Many South African XBox players have resorted to using UK or US accounts to play online on XBox Live, however this could become pricey with microsoft’s new subscription pricing.

Microsoft will be increasing the price of their XBox Live Gold subscription fees for all members in Canada, Mexico, United Kingdom and United States. Chances are that if you are a South African and making use of XBox Live Gold to play online, you will be affected by the new pricing.

As of 1 November 2010 Microsoft will increase the price of certain XBox Live Gold subscription packages, US users have it worst as all subscriptions from the 1 Month to the 12 Month ones are subjected to the new pricing as detailed below.

If you make use of a UK account you will only be affected if you buy on a monthly basis, to avoid being affected by the new rates when they kick in why not upgrade your account now with a 12 month subscription at the normal price.

Another question that remains, now that South Africa will finally be getting Xbox Live soon, how will users currently making use of these overseas account transfer to the local accounts?

Africa has come a long way with regards to broadband, previously relying heavily on Satellite connections for Internet access the continent now has a multitude of undersea fibre cables serving it with access to high speed Internet.

Some African countries like South Africa, Senegal, Ghana and Cameroon have already been making use of underwater fibre cables for Internet access since a few years back but due to the age and high bandwidth prices on the SAT3/Safe cable system these countries did not really have access to affordable high speed broadband.

Since the landing of Seacom in July 2009, African countries have been enjoying high speed Internet access at affordable rates and with numerous cables still to land in Africa, the speed of broadband in Africa is steadily on the rise while the prices are declining as the competition heats up.

With all these underwater cables landing in Africa, who cries king in terms of the fastest broadband speeds in Africa? According to tests conducted by users of African countries on Speedtest.net here is a list of the top 5 broadband countries in Africa:

Compared to the top rated broadband countries in the World, Africa still has a long way to go to catch up to avg. speeds of 34 or 24 Mbps, but its good to see that Africa’s top 5 countries has at least broken the 2 Mbps mark for average download speeds.

Director: Alejandro Amenábar Screenplay: Alejandro Amenábar, Mateo Gil Cast: Rachel Weisz, Max Minghella, Oscar Isaac, Rupert Evans Time: 126min Age Restriction: 13VP

Genre:
Drama/Historical

Summary Review:
Agora will engage your intellect and educate you on ancient philosophy, all while taking you through an action-packed fight for a great city.

Synopsis:
Agora is set in Alexandria, Egypt in the 4th century A.D. The city’s people are a clashing mixture of pagans, who worship the ancient gods, Jews and Christians.

The pagan dignitaries at the Library of Alexandria become weary of the band of zealous Christians evangelising to “their” citizens and so they attack a group of Christians in the street. But the Gospel of Jesus Christ has spread like fire and there are more converts than they had expected.

The Christians soon overpower the pagans and eventually destroy their library.

Rachel Weisz plays Hypatia, the most renowned Egyptian philosopher of her time. She is a teacher at the Library and Agora focuses on the intellectual battle her and her students face in reconciling all that they know of science, astronomy and philosophy with the pagan religion of their ancestors and the new gospel of the Christians.

Hypatia has devoted her life to philosophy and it is in her nature to question theories and arrive at an understanding through logic and thought, while all around her chaos reigns as the Christians act out of passion for their faith, the Jews retaliate out of pride and revenge and the pagans fight blindly in fear of losing their tradition.

Agora has good casting, dialogue, settings, costumes and action sequences, but none of those factors are significantly better than other period pieces that we’ve seen.

What sets Agora apart, however, is the philosophical, religious and intellectual themes that are woven through the story at the heart of the fight for the city of Alexandria.

While it delivers on the prerequisites set for action, romance and character-crises, engaging your mind is Agora‘s greatest accomplishment and makes it unlike anything else you’re going to see at the cinema this year.

Agora will inspire many intense debates and discussions as people leave the cinema.

Last week the North Gauteng high court ruled that online gambling is now illegal in South Africa, however after that announcement Piggs Peak issued a statement that they will appeal the ruling and that all operations of the online casino will continue as normal.

Since yesterday however Piggs Peak has shut down all operations issuing the following statement

Saturday, 28 Aug 2010

As you are aware we lost our application in the Pretoria High Court regarding the legality of South Africans playing on our Swaziland licensed internet casino which has serious implications for South African players. We are in the process of applying for leave to appeal the judgement and felt that we could continue operating in the interim. We have since been advised that we should stop operating for South African players until the matter has been resolved.

In your interests we have taken a decision to stop operating from midnight Saturday August 28 until application for leave to appeal has been heard and decided upon, which we feel should take no longer than a week or two.  All remaining player balances, will be held safely at Piggs Peak Casino Swaziland. You can cash in any balance by e-mailing support@piggspeak.com and your request will be processed.

Yours Sincerely,

Lew Saul Koor
Operations Director
Piggs Peak Casino

At the time of publishing this post, the Piggs Peak online casino website has been shut down only displaying the notice above on the homepage. Silversands is however still operational.

Maybe this is really the end of online poker and gambling in South Africa, whats your thoughts? Will you be withdrawing your funds ASAP?

Remember a few month back when word first got out about Diaspora, the open source “Facebook Killer”? Well they guys behind Diaspora has been working hard and have set a date when they will release their code.

The four NYU students have been coding away the past couple of months and at the beginning of last month put up a short demo of what they have been working. Now in a new blog post by the team they have set the date to release the code to public on 15 September 2010 by issuing the following statement: ”We have been coding. We have Diaspora working, we like it, and it will be open-sourced on September 15th.”

Will the team of NYU students continue to improve on Diaspora after they open source the code on 15 September? The short answer is yes. In the blog post they also stated “We aren’t going to stop working after we release. Ilya and Raphael are taking leave from NYU, and we will continue to develop and maintain Diaspora as a long term project. We have shifted our development timeline accordingly, and the first release will be the beginning of something great, not a finished summer project.”

If Diaspora is anything to go by from what I have seen on their demo videos they may just have a success on their hands. Whether Diaspora is a “Facebook Killer” we will just have to wait and see, chances of users moving to another social network are slim unless you can convince you friends to move along, who knows maybe Diaspora can achieve this.

Will you make use of Diaspora once they release their code to the public?

YouTube has launched a whole new section on their site dedicated to full length movies.

The new movies section on YouTube feature over 400 full length movies users can watch free of charge. This may just be part of Google’s plans to launch its WebTV set top box.

The new section on YouTube does not feature any of the latest movies, but there are some Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan movies and then a load of Bollywood films. Also if you have kids check out the Cartoon section, that will keep the kids busy for a while.

Nice thing about this is that I can now use my Xtreamer media player to watch these movies straight on my TV with my Uncapped Internet.

Go check out the movies available in the new YouTube Movies section, I saw a Pablo Francisco show under comedy.

It’s not often that I post some code here on iGeek, which is a pitty because coding is a real passion of mine specially PHP, but sometimes you just write something you need to share with your fellow enthusiasts.

Here is a function I wrote in PHP that validates South African ID Numbers based on Luhn Check:

function ValidateSAIDNumber($idnr) {
	$d = -1;
	$a = 0;
	for($i=0;$i<6;$i++)
		$a += substr($idnr,$i*2,1);
	for($i=0;$i<6;$i++)
		$b = $b * 10 + substr($idnr,(2*$i)+1,1);
	$b *= 2;
	$c = 0;

	while($b > 0) {
		$c += $b % 10;
		$b = $b / 10;
	}
	$c += $a;
	$d = 10 - ($c % 10);
	if($d == 10)
		$d = 0;
	if($d == substr($idnr,strlen($idnr)-1,1))
		return true;
	else
		return false;
}

To use simply call ValidateSAIDNumber(IDNR) where IDNR is the South African ID Number and it will either return true if its a valid number or false if its not.

Just got the Samsung Wave, my first thoughts after playing around with it for a few minutes:

• Screen clarity and colours are just amazing
• Camera takes pretty decent quality pics
• Bada may just be errm… amazing
• Browser seems to pixelize web page images
• Asks me for sim card to be able to use Twitter client, guess you wont use a phone without a sim.

With the official launch of Microsoft’s new browser Internet Explorer 9 only a few weeks away, allot has already been said about all the great new features it boasts and how impressive it is, but until now nobody has actually had an idea how the new browser will look.

The question is will the new IE9 be all cluttered and busy like previous versions of the browser or have Microsoft approached a new sleeker and minimalistic look like that of Google Chrome.

ZDNet caught a glimpse of IE9′s new user interface when the Russian Microsoft site briefly posted a screenshot and user interface details of Microsoft’s new Internet Explorer 9 browser.

According to Microsoft’s Russian site, Internet Explorer 9′s user interface includes features such as quick-release tabs and by looking at the leaked screenshot a chrome-like address bar and minimalistic layout.

If everything we see here is set to be true, it is evident that Microsoft is finally meaning business with their new Internet Explorer 9 browser.

Normally when you use Google Voice it requires for both parties to be logged onto a computer with headphones, but not any more.

Starting today users can now call any phone right from Gmail, yes no need anymore for both parties to be signed in on a computer.

Google has struck some great deals with US and Canadian phone companies and for now all calls to those two countries will be free. Unfortunately calls to South African phones are not free but works out way cheaper than calling from a normal land line or cellphone.

Calls to South African mobile and land line numbers will be charged according to the Google Voice rates that are currently 37c per minute to land lines and R1.25 to cellphones. For rates to other countries see the Google Voice rates list.

As with all things new on the web, South Africa is usually not first in line to get these features, but that does not prohibit you from installing the Gmail plugin you will need to make use of this feature when it goes live.