Stuff (South Africa)

A few short weeks ago, the Garmin Enduro 4 was a rumour known about because of a Russian regulator… Okay, common sense also told us it was coming. Now, following an official announcement, we’ve also got some South African details about the rugged wearable. At the time of writing, Garmin South Africa hadn’t said anything about the new wearable tracker. Right now, its website helpfully lists the coming price of R20,000.

As if you needed any more proof of Checkers Sixty60‘s dominance in the grocery delivery space, Shoprite Holdings today announced that the beloved delivery app now sells mobile data, airtime, and other vouchers. Instead of wasting petrol (in this economy?!), buyers will receive their purchases instantly via SMS. Airtime and data bundles are already among the most-purchased services in the country, unsurprisingly.

Last night, Johannesburg played host to Xiaomi’s higher-ups as the company unveiled the Redmi Note 17 Series. Comprising the Redmi Note 17, Note 17 Pro, and Note 17 Pro Max, the trio represents Xiaomi’s mid-range smartphone line in the country. All of ’em are 5G-capable, with the cheapest of the lot starting at R10,000. Xiaomi hasn’t priced buyers out of the rest of the line-up either.

I realised Audible had gone mainstream when I last wrote about how much I use – and love – this truly great audiobook service. Instead of having to explain what it was anymore, I was almost always greeted with requests for recommendations. I think of Audible, which I have been using for about two decades now, as the new way to “read” books. But really it’s the old, original way stories were told, using the spoken voice. It was only a few hundred years ago that reading itself went mainstream.

It’s an ongoing joke that your tech isn’t really tech until someone figures out how to run Doom on it. The Hasselblad X2D medium-format camera is the latest hardware to see ID Software’s iconic shooter running on it. Hey, if a lawnmower can do it, why not an actual shooter? It’s not as simple as a download onto your expensive Swedish camera‘s memory card. If that were the case, every photographer would have IDKFA and IDDQD memorised.

Now that spring has officially sprung, it’s time to stop neglecting those chores you were “too cold” to handle all winter. Or, better yet, have one of Xiaomi’s new robot vacuums pick up the slack. The Xiaomi Robot Vacuum 6 Series isn’t like the rest. These are smarter, leaner, and unafraid of little steps that would normally send autonomous vacs running. Robot vacuums have come a long way from being little discs that bump into your furniture and hope for the best.

We’ve known about Apple’s smart home plans for quite some time, though we only recently learned just how involved LG has been in the development. Yesterday, images of the devices in the upcoming collaboration leaked, and it seems we’ll get our first (official) look at ’em on 13 October during Apple’s ‘Welcome Home’ event. Apple’s Greg Joswiak, senior vice president of worldwide marketing, shared a short teaser for the event.

It lit up my day when it arrived. A BBC News alert about the Nobel Prize in Physics being awarded for detecting “ghost particles” from space. In a world that seems to have gone mad (even madder?), it’s a particularly bright moment that reminded me that humanity still values science and research. And the geeks who do it. This year the honour went to Belgian-American physicist Prof Francis Halzen, who pioneered the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole.

Earlier this week, OpenAI published a trove of hundreds of mathematical results it claimed could “push the frontier of human knowledge”. Produced largely by an unreleased artificial intelligence (AI) model, the 722 papers relate to 372 open problems covering everything from algebra and geometry to theoretical computer science.

Non-player characters (NPCs) are one of the most important elements of any video game. They help sell the lie developers are building, even if they’re a little generic — especially in bigger open-world titles. Now, PlayStation wants to make NPCs a little smarter, using — you guessed it — AI. Microsoft and Sony are both looking for any excuse to add artificial intelligence to their consoles.