Category: Site News

We just wound down our annual St. Jude fundraiser. The Relay community was once again incredibly generous, donating $753,756 to help end childhood cancer around the world. This makes 2025 our third-biggest fundraiser ever.

When we started this back in 2019, we just wanted to raise a few thousand dollars, but as of today, we’ve raised a total of $4.8 million!

That’s an eye-watering amount of money, and I am deeply humbled by it. I view this work as an important part of Relay’s legacy. When we’re gone and the RSS feeds grow stale, St. Jude will still be at work saving the lives of children around the world with the most advanced treatments known to humankind. That’s not a small thing, and as the father of a pediatric cancer survivor, it’s a very personal thing.

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Chris Pennington over at Coding in Public has been running a community fundraiser with Relay for St. Jude for a few years, and yesterday, we sat down to talk about my St. Jude story, and how the hospital is serving sick kids — and their families — around the world.

Speaking for our St. Jude fundraiser, we have passed $540,000 raised this year, and there are several days to go! I would love to have you join us in giving families facing childhood cancer more tomorrows.

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Our 7th annual 12-hour live show raising money for St. Jude is coming up on Friday! Please tune in and donate:

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I spent a large part of my weekend making over 150 screenshots, just for you.

I mostly like Liquid Glass on iOS and iPadOS, but it feels like macOS got a lot less time in the oven than the mobile operating systems did. For example, toolbar buttons still really stick out, and I wish app icons weren’t all in squircle jail:

Like previous years, I have various sections of screenshots for you to check out, but with a new addition this year: Icon & Widget Styles.

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I am very, very excited about our live show this year. We’ll be live on Friday, September 19 at 12 PM Eastern for 12 hours of nonsense and fundraising.

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September is around the corner, and that means our campaign to raise money for St. Jude is back!

In 2009, our oldest son Josiah began treatment at St. Jude for a brain tumor. He was just six months old. After 18 rounds of chemotherapy and a half-dozen surgeries, the cancer has not returned, but our family is forever changed.

We learned what it meant to suffer, and how it felt to fear the worst. We learned how to operate on very little sleep, and how to rely on our friends and family for not just support, but even for the basics of everyday life. Those 18 rounds of chemo were hard, but they worked, and as our son has grown, so has our response to the entire ordeal. Slowly, anger and despair faded, being replaced with a desire to give back to the place that saved Josiah’s life.

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Today marks Relay’s 11th birthday, as noted by Myke Hurley:

In recent months, there’s been a fresh wave of chatter about the “ death of podcasting” — this time aimed at anything expensive or audio-only. I often joke that I’ve seen podcasting declared dead three or four times over the course of my career, and this is simply the latest chapter.

What many people fail to recognise, or have only just realised, is that this medium thrives when shows are made by people who care — people who are passionate and started podcasting simply because they loved it. The kinds of shows we make — talk shows for niche audiences — continue to succeed long after the big-budget projects fade away. Why? Because we have an audience that supports us, grows with us, and changes with us.

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I’ve spent some time updating the official 512 Pixels Merch Store over on Cotton Bureau. Here’s what new:

512 Logo Stickers

I finally have stickers of the newish blog logo ready!

Order in 2-inch and 3-inch varities →

The Big Idea

“Let each element be true to itself. If the screen is flat, let it be flat. If the computer wants to be horizontal, let it be horizontal.”

Order this shirt →

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As a reminder, I have two ongoing pages on the site that I’m really enjoying:

• The Now Page
• The Then Page

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A decade ago, I made a major announcement:

I’m leaving my 9-5 job to work on Relay FM, 512 Pixels and my freelance business full time.

This anniversary snuck up on me, and I think that’s a sign of how well things have gone since I published that blog post.

Had you told me ten years ago that I’d still be making things on the Internet with my friends, I’m not sure I would have believed you.

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The other day, my buddy Joe Rossignol wrote this on Threads:

Looks like I surpassed 8,000 blog posts at MacRumors recently.

My typed word count has probably well exceeded 2 million.

Sheesh.

That got me wondering about my own output, so here are some random stats:

• Including this article, there are 11,337 posts on 512 Pixels, published over the course of nearly 17 years.
• I have published 1,655,996 words across the previous 11,336 posts.
• The XML export of those posts is 43.2 MB in size.
• I don’t expose them on the website, but 51 different categories are in use, and every article is in at least one of them.
• There are 55 pages on the site. There are another 20,981 words in total across those pages.
• There are 5,396 items in the site’s media library within WordPress.
• In the last three years, my macOS wallpapers page has been visited over a million times.
• In the same time frame, the largest referrals of traffic to the blog have been Hacker News, Daring Fireball, and Flipboard. That last one surprised me.

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Later this year, 512 Pixels will turn seventeen years old. Over the years, it has had several looks, and today there’s a new one.¹

The overall structure of the site is unchanged, but the colors and some of the typefaces are all new. For the first time in a long time, there is no orange used in the design. In its place is #213A49, a dark blue that I love. To go with it is EB Garamond for titles, navigation, and even the site logo.

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