Author: Stuff writer

Microsoft previewed Places this week, an app meant to help us get back into the swing of things as we figure out the ‘new normal’ hybrid working environment. That’s if you use Microsoft of course. Microsft says the workplace needs to be more connected. Sure, Microsoft, we’ll hear you out. “When spaces have meaning and purpose, they become places. That comes from people gathering, bonding, and sharing an experience together. It’s what makes a house a home—and an office worth coming into,” says Microsoft. Well, we don’t know about that. But we guess it would be nice to have the…

You could soon be catching an air taxi to the airport if Delta Airlines’ investment in Joby Aviation works out. It will probably be slightly different to South Africa’s Siyaya taxis with passengers passing money from the back of the taxi. Also, you won’t have to worry about sitting in front and calculating the change so you give the driver the right amount. Your Joby experience might be completely different, but it’s still a taxi. Fly me to the… airport It plans to have vertiports across New York City and Los Angeles initially. These will be close enough to residential…

It’s no secret that Huawei, as a smartphone maker, faces an uphill battle. Various factors act against the company, limiting what it is able to put together. 5G chips are in short supply, as are high-end processors, but that’s about where it stops on the hardware front. The new Huawei Nova 10 and Nova 10 Pro, recently launched in South Africa, illustrate this rather well. The company’s smartphones put their best, mid-rangiest feet forward in a bid to grab your attention. Largely, it works. There’s more inside these phones than you’d expect at first glance. As always, it’s up to…

In 2001, an unassuming white box arrived and transformed the gadget world. Good job it did too: if Apple had carried on just making computers, we might all be walking around today listening to MiniDiscs, taking photos on compact cameras, and making calls on Nokias. Imagine! iPod (1st generation) In terms of design, the original iPod was a classic. It had a scroll wheel that actually turned – a clever system that in many ways beats a touchscreen for the tactile pleasure of scrolling from ABBA to Zappa – and four buttons around it that made a satisfying click when…

Google is hanging on to its text-to-video AI engine, Imagen Video, as it addresses concerns about the potential misuse of the tech. Imagen Video uses AI and machine learning to interpret words and turn them into looping video clips – just like Meta’s Make-A-video. The AI formulates animated 1,280×720 three-dimensional videos at 24fps in different styles, based on your prompts. Google trying to avoid Skynet and Tay “We train our models on a combination of an internal dataset consisting of 14 million video-text pairs and 60 million image-text pairs, and the publicly available LAION-400M image-text dataset,” says Google in a…

Remote work is great until the power goes out  (a not-so-new norm in South Africa). Unless you’ve got a UPS or the good-old generator, you’ll either have to wait it out or find a place to work from and hope they’ve got electricity.  Necessity is the mother of innovation and the need for electricity has sparked great ideas on the continent.  Western Cape app developer, Tristan Klement has launched an app to help you find workspaces with electricity. You’ll be directed to places like restaurants and cafes – though if you’re able, maybe bring a portable Wi-Fi with you. After…

As expected, SA is back in the dark after Eskom announced the return of load shedding on Sunday evening. What a way to spoil a weekend. As for the week ahead, most South Africans return to the mercy of the load-shedding schedule (assuming there are no localised faults).  Second verse, same as the first Eskom has implemented Stage 2 load shedding daily from 16:00 until midnight from Monday until Wednesday this week. So you’ll probably spend at least the first three evenings of this week in the dark. You can probably expect that to increase The power utility says two…

Eskom has suspended load shedding…again. We all know it’s coming back. Here are some tips so you don’t starve in the dark over the weekend. When extended powerless periods become the norm, we have to adapt how we prepare our food, hot drinks, and cold ones. If that means camping in the kitchen, we’re game. Earthfire Pizza Oven It looks like you don’t have to stock up on bricks if you’re a pizza fundi with a craving for woodfired pizzas in your humble abode. These days, almost every archaic cooking method has a new high-tech replacement (case in point: the…

Meta is rolling out “new ways to customise your Facebook feed”. The social media company will give you an option to ‘show more’ or ‘show less’ of the content on your Facebook Feed. That means you can opt to see more of the content that you like on your Facebook Feed from the groups, pages,  friends, family members and less of the content that you’re not into. Facebook already recommends content that their algorithm thinks you may like based on the content that you spend more of your time on when you’re on the platform. Don’t get stuck in the…

The OnePlus Nord CE 2 is a solid mix of midrange specs with a few flagship flourishes.  Its MediaTek Dimensity 900 internals are more powerful than the sub-R7,000 competition, and it’s the fastest-charging handset of the bunch. With a 90Hz AMOLED screen, it isn’t quite as smooth as other operators, and with no OIS (Optical Image Stabilisation) its camera can’t conquer all the competition. Still, it lasts a full day, packs a nifty under-display fingerprint scanner, and matches great gaming performance for the price. Is it any good? The headline here is that the Nord CE 2 is one of…