Author: Trent Meikle

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…

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…