GadgeteerZA

This is a lesson that you are never too big to disappear. I remember the arrival of Google Search (when that was all they did) and how it collapsed Yahoo search from the scene. Googling even became a verb. As big and massive as Google Search was, who can say they still go to the Google search site to search, after ever having asked what they are looking for in most AI services today? Even just a year or two ago, most people would have laughed at you if you told them no-one would be actually…

You can either self-host the service, in many different ways, or there is also an official online instance you can use. The link to that instance is on the GitHub project page at the link below. See https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge

“OpenAI is making a big change for ChatGPT users on its free and Go tiers: Starting next week, users on those tiers will be able to have unlimited text chats with the chatbot, according to OpenAI. Right now, you may run into rate limits if you do too many text chats on those tiers, but those limits, just for text, will be going away soon. Next week, OpenAI is also adding a Think button for free and Go users that they can use to access higher reasoning for harder questions.” Which may be great…

“The international finals for the world’s longest-running space engineering competition were held at NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre and the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida from 30 July to 2 August. Team ZA was the only African team in the competition. It was South Africa’s first time entering, and no African team had competed before.” So yes, not a solo win by Team ZA on their own, but it shows the tremendous potential that South Africa has. If only SA could rid itself of the corruption…

So a few amendments made, but what I really am happy to finally see, is the loophole closed around marketers opting in or not: “Any direct marketer who is not registered on the opt-out registry is prohibited from contacting consumers for marketing purposes”. They have to pay to register, and abide with monthly conditions, and of course there is now potentially a hefty fine too. I suppose the only issue is going to be around “foreign marketing” but so far all my spam callers had seemed to be for…

“If you’re using an LG monitor and you suddenly see blaring ads for McAfee scam protection, it’s not because your PC’s been hacked (or, rather, not hacked by some unknown third party). LG, the maker of popular high-end screens, has been quietly stuffing its current and even past monitors full of adware.” I missed this somehow but heard about it this morning on the Security Now podcast. The big issue is not really the adverts at all, and if it were not for the adverts, no-one would probably have…

“The infamous dead internet theory was originally a conspiracy that posited that the vast majority of the internet was run by bots and thinking machines. Most accounts you saw online were really bots masquerading as people — all part of some nefarious scheme to control humankind by keeping us isolated and divided. That last part is far-fetched, but the core of the idea — that bots outnumber humans online — is inexorably starting to feel weirdly grounded.” Pretty sad. I remember the first public…

This is the story of how the app evolved from being a high demand app to manage the electricity load shedding across South Africa, to something completely different after load shedding went away. The app now helps communities crowdsource issue around their water, electricity and Internet outages, and also has channels for safety, weather, and other news in communities. As I don’t use Facebook or WhatsApp I like using EskomSePush as it is highly focussed on my own community and I can mute what…

“Roughly one in two smartphones sold in Africa is made by a company most buyers have never heard of. Transsion, a Shenzhen-based manufacturer, owns the Tecno, Infinix and Itel brands, which together accounted for about 48% of African smartphone shipments in 2025 – more than 40 million of the 84.4 million handsets shipped on the continent last year, according to Omdia data. New research has decrypted what those phones send back to their maker.” Yes, one could say that most phones and software…

The Boland Amateur Radio Club (BARC) invited me to do this talk on 23 July 2026. HAMNET Emergency Communications provided the Zoom platform. The audience consisted of radio amateurs, citizens, and disaster management. MeshCore is a newer type of license-free decentralised radio network that allows citizens, government agencies including nature reserves, disaster management agencies, and amateur radio operators to all talk together, whether in public channels, directly to each other, or even in…

Block community-flagged spam on Android, send formal POPIA opt-outs, and monitor breaches — one SA account, no ads. iOS users can use the website, but there is no iOS app yet (probably also because iOS does not allow apps to take control of the dialler, which is why TrueCaller was so broken for me when I had an iPhone). This app actually takes control of the Android dialler (otherwise calls cannot be blocked) and accesses / adds to the blocked numbers list on the phone. It is not a caller ID…

“OpenAI’s blog post essentially says an evaluation was going on that was intended to test the ability of the models to carry out cyberattacks—benchmarks as they’re called. These instances of the models were running theoretically without internet access, and instead given only the ability to download from a network hosted by OpenAI itself via some unnamed web hosting vendor.” I get that AI models need to suck up data to “learn on” but this just goes to show that it is actively being done by AI…

“Period tracking is a simple job that plenty of apps can do. But most apps these days—including those that track health data—store information about you on their own servers and sometimes even share that data with advertisers. The Mozilla Foundation has tested several of the most popular period-tracking apps, and it identified one as better than the rest at keeping your data private: Euki.” It is really sad when something that tracks personal health metrics has to be specifically protected from…

“Last week, a Chinese-made large language model called Kimi K3, developed by Beijing-based firm Moonshot AI, burst onto the scene. The open-weight model impressed with early benchmark results, trading blows with some of the most advanced closed-weight ones being developed by the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic — and at a fraction of the cost.” Lest we forget, there is BIG money in oil, pharmaceuticals, AI, etc, and those executives do not like their profits being undercut by free community…

“The Fitbit Air is a really nice wearable—it’s thin, unobtrusive, cheap. But its app, Google Health, has problems. It gives you paragraphs of AI-generated text multiple times a day as long as you have premium features turned on, and it’s missing simple things like the ability to see your stats from yesterday. Fortunately, the iPhone app Bevel is now compatible with Google Health, which means you can replace the app entirely.” Bevel is now free to use, and it has a few features that Google…

“Vital Signals thinks its Signal Ring is accurate enough to replace traditional blood pressure cuffs for the almost half of U.S. adults who live with high blood pressure. The new wearable is thicker than the average ring, not unlike Oura’s older smart rings, but its on-the-spot and continuous blood pressure monitoring laps competitors like Samsung, Apple, and Whoop—if you’re willing to pay $399 to use it.” The other big differentiator though is that no blood pressure cuff calibration is…

“The goal of the so-called OpenStrap project is not to re-create the WHOOP app. Rather, the algorithms and processing methods are developed from scratch, based on public research. It’s all calculated locally on a 1 Hz interval, based on the data the WHOOP 4.0 device feeds the app. As such, the health data collected from the watch, never leaves the phone. While not the main goal of the project, the privacy improvement of the app’s serverless nature cannot be overstated. However, to display…

“In Disney movies, if you wish really, really hard for what you want, it happens. In British courts, not so much. Prince Redmondia really, really wanted to stop the evil barons from reselling on-prem Office and Windows licenses, and made a fairy tale argument in court to make it so. Our hero did not get its wish, not then, and not now with the UK Court of Appeals.” I just had to post this, as my very favourite saying was the conclusion of the linked article: be careful what you wish for. That,…

“Barely a month goes by without an AI laboratory declaring its latest model the smartest ever built. For anyone simply trying to keep up, or trying to pick a tool that drafts a decent e-mail, fixes broken code or turns a prompt into a usable image, the noise is deafening. This is the first instalment of TechCentral’s AI Barometer, a recurring, evidence-based snapshot of which AI models and platforms lead in the tasks people actually use them for. No vibes and no vendor marketing: every verdict…

This is a very feature packed and functional keyboard. I’ve found its word suggestions as good as GBoard and other Big Tech keyboards. I managed to import an Afrikaans dictionary and HeliBoard handled multilingual typing well. There are also quite a few layout tweaks that can be applied, it can pop up more word suggestions, clipboard history, do split keyboard, etc. Interestingly too, in the About menu there is a page that shows a description of hidden features that may go unnoticed. That is a…

“The reality, of course, is that attempts to integrate AI into education have been consistently disastrous. As it turns out, a technology that spits out a confident mixture of fact and fiction without challenging the user to track down or digest information on their own isn’t conducive to particularly effective schooling.” Yep, lack of context has been its Achilles heel. And because of this novel length books, taking over many jobs, proper education, etc are completely beyond it. It has…

“Android has come to dominate the global smartphone marketplace, and a large part of why this has happened is thanks to its open-source nature. Any phone maker can put Android on its phones with no licensing fees, and its adoption has also spawned a massive app ecosystem, so unless you’re a trillion-dollar company like Apple, going a different way isn’t sensible. But is the Android operating system on your phone really open source? The short answer is, technically, “yes.” However, the phone in…

“Meta has filed a patent for a system that records your voice and surroundings all day, then uses an AI to analyse your mood. The patent’s stated, theoretical goal is for Meta, a company that makes billions of dollars targeting ads at its users based on their data, is to sell users a wearable that tailors workouts for them based on whether they’re happy or sad. Patentlyze first noticed the patent which was published on July 2 after Meta filed it back in December of 2025. The filing described an…

“So far, around 5,000 staff are using their new FOSS tools for chat, video conferencing, and groupware, but the plan is to roll it out to more than 50,000 public employees. It is also using OpenProject. For now, the plan is to keep Microsoft client OSes, changing the groupware tools first. This is not a Linux migration… yet.” Which is the best-practice way of implementing such a migration. Start with the applications, and test out cross-platform alternatives on your existing OS. Once those are…

Wallos is a free and open-source application that you can self-host and which will help you track what subscriptions you currently have, what they cost (with auto-conversion to your currency), when they renew, notify you before they are due for renewal, and it will also optionally use AI to give you recommendations on what you could possibly save money on. In the video I also spend some time showing what subscriptions I saved R5,800 (about US$438) per annum on. Wallos will show you where your…

“Copy-on-write (CoW) changes that bargain in a way that almost feels like cheating. Instead of rushing to overwrite old blocks, a CoW file system writes the changed data somewhere else and then updates its map. That simple shift is what makes snapshots, cheap clones, rollbacks, and smarter backups possible.” I like the advice in the article about creating a test partition or drive to test this out first. I made the mistake in the early days of putting my entire 1 TB plus /home partition only…

“Earlier in May, the Texas Attorney General’s office sued Meta for deceiving users on the level of security offered by end-to-end encryption on WhatsApp. E2EE is used as a catch-all term to describe secure messaging features across a lot of different apps, but these apps each apply different implementation standards and the level of security is never the same. You should not assume that all your communications are safe from interception just because your messaging app supports E2EE.” Worth…

“South African-born pioneer of the British tech industry David Potter, the man behind the iconic Psion pocket computers, passed away on 28th June, six days before his 83rd birthday. Potter was the founder of the company of the same name, a pivotal firm in the British technology industry from the 1980s to the 2000s. Psion supplied software for the early computers from Sinclair Research, the ZX80 and the ZX81, including a Flight Simulator that you can play online. In 1982, Psion supplied the…

OK this was not “me” obviously, as I run Linux as my main OS. But interesting as I always thought CrystalDiskInfo was the best tool out there for SSD checking (or maybe that was the marketing PR that stuck in my head?). Commands like this are actually useful, as I use similar ones to extract specific data I want to monitor, and I display it on a Conky window on my desktop. See https://www.howtogeek.com/i-ran-the-same-ssd-health-check-on-linux-and-windows

I use the Snoozz extension to park browser tabs for later action. I also have some tab that I open at regular scheduled times to do things. So I rely on those tabs to pop up in a week or in a month’s time. Obviously I have no way of recalling right now exactly which tabs they are, as that is why they are parked for later. So imagine my extreme irritation this morning, when I find that Brave has just broken my workflow without any warning at all. The notice just says “The extension was turned…