Author: Duncan Pike

Are your award-winning tech senses tingling? That means they’re working because it’s time for another edition of the Stuff Gadget Awards. We’ve poked, prodded, bent, knocked, squinted at, smelt, listened to, felt, sat in, played with, and pondered all the best gadgets from 2023 and come with a few we thought deserved an award. In between all that we also managed to touch some grass, test more tech, and had fun doing it. We hope you have as much fun reading about it in the February-March 2024 issue of Stuff. Looking back at the best tech of last year is…

If you aren’t satisfied with the current AI chatbot offerings, Nvidia recently released a new one that works a little differently from the rest – ‘Chat with RTX’ is available right now as a free demo that runs locally on your Windows PC. Instead of using cloud-based LLM (large language model) services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Microsoft’s Copilot, Nvidia says Chat with RTX allows users to quickly and easily “connect local files on a PC as a dataset to an open-source large language model like Mistral or Llama 2.” The examples shown in Nvidia’s demo include things like asking for…

Cape Town, South Africa’s southernmost city, moves closer to the light with the launch of its ‘Cash for Power’ scheme. As the name implies, if you live in the area and have excess power lying around, the Mother City will buy it from you for cold hard cash – or soft warm cash, if you’d prefer. The new scheme doesn’t exactly make it easy for denizens to earn, but those who are willing to jump through the bureaucratic hoops can use the credit from their excess generation to settle their municipal account and bank the change for a rainy day.…

Google announced on Thursday that it is consolidating its AI offerings by folding everything AI-related that it currently offers into the Google Gemini brand. It also announced a new Android app and overpriced Google One subscription tier, a year after Bard sang its first ballad. If you can remember as far back as February last year, Google Bard’s launch came hot on the heels of Microsoft’s Copilot launch. That celebrated its first birthday this week with a redesign and Super Bowl ad, now it’s Google’s turn. Google Gemini Included in Google Gemini is The Chatbot Formerly Known as Bard, Google’s…

It’s almost impossible to hide things from people these days. Nvidia’s yet-to-be-announced “TrueHDR” tool has been discovered in the latest Game Ready Driver (version 551.23) by a user on NexusMods with the handle ’emoose’. The driver reportedly contains a hidden profile with evidence that Nvidia is working on a “TrueHDR” tool which supposedly leverages AI to add HDR (High Dynamic Range) to SDR games (Standard Dynamic Range) in real time. The same Game Ready Driver version already uses AI to power Nvidia RTX Video HDR which does the same real-time SDR-to-HDR conversion but for videos. A TrueHDR day may come,…

What better way to celebrate your first birthday than with a fresh coat of paint? Well, we could think of a few other ideas but Microsoft has gone with the paint option for Copilot. Launched a year ago, Microsoft says Copilot’s web interface and mobile app (available on iOS and Android) now have “a more streamlined look and feel” which will supposedly make it easier to “bring your ideas to life” and “gain understanding about the world”. There’s also a “fun” new set of suggested prompts because some people need a little help imagining things. Oh, and there’s a new…

If you’re looking to freshen up your social media life, Bluesky has just closed its waiting list and is now open for anyone to join — because everyone was itching for another platform. You remember Bluesky, right? Yeah, we had to remind ourselves about it too. Not to be confused with the cloud consulting company of the same name, Bluesky Social is the decentralised open-source X.com alternative that launched in February last year as a closed beta for iPhones. It has since spread to desktops through a web browser and Android devices through the Play Store. It’s free to sign…

Popular remote access software company AnyDesk Software published a statement on Friday, 02 February revealing it “found evidence of compromised production systems” during a security audit following “indications of an incident”. Although few details were shared, the Germany-based company did confirm that the breach was “not related to ransomware” and that it found “no evidence that any end-user devices [had] been affected”. AnyDesk but mein In response to the hack, the company says it “immediately activated a remediation and response plan” and contacted the relevant authorities. “We have revoked all security-related certificates and systems have been remediated or replaced where necessary.…

FNB will be shutting down its contactless ‘tap-to-pay’ functionality in April this year. FNB customers can still use the feature, which recently underwent maintenance, though they may have to de-register and re-register to do so before it dies in April. However, FNB is advising customers to switch to an alternative solution sooner rather than later or make use of FNB’s scan-to-pay feature which uses QR codes instead of the NFC-powered (near-field communication) tap-to-pay. The decision to remove the feature was mostly a result of global contactless payment methods gaining traction among FNB customers, FNB’s head of card digitisation Jason Viljoen…

Volkswagen SA launched its brand new advanced driving course it calls ‘Night School’ in October last year. As the name suggests, this course happens mostly at night and is geared towards educating drivers on the best practices of night-time driving. At the media launch, a member of the Road Traffic Management Corporation shared a scary statistic – over 50% of South Africa’s fatal road accidents in 2022 happened at night. VW’s Night School hopes to reduce that number by underscoring several important aspects that all drivers should know. Earlier this week, VW invited Stuff to try out the full course…