Author: Trent Meikle

Microsoft’s Edge, Bing (ew) and a new Office app known as Microsoft Designer will all be receiving DALL-E 2 integration. Microsoft announced the new app and DALL-E 2 integration at yesterday’s Surface event. DALL-E 2, if you haven’t already heard, is OpenAI’s AI-powered text-to-photo generator. Throw in a prompt and it will try its best to spit out an image that matches the text. Let’s put AI in everything, what could go wrong? The newly announced Designer app started as a feature on PowerPoint. It suggests design ideas to help get the creative juices flowing. That won’t be changing when…

It had to happen eventually. It’s just unfortunate that it had to happen in the month before Christmas. But, we had a good run. Well, petrol drivers did. Diesel drivers… not so much. For the month of November though, both petrol and diesel drivers are suffering the same fate – rising fuel prices. To be clear, these numbers are not final. They’re the Central Energy Fund’s (CEF) predictions captured on 12 October, based on factors such as the international fuel prices and the Rand/Dollar exchange that South Africa uses to make its purchases. The Department of Energy will make November’s…

Good news everyone. We never thought we’d hear ourselves say that for the continuation of load shedding, but here we are. Eskom has confirmed stage 2 will be sticking around until at least the end of the week. After that… we’re heading back to stage 1. Cue the applause. #POWERALERT1 Stage 2 loadshedding will continue to be implemented on Wednesday and Thursday at 16:00 –00:00 and be reduced to Stage 1 on Friday pic.twitter.com/P84AFQBDuy — Eskom Hld SOC Ltd (@Eskom_SA) October 12, 2022 It’s not over yet “Due to the persistent shortage of generation capacity, stage 2 load shedding will continue…

The Meta Quest Pro is real, despite our (and Meta’s own employees’) wishes. And the worst part? It’ll set you back $1500 (roughly R27,000). Mark Zuckerberg  officially revealed the headset on Tuesday, saying it’s aimed at “making the metaverse a reality.” On a quest to be bad The Quest Pro is Meta’s follow-up to the Quest 2, a far cheaper VR headset that didn’t cost more than two PlayStation 5’s to own. Zuckerberg claims that the Pro model was designed for work, rather than the VR headsets’ common use – gaming. “It’s work-focused”, Zuckerberg told reporters in Washington in late…

“Welcome to another episode of the Bro Jogan Experience” is the welcome you’ll hear in this fictional podcast between Joe Rogan and Steve Jobs. Now, you might have noticed a problem with that last sentence. “It’s not called the Bro Jogan Experience” and you’re absolutely right. There’s also the matter of Steve Jobs not being alive anymore. That doesn’t matter to Play.ht, a company that sells its voice synthesis services to the highest bidders. “Jamie, dig up Steve Jobs real quick” The podcast begins with fake Joe Rogan introducing his next guest, the late Steve Jobs. Of course, it was…

Just two weeks after announcing its partnership with Showmax, Vodacom is back at it again – this time, teaming up with Amazon Prime Video. Customers under the prepaid and contract umbrellas will have access to cheaper streaming deals, with the bonus of some mobile data to start watching. Primed to take the market by storm Customers looking to save on Amazon Prime Video can only do so through the Prime Video Mobile Edition which limits users to one mobile device and caps the quality to standard definition. This is fine, considering you’re paying R60/month for a subscription, with the first…

Have you ever been in a group chat of 512 people and thought ‘There aren’t enough people in here. We should add another 512.’ If you have, that’s pretty weird. But, your dreams are coming true. WhatsApp is increasing the cap on group chats to allow 1,024 users to join a single group, up from 512. Mash that mute button  Just the thought of returning to your phone to find over 1,000+ messages waiting scares us. Still, it’s a far cry from Telegram’s 200,000 group cap, although that’s aimed at business and enterprise users. It’s possible that we could see…

YouTube is changing how users identify themselves, forcing unique handles onto us. This is standard practice for most social media platforms – but not for YouTube. Users will soon be known as @InsertNameHere, across both channels and Shorts. Please, please, pick a sensible username. Don’t fly off the handle Channel names won’t be disappearing, but the creators behind them will be unique handles. It’s likely that the change was brought in to crack down on the number of impersonator accounts on the platform. “We want to ensure creators can craft an identity as unique as their content while giving viewers…

By the end of last year, 2021 had the most load shedding South Africa had seen with 1,169 hours of rolling blackouts in total. 2022 is nearly done and with two months still to go, we’ve almost doubled the total hours. A quick glance at EskomSePush tells us we’re sitting on 2,096 hours in total. So we think it’s safe to say the SA government could use a little help. Luckily, Germany seems willing and able. The European country has pledged a further €355 million (R6.2 billion) to help pull South Africa away from the coal-fuelled nightmare we can’t wake…

South Africa’s go-to source for load-shedding schedules, EskomSePush, is getting an upgrade soon. It’ll add water-shedding schedules (because that’s a thing now), calendar support, and fire reporting. Hermann Maritz and Dan Southwood, the app’s developers, said this was only a taste of the new features to come while speaking with Rapport. EskomSePush is levelling up What was once a side hustle for the two developers, has grown to become a full-time job. The app has gained notoriety and with it, users, as Eskom continues to implement load shedding. It now has over 6.6 million installs, with a daily active user…