going away, they tell us. Most brands have plans to phase out fossil fuel guzzlers by 2030 (or somewhere in the vicinity). The new Jaguar F-Pace SVR, a supercharged 5.0l V8, makes it clear just how much of a pity that will be. Not because of the environment (though lithium mining is having its own effects on the planet). Instead, it’s the sheer joy of stomping on an accelerator and having a petrol engine leap forward like it’s about to consume the car in front of it. Whether, as in the F-Pace SVR’s case, it’s worth paying…

Samsung’s Galaxy S23 Ultra is the company’s headliner for 2023. There’s a tiny chance that Samsung will release a better device but you might as well expect Eskom to sort itself out without any further complications. It’s… super unlikely to happen. In Samsung’s case, that’s okay. We’re going to stop talking about Eskom now, however. The S23 Ultra is the newest ‘Note’, for fans with memories that long. It’s a massive and massively-powerful smartphone. It ships with an S Pen stylus built into the body. It’s got Samsung’s most high-performance camera in any device, ever. But if you’ve got it…