Author: Trent Meikle

We’ve got some bad news for all you solar PV system owners in South Africa. The National Energy Regulator of South Africa (Nersa) has approved Eskom’s Retail Tariff Plan (RTP) that will effectively require residents – those who are still connected to the grid – to pay Eskom every month, whether they use electricity or not. Sometimes maybe good, sometimes… It’s not all bad news, however. Eskom’s proposed implementation for higher tariffs has been dramatically adjusted by Nersa, allowing the increased fixed charges to be spread out over the coming years. The recent revenue determination allowed Eskom a 12.74% hike,…

Anybody with a Nintendo Switch knows just how great the eShop Gold Points reward system is. Buy a digital game, and a few extra Gold Points are automatically added to your account ready to shave off a few bucks on your next purchase. Did you think we’d buy Suika Game at full price with our hard-earned cash? No. That was courtesy of Nintendo’s Gold Points. So what do you do with a beloved system? You kill it. Duh. Waaaah! Give us more money! Waaaaah! That’s what Nintendo is doing, anyway. In a post on the My Nintendo website, the Zelda and Mario maker confirmed…

MyBroadband Insights has published its 2024 Mobile Network Quality Report, pre-emptively answering the question on our lips: who’s got the best mobile network in South Africa? The report dished out awards to several of South Africa’s home-grown networks, ultimately crowning MTN as the ‘best’ overall mobile network over the year, leaving Vodacom, Telkom, Rain, and Cell C to squabble over 2nd place. The report spans from 1 January 2024 to 31 December 2024, comprising 1.17 million speed tests performed by 18,649 mobile data users. The year-long test includes data from “crowdsourced users” and “dedicated drive tests” (involving a mix of high-end…

When Eskom first published its amendments to its 2025 Retail Tariff Plan (RTP) in November 2024, it included provisions for a new generation capacity charge (GCC) that would see customers hit with an additional fee, designed to “recover fixed costs related to generation capacity, thus reducing revenue risk due to volumetric recovery rates.” In other words, customers would be charged more for simply having a grid connection. Eskom’s got some big plans for the future Unfortunately, the National Energy Regulator of South Africa (Nersa) and its Electricity Subcommittee (ELS) met on 11 February to discuss Eskom’s RTP and recommended that…

With the flurry of AI news penetrating the headlines in recent weeks, you might’ve missed Elon Musk’s intent to launch Grok 3, xAI’s most advanced large language model (LLM) yet. The big day has finally come, as Musk announced the release of Grok 3 in beta to all Premium Plus members today. If you weren’t aware, that’s a whole tier above the Premium subscription, which still raids your bank account every month in exchange for fewer ads and less restrictive access to Grok 2 – xAI’s more widely available generative AI model. Grok 3 isn’t quite as generous, unfortunately. Taking…

After last week’s dire warning of an impending petrol and diesel price hike for March 2025, we have some better news to share this week. The Central Energy Fund (CEF) has supplied the country’s motorists with another daily predictive snapshot, foretelling a (very) minor decrease for (some) diesel drivers in the coming weeks. We’re not out of the woods just yet. While the CEF’s latest snapshot (captured 14 February) does bring good tidings, the remaining grades of petrol and diesel (and even illuminating paraffin) are still on track to cost more than they did a month ago. But the outlook…

Alexa’s on the backfoot Amazon’s Alexa is due for a massive AI overhaul – set to be revealed as soon as this month – that’ll see customers paying an extra monthly fee to fully realise its newfound smarts. That was the plan, anyway. Despite setting a date of 26 February for a hardware showcase, reporters indicate that Amazon has hit another speed bump in the road. Another speed bump could delay the AI rollout even further, which has thus far suffered several setbacks already. According to The Washington Post (via The Verge), the retail outfit will stick with the 26 February…

Having spent the better part of a year with Xiaomi’s Redmi Note 13 Pro+, we were keen to see what Xiaomi had cooked up for 2025. Unsurprisingly that turned out to be the recently released Redmi Note 14 Series, of which we managed to get our hands on the middle-of-the-park Note 14 Pro 5G (not to be mistaken for the more affordable (yet weaker) Pro (4G)). This year, it’s not as simple as choosing the best smartphone you can afford. As good as Xiaomi’s Redmi Note 14 Pro 5G efforts are this year (and they are good), sporting 8/12GB of RAM…

For a supposedly artificially intelligent chatbot dubbed Gemini Advanced (for paying users), it doesn’t seem all that… advanced. Google is changing that, introducing improved contextual reasoning by allowing it to access a chat’s history, which in turn lets it offer “more tailored help.” Gemini Advanced in training “Starting today, Gemini can now recall your past chats to provide more helpful responses. Whether you’re asking a question about something you’ve already discussed, or asking Gemini to summarize a previous conversation, Gemini now uses information from relevant chats to craft a response,” Google said in an announcement. That means no more starting…

We’ll be the first to admit we huffed too much hopium in the build-up to PlayStation’s State of Play, which wrapped up at roughly 00h40 this morning. Where we desperately hoped to see a Bloodborne remaster grace our PS5, we got something much better. Say hello to Days Gone Remastered and a whole lot more. The 40-minute-long show was a snapshot of what Sony has planned for 2025 and beyond. This isn’t all that’s lined up – PlayStation likes to do a couple of these things each year – but it does supply a fair idea of what we can expect, particularly…