The package comes with a Blue Bulls skin and matching pouch, Road to Victory DVD and Blue Bulls start up and shut down screens. It is also preloaded with player’s voices for directions, including Victor Matfield, Pierre Spies, Morné Steyn and “The Twin” Akona Ndungane.

So if your blood is blue (and you know mine is), and you need a GPS, then look no further. Once the Bulls have won the Super 14 (come on, you know it’s going to happen) you can piss off all your Lions and Stormers-supporting friends by giving them lifts and letting Victor shout at them all the way home.

The Blue Bulls Tomtom Start goes for R1800 and will be available from the end of March.

“We don’t want to promise a service like this and then not deliver it – people would just hate us all over again if we did that,” says Joubert.

“This is the real deal,” he insists, adding that MWEB has done extensive testing on the offerings to ensure that customers will get what they sign up for.

Joubert said that the home packages, starting at R219/month for a 384kbps service and going up to R539 for 4Mbps, would be shaped. But there will be no other limits on the service. No day/night split, no soft-capping, none of that.

“The only thing I can’t tell you about is contention on our network, for competitive reasons,” he says.

“Also, on the home packages, your web, mail and other commonly used ports will be unshaped. Things like peer-to-peer will be shaped, depending on contention – if there is capacity available, those services will burst onto unshaped bandwidth,” he explains.

“But we are doing things differently from other companies that have tried it. We know what we’re doing and we have the scale to pull it off,” adds Joubert.

He says that the new packages would not be a loss-leader for MWEB.

“It makes business sense given our economies of scale,” explains Joubert.

He adds that it wouldn’t make much sense for MWEB to compromise its core services by subsidising lower prices. Competitors like Afrihost have done this, hoping to attract subscribers now and keep them around when the economies of scale improve, but Joubert largely pooh-poohs that strategy.

“It works for us without being subsidised,” he states, confirming that MWEB will make money from the service from day 1.

For business customers MWEB’s uncapped ADSL is completely unshaped and unhindered by restrictions, according to Joubert. For this you pay more – R499 for 384kbps up to R1999 for 4Mbps.

These prices exclude Telkom line-rental, however, but MWEB has also put together packages that include line and bandwidth.

These all-inclusive packages, including ADSL line rental and uncapped bandwidth, go for R349, R599 and R899 per month for line speeds of 384kbps, 512kbps and 4Mbps respectively, for shaped bandwidth. All-inclusive business (unshaped) packages will cost R629 for the 384kbps option, R999 for the 512kbps and R2 259 for the 4Mbps package.

There is simply no cheaper broadband connection currently available in SA – and very few networks who could beat it. Joubert says that MWEB is heavily utilising international bandwidth on the SEACOM cable for this offering, along with some bandwidth on Telkom’s SAT3 cable.

Joubert says that when other undersea cables such as Eassy and WACS come online, prices will be adjusted down again.

“This is just the beginning,” he agrees.

There is also a point to be made about local bandwidth – which it now more expensive than international bandwidth in South Africa thanks to incumbent network Telkom’s stranglehold on the ‘local loop’. ADSL line-rentals are also way too expensive, and bandwidth is steadily becoming cheaper than line-rentals – which is just ridiculous.

I’ll reserve final judgement on MWEB ADSL until I’ve tried it myself, but there is cause to be excited methinks.

The Desire is comparable to the Nexus One, which is manufactured by HTC and sold by Google. There are still no plans to launch the Nexus One in SA, but the Desire is a practically identical phone with the same 3.7″ AMOLED capacitive touchscreen, 5 megapixel camera and, most importantly, Android 2.1 operating system that you’ll find on the Nexus One.

The only real difference between the two is that the Nexus One is a quad-band device that supports WCDMA and associated American network frequencies, while the Desire is a dual-band GSM (with HSDPA) handset. The Desire also beats the Nexus One for battery life, apparently.

The Legend is a smaller smartphone with a slower processor (600MHz compared to 1GHz on the Desire). It also runs Android 2.1 and HTC’s Sense user interface.

It is uncertain at this stage what the new HTC devices will cost in South Africa or which networks will carry them – but since Vodafone carries both the Desire and Legend in the UK I think it’s safe to say that Vodacom will have both available on contract.

HTC faces legal charges from rival Apple who has accused the former of patent-infringement. Analysts have predicted that HTC will have to place new products on the back-burner until the dispute is settled. The Desire and Legend are firm competitors for Apple’s iPhone, which continues to dominate the touchscreen smartphone market.

Google Search is one of the last major international internet services accessible in China after the government in that country banned Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and several other sites in 2009, making them inaccessible to local internet users.

Google begrudgingly agreed to play ball with the great firewall of China in order to officially operate in the country, but after some of its users’ accounts were hacked – apparently from within China – Google said it had had enough and would pull out of the country if internet filtering was not relaxed.

I travelled to Beijing last year as a guest of Lenovo and got to experience the Great Firewall firsthand. It was eery not being able to access Twitter or Facebook, but I soon found ways around this. One method was to use SSH tunneling and apparently VPN access works well too – some companies are even making money out of selling this kind of access to internet users in China.

Another less obvious method was to use the browser on an Amazon Kindle. The Kindle connects wirelessly to cellular networks around the world thanks to roaming agreements with AT&T – Amazon’s network partner. Using the Kindle Browser I could hit Twitter, Facebook and other banned sites. The Kindle experimental browser is terrible – but it worked. And it’s free.

Obviously there are ethical issues with content filtering and I don’t believe governments have any right to apply such controls, but the reality of internet usage in China is that the filtering isn’t a big deal for users. I’m reminded, again, of infamous libertarian and computer scientist John Gilmore’s quote – “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

Google will still be accessible from China, but will not have a dedicated Chinese service, which is the gist of this latest news. This will provide new incentive for the Chinese to provide their own services, just as they have come up with their own alternatives to Twitter and Facebook.

I live in a country with problems-a-plenty, but at least freedom of speech and censorship laws are progressive and protected by the constitution.

Most important is the fact that Valve is not using emulation to make this all happen, as some suspected it would. Emulation would see the original versions of the games being played on the Mac in a spoofed Windows environment. Instead the developer has created a native version of its gaming engine – built for OS X.

This is an astute move by Valve, paving the way for native Mac games in the future and opening the system up to the growing market of Mac users.

Valve has been at the forefront of digital distribution in gaming, allowing gamers to buy and download games and other content, interact with a social network of other users and find servers to play multiplayer games on, all from the Steam software.

Said Gabe Newell, president of Valve, in a statement on his company’s website, ”As we transition from entertainment as a product to entertainment as a service, customers and developers need open, high-quality Internet clients.”

“The Mac is a great platform for entertainment services,” he added.

Valve said that it currently provides over 1000 games on the Steam platform to over 25 million gamers. It also confirmed that licenses for its games would be usable on either PC or Mac versions of those games.

So, for example, The Orange Box compilation that I bought in 2008, with licenses for Half Life 2, Team Fortress 2 and some other games can now be used to play those titles on the Mac when the Steam client for Mac launches in April.

Steam also offers internet distribution of gaming software – so I will be able to download the Mac versions of those games without having to go out and find disks.

And one could, for example, play Half Life 2 on a Mac and then switch to a PC and carry on where they left off.

This places Valve way ahead of the pack when it comes to next-generation gaming, and also highlights the growth in market share of the Mac platform. At this point I should probably add that Blizzard – the company behind the Diablo, Starcraft and Warcraft franchises, including the world’s most popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game, World of Warcraft, has been developing its games for both Windows and Mac for over a decade.

The upcoming Portal 2 will be Valve’s first simultaneous release for Mac and Windows and, thanks to the Source engine, the Steam system will bring a bunch of games over to the Mac at launch, and many more in future.

Now my only problem is that the Magic Mouse is crap for first-person shooters. Time to dust off the Microsoft mouse!

The service is called iGame Unlimited and is being offered as part of iBurst’s iDSL service that is being launched this month and offers ADSL bandwidth from R49 per gigabyte. If you have an iDSL account with iGame Unlimited bolted on then any gaming traffic isolated to the iBurst network and servers will not be deducted from your quota.

iBurst says it already has servers running for Left 4 Dead 2, Call of Duty 4 and a range of other games and will take its lead from subscribers when deciding on what servers to add. A list of servers currently online can be found over here. iBurst also claims to be in talks with Activision and Blizzard to get a local World of Warcraft server on the network.

It is uncertain as to whether the service will be extended to console gamers – iGame Unlimited is currently limited to PC games.

iBurst has also launched a community site called iGame Online where its community of subscribers can interact.

There’s a new cult in town. You might’ve heard about it already. You may even be a member. If you haven’t, and you’d like to preserve the precious little time you have, stay away from PopCap’s new insanely addictive game – Plants vs. Zombies.

I started playing this tower-defence-type title on my Macbook and now it’s spread onto my iPhone. I can’t get enough. I may need help.

The premise of this game is, in a word, awesome. You have a house. Zombies are invading. You must collect sunshine and plant flowers that kill the undead ghouls deader than they already are. Were. Whatever.

Plants vs. Zombies has everything I want in a game – violence, humour, hordes of things to kill… and plants.

The first few levels of the game are set in your front yard where a small variety of zombies need to get smacked apart by a range of angry plants. As the game progresses, and moves from your front to backyard, into the swimming pool and onto the roof, more types of zombies are added, with a variety of resistances, and your collection of plants to tackle them with grows accordingly.

You’ll also get to tackle Zombies in the dark where you must rely on mushrooms and other, more nocturnal undead-killing flora. There’s also money to be collected from dead zombies, and which can be used to buy slaughtering accessories from your crazy virtual neighbour.

The game is available for PC, Mac, iPhone or you can play it online as a flash game. The desktop version costs R185 to register, but you can play for 60 minutes for free, while the iPhone version goes for $2.99 (at time of writing) and requires a US iTunes account.

This title is worth every cent. It’s addictive as hell and, if you have it on your phone, is the perfect diversion while waiting in queues. It steps up to precocious, big-budget titles like Heavy Rain and smacks them in the face with pure awesomeness. It also makes the point, again, that good gameplay trumps sophisticated graphics and physics engines every time. Go get it. Now.

I like it so much I made it my ‘pick of the week’ on the latest episode of the ZA Tech Show.

Sitting back and reflecting over the past two years makes me realise how lucky we are to have enjoyed the support that we have from our families, friends and fans. The show owes its survival to the support of a group of the most awesome people I’ve met – but more about them later.

Since we intend to broadcast every one of our shows live from now on we are committed to starting on time at our usual 4pm (UTC+2) slot every Friday. This is not an ideal time, but is the only point at which we can get most of our regular panel together. We are looking at other potential broadcast slots and might announce a scheduling change soon.

On the technical side we had to work on a shoestring budget as the podcast is yet to make any profit. We’re planning to change that soon, and the intention was always to grow this slowly and make it scalable for when the economies of the local market align with our vision for broadcasting online in it.

That in mind, we chose to broadcast the audio-only version of the show using an Icecast server that runs out of the data centre of our bandwidth sponsors, Internet Solutions.

Icecast is an awesome piece of software and ideal for our needs, providing a standardised stream that is widely supported and enables us to cater for thousands of concurrent listeners while providing the audio on local (South African) bandwidth.

To get the audio from our “studio” to the Icecast server we use an excellent piece of software from Rogue Amoeba called Nicecast. I’m a big fan of Rogue Amoeba’s software in general, and we use Audio Hijack Pro to do complex recordings of the show that require Skype calls to be supported.

Using Nicecast in conjunction with Audio Hijack Pro also has the advantage of us being able to stream and record audio on the same computer. And by now you would probably have realised that we run Macs end-to-end in our makeshift studio, although we will likely use a PC to drive our video setup in the future and we are experimenting with software solutions for live video mixing since we can’t afford to get something like a Tricaster just yet.

The rest of our setup is standard stuff. We use Shure microphones and a simple 8-channel Behringer mixer. Our live video is streamed using Ustream and the built-in webcam on a Mabook Pro. This suffices given the limit on bandwidth that we face, both for our upstream and the average downstream of our viewers. The audio for the video stream is provided from our main mixer, allowing us to bring in Skype callers.

So video is on international bandwidth and audio on local, which we feel is a good enough solution for now.

The first broadcast went relatively well and raised some good ideas for how we could make it better in the future.

We also have some new office and studio space, thanks to the awesomeness of Don Packett and Richard Mulholland at Thunk! Perspective Lab, and we will be kitting this out over the next few weeks using clever tech to get around our tiny budget.

We made fun of that fact that we don’t have a studio at the moment by packing heaps of boxes around an old coffee table that we broadcast from last Friday, pretending that we were at Brett’s mom’s house, in her storeroom. Apparently some of live viewers took us seriously on that.

The ZA Tech Show started as a group of technology journalists drinking beer and talking about technology on a Friday afternoon and we plan to keep it that way, preserving the camaraderie and raw, honest discussion that has made the show as popular as it is.

We believe that the future holds big things for the show and we look forward to sharing that with our listeners, and now viewers, live =)

Brett Haggard, Ben Kelly, Duncan McLeod and Jon Tullett are the crazy f*#kers that started this thing with me and it was great to have them all back on the show for episode 100. Since then Toby Shapshak has become a regular on the show and deserves a special mention.

Since starting the show we’ve also added Candice Jones, Samantha Perry and Aki Anastasiou to our list of occasional guests, along with Will Hahn who dials in from the USA every now and then and who has offered us amazing support.

Mark Shuttleworth, Stafford Masie, Mike Stopforth, Dwayne Bailey, Saul Kropman and other guests have appeared on the show over the last two years and added massive value for our listeners. And, away from the mic, we’ve been blown away by the awesomeness of the guys at Thunk! (mentioned above), Emerging Media Communications, Lenovo, Tribeca, Puruma, Text 100, Microsoft, Nokia and other companies that have come out in support of the podcast in various ways.

We also owe a serious debt of gratitude to the guys at Internet Solutions who have offered amazing support and who sponsor our local bandwidth. Jason Bronkhorst and Charl Malherbe at Infiltrate Media have also been legendary and designed both the ZA Tech Show and ZA Car Show logos.

I’d also like to thank our friends at the TWiT Network in Petaluma CA, especially Dane Golden and Leo Laporte who I consider mentors in the game of online broadcasting. Without knowing it they’ve provided inspiration and know-how for our show via their online knowledge-base and, more recently, they allowed us to broadcast over their wildly popular channel from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Finally, I must thank my business partner and friend Craig Rodney who glues this whole thing together from a business perspective.

It’s been a wild ride and it ain’t over yet. Here’s to the next 100!