Author: Trent Meikle

Napoleon’s biggest sin wasn’t the countless people he slaughtered in his rise to the top, the endless adultering, or his megalomaniacal ego. It was the fact that Ridley Scott had the gall to put him up on the big screen for all of two hours and thirty-eight minutes. Scott’s ‘Napoleon’ epic, which Stuff got to see ahead of the film’s Friday 24 November release, left us wishing we’d have stayed in and watched Oppenheimer again instead. Hell, we probably could have laboured through another showing of The Whale. On paper, Ridley Scott’s grand vision for a biopic centred on a…

Bard can… watch YouTube videos now? Do you remember Bard, Google’s AI chatbot? The one that cost the company upwards of $100 million during its first week of life? It hasn’t done much since then, with OpenAI’s ChatGPT hogging most of the attention, not least because of the dramatic events earlier this week concerning the ex- and now current CEO of the company, Sam Altman. It’s Bard’s turn in the spotlight again, but not for any game-changing functionality. Bard can now watch YouTube videos but… better? Google first added the ability to analyze YouTube videos to Bard back in September,…

Sonos (but headphones) It’s difficult to deny that Sonos is one of the best out there when it comes to audio. It’s certainly one of Stuff’s favourites, but it does little for the headphone-loving audiophiles of the world. Sonos has long been expected to enter the headphone space, with rumours dating back as far as February 2021. It’s kept those ambitions quiet since then, though according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, that might be about to change. When Gurman speaks, you listen. According to unnamed sources close to Sonos, the company is expected to release a high-end pair of headphones as…

AI is keeping it real ‘Make it Real’ is the latest piece of AI genius that’s left us in awe and if we’re honest, a little frightened. A company going by the name of “tldraw” – a whiteboard app maker – caused a stir throughout X.com on Wednesday after showing off a prototype of ‘Make it Real’, a service that lets people draw out an image of a software UI and having AI bring the whole thing to life. It’s got GPT-4V’s API behind it to do all of the looking, and Tailwind CSS and JavaScript web code that’ll be…

As EVs (electric vehicles) begin to slowly pad out South Africa’s roads, so do the charging stations that go with them. It’s all well and good to drive a car that isn’t actively killing the planet, but when the source of that power is Eskom, how much of a difference is it really making? Not much, apparently. What if there was a charging station that was completely off the grid, out of Eskom’s clutches? Well, that’s exactly what Zero Carbon Charge is trying to build. Zero Carbon Charge (ZCC), an EV charging station contractor in Vredendal, recently announced that it…

Starship Oddity SpaceX has finally done it. Over the weekend, the private space company’s largest-ever rocket, Starship, took to the skies, eventually reaching space. Unfortunately, that’s where the good news ends. Shortly after it achieved its goal on Saturday, 18 November, the rocket’s colossal Super Heavy booster exploded (after stage separation), with Starship’s upper-stage vehicle following suit before reaching its target altitude. The company described the entire process as a “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” – the same terminology presented during the rocket’s first launch attempt in April. For a second go, things didn’t go quite as badly as they could have.…

RCS support is finally coming to iPhones. After years of begging Apple to support Rich Communication Services (RCS) – a standard amongst Android and Google devices – the big fruit company has announced it’s finally yielding to the pressure, according to a report from 9to5Mac. It’s expected to arrive via a software update “later next year,” bringing with it a swathe of features that iMessage quite frankly lacks. “Later next year, we will be adding support for RCS Universal Profile, the standard as currently published by the GSM Association,” Apple said in a statement shared with 9to5Mac. “We believe RCS…

X.com is kinda like LinkedIn, but far worse Have you ever looked at LinkedIn and thought “Wow! Wouldn’t this be great if it were on Elon Musk’s $44 billion platform, X.com?” We didn’t think so. The eccentric billionaire is doing it anyway, with the job search feature going live for all users on the web version of the site, following the feature’s beta back in August. Android and iOS users aren’t being left out, either. The company said that the feature would get mobile functionally “soon” but didn’t delve deeper into what the feature might look like there. The web…

If you were one of the many too busy drooling over GWM’s Ora EV yesterday, you might’ve missed the news that Showmax is officially relaunching in February 2024 and it’s bringing with it a “brand-new look, new app and entirely new product suite.” The MultiChoice-owned streamer didn’t delve into too many specifics, leaving out details of the revamped app’s exact launch date or what sort of prices people can expect to pay for access. That doesn’t mean we’re entirely in the dark. We know Showmax 2.0 will launch with three new plans and a host of new content from Comcast’s…

We’ve been feeling cautiously optimistic about South Africa’s future of late. Not only has Eskom eased up on load shedding, but November saw one of the larger petrol and diesel price drops in some time. According to mid-month data from the Central Energy Fund (CEF), that trend could continue right into December, with another R2.00 diesel price drop on the cards. No more walking for you, diesel drivers Still, we’d advise you to keep those expectations tamped until the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy announces the country’s official petrol and diesel prices at the beginning of the new month.…