Author: Trent Meikle

Paint is… fun again? If you didn’t while away hours of schooling career randomly screwing around on Microsoft Paint, did you really have a childhood? In our books, no. Possibly the most iconic of Microsoft’s programs just got a major update that’ll see it survive another generation or two: AI. It’s called Cocreator, but its true nature is that of DALL-E 3, and it’ll land on the Paint app soon. It was only a matter of time, really. Microsoft has so many fingers dipped into AI pies that it’ll eventually be news when a product doesn’t have some sort of…

Not so long ago, we felt “cautiously optimistic” about South Africa’s prospects. Load shedding was down, and the Central Energy Fund’s (CEF) latest round of diesel and petrol predictions looked promising. Two weeks on, and things aren’t looking so good. Eskom is back in full force and the Rand is doing… something. Fortunately (for us), the country’s many other faults haven’t yet infected December’s predicted fuel prices. South Africa is still on track to see that R2+ drop in diesel prices we initially reported back in mid-November. Petrol drivers don’t have much to fear, either, as the CEF’s latest chunk…

AI gets a new Runway You might be tired of the constant spew of AI news, but it isn’t going away. Every company with a working bank account is in on the hype. Some are producing some rather extraordinary tech. One such company is Runway, and it’s just stepped up AI’s game. Specifically, it just launched the second generation of its Motion Brush tool, which brings aspects of a still image to life in just a couple of seconds. It’s capable of animating small stuff, like the swirling smoke from a cigarette or a bird’s early morning stretch. It’s best…

After MultiChoice’s announcement of a vastly improved Showmax hitting the small screens sometime in February 2024, we believed that the company’s next big announcement would have to detriment customers somehow. Nope. This morning, the broadcaster owner announced that it would be adding ESPN 1 – a major sports channel in the US – to DStv Access. Enter ESPN That might not sound like big news, but it is. Before, the ESPN 1 channel was limited to DStv Compact, Compact Plus, and Premium, with a minimum price requirement of R450/m. DStv Access is the company’s significantly cheaper entry-level package, with prices…

Eskom takes a break After a weekend of Stage 6 power cuts (and 30-degree heat to go with it), Eskom is finally easing up. It can’t do much about the heat (which should be lessening on Wednesday), but it can do something about load shedding, announcing that the country would be going from Stage 6 to Stage 4. At 05:00 this morning, the country was reduced to Stage 3. Unfortunately, it won’t stay that way for long. At 16:00 on Monday, 27 November, Eskom will be implementing Stage 4, with Stage 3 returning at 05:00 tomorrow, Tuesday 28 November. That…

Black Friday is well underway and Huawei, along with most companies, is offering potentially lucrative deals in exchange for some of your hard-earned cash. The Chinese conglomerate really isn’t messing around this year. It’s offering a selection of marked-down products through South Africa’s biggest mobile networks – Vodacom, Cell C, MTN, and Telkom. Although it’s keeping some of the bigger stuff separate over on its online store. That includes all the usual deals on cellphones, wearables, gadgets, and office products. The “hallmark” of this year’s Black Friday (no 2023 deaths so far) is “the free gadgets bundled with a host…

Stability can make videos now Stable Video Diffusion is now a thing, allowing the company’s generative AI art to be animated, Stability AI has announced. Video Diffusion is available as part of a research preview, and works by creating a video from a single still image. “This state-of-the-art generative AI video model represents a significant step in our journey toward creating models for everyone of every type,” Stability said. Video Diffusion is available in the form of two image-to-video models, capable of generating 14 and 12 frames “at customizable frame rates between 3 and 30 frames per second,” it said.…

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…