Rogue Amoeba’s work has made the Mac a better platform for all sorts of people for two decades now. Here’s Paul Kafasis:
In 2022, Rogue Amoeba is going stronger than ever. Every day, our audio tools help countless Mac users create podcasts, enhance video calls, and so much more. Of course, most of our time is spent focusing on the future (including support for MacOS 13 (Ventura), coming very soon). But as the date of our twentieth anniversary approaches, it’s nice to celebrate, by taking a few minutes to review the past and reflect.
The screenshots of early versions of Audio Hijack are just glorious.
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Apple has completely redesigned the internals of the iPhone 14 to make it easier to repair. It is not at all visible from the outside, but this is a big deal. It’s the most significant design change to the iPhone in a long time. The iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max models still have the old architecture, so if you’re thinking about buying a new phone, and you want an iPhone that really lasts, you should keep reading.
On this week’s feedback episode of MPU, David and I revisit iOS 16 and the M2 MacBook Air, then dive into some listener questions and talk about the state of voice dictation.
My thanks to Unit 4 for sponsoring 512 Pixels this week.
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Three years ago, I installed the Insignia Wi-Fi Garage Door Controller, which allowed me to check the status of my garage door — and control it — via HomeKit.
After that blog post was published, I heard from several people saying that they had done the same thing, just to be disappointed when the Insignia hardware failed on them within the first year or two of use.
I’m sad to say that the same thing happened to me, so for the last year or so, I’ve been opening my garage door with its old-school remote like an animal.
Recently, some folks in the Relay FM Member Discord were discussing a HomeKit garage door kit made by Meross. The company makes a wide-range of HomeKit-enabled gear, all of which seems to be well-liked so I spent the $50 for the kit.
Installation was pretty straight-forward. Unlike the Insignia, which had a module that attached to the garage door to work out its orientation, the Meross uses a set of small magnetic sensors to know when the door is closed. As the door opens and moves up the track, the sensors lose contact with each other, and the system knows that the door is open.
The stationary side of the sensor pair is hard-wired to the base unit, and doesn’t require separate power or batteries. I like the simplicity of that, even if it meant needing to run wire from the sensor back to the small base unit, which I mounted to the top of the garage door opener. My garage is unfinished, so it wasn’t a big deal with to run the wire, especially with Myke Hurley making sure my ladder didn’t move out from under me.
The other wiring required was to two terminals on the garage door opener itself. These terminals are also used for the wired button in the garage, so this was just a matter of backing the screw out on each terminal, then slipping the new wires into place. My opener is from the 90s, but didn’t give me any trouble during the installation.
The base unit plugs into power via USB-A and a small power brick. No batteries needed.
The opener requires the Meross app for set up and firmware updates, which isn’t a dealbreaker for me. It’s been shuttled off into the App Library forever, but now my garage door shows up in the Home app, right next to a bunch of other stuff around the house:
