“You can take our lights. You can take all our frozen food, but don’t you dare take our WiFi from…
Your struggle for power doesn’t have to be a massive struggle. We’re all rocking electric devices and those devices make life easier when it comes to power outages. The trick is keeping those devices topped up when Eskom’s out — three hours of gaming on a Nintendo Switch will ding the battery pretty hard. There is an obvious answer, though: batteries.
Vodacom has resorted to using diesel generators to prop up some older cellular towers, which are battling with Eskom’s constant outages. We asked the company what plans it hard to mitigate issues the country’s power provider is causing for the network.
In South Africa, the biggest threats to democracy are pretty obvious: the stuttering economy, never-ending rolling blackouts (let’s call them what they are), the rampant unemployment (nearly 30% in total, over 50% for youth) and a delusional political elite that doesn’t know it’s out of touch, out of money (due to said economic woes and therefore the inability of Sars to collect revenue) and generalised arrogance.
The traditional first column of the year is usually a prediction of the events and trends to expect this year. I’ll give it to you in a sentence, then focus on the unfortunate reality in South Africa where the tech we need to focus on is somewhat more prosaic but infinitely necessary: solar.
The country may be hit by some ‘scheduled rolling blackouts’, but that doesn’t mean we should stop having fun. Although it may feel like we’re back in the stone age, and traffic seems to add hours to your commute, there are ways to make the dark times more comfortable for everyone.
Light Start – iPhone’s tracking you, more Huawei’s we can’t have, load shedding issues and cop Cybertrucks
This week in Light Start, we’re looking at a new Galaxy Fold, Gmail goes dark mode too, Tesla launches new solar roof tiles and a rumoured new drone.
Probably the only good load shedding news to come out of SA, is that locally developed load shedding push-notification app…