512 Pixels

Laine Nooney has a new book coming out all about the Apple II:

The Apple II was a versatile piece of hardware, but its most compelling story isn’t found in the feat of its engineering, the personalities of Apple’s founders, or the way it set the stage for the company’s multi-billion-dollar future. Instead, as historian Laine Nooney shows, what made the Apple II iconic was its software. In software, we discover the material reasons people bought computers. Not to hack, but to play. Not to code, but to calculate. Not to program, but to print. The story of personal computing in the United States is not about the evolution of hackers — it’s about the rise of everyday users.

John Gruber, in his linked post about the book:

Did I preorder a copy immediately? Come on, you know the answer.

My debit card literally jumped out of my wallet and at the screen of my MacBook Pro.

Neale Van Fleet, writing on the Rogue Amoeba blog:

As part of the unveiling of our Historic Screenshot Archive, I made some fun images to post to our social media accounts. Making those images was tricky, because interfaces were much smaller in the pre-Retina era.

Working on this project with Rogue Amoeba was a real blast, but I had been wondering how they prepped the images used on social media. Now I know!

Nilay Patel, writing at The Verge:

Here’s the best printer in 2023: the Brother laser printer that everyone has. Stop thinking about it and just buy one. It will be fine!

Seriously, ask around or just look in the background of Zoom calls: there’s a black Brother laser printer sitting there. Some people have the bare-bones Brother HL-L2305DW, which costs like $120. We have the $270 Brother MFC-L2750DW, which adds a sheet-fed scanner, because my wife is a lawyer and scans things for judges or whatever she does with it. It doesn’t matter. We only bought that one to replace our previous Brother laser printer that we lost in a move, and even then, I didn’t even look at the model numbers. It has been connected to our Wi-Fi for like six years straight, and I have never replaced the toner. It prints Amazon return labels from my phone without complaining, and it does not feel like the CEO of Inkjet Supply and Hostage Situations Incorporated is waiting to mug me or enable DRM at the slightest provocation.

Know what’s sitting in a closet in my house, plugged into power and Ethernet? A Brother HL-2270DW that I bought in August 2014. It’s the oldest thing on my network.

This week on the podcast:

Spotify is getting weird, Apple is getting wise to long thighs and The Quizzies are back!

Philip Lee has an amazing new product for sale now:

Trashbot 2.0 stationery set is inspired by classic 80s computer culture, featuring unique desktop and icon designs. The set includes:

• Whiteboard x1
• Icons with magnetic back x3
• Trashbot figure/mini pen holder x1
• Error bot figure x1
• Memo Pad x2 (200pages in total)

Ordered.

Apple Support:

Issue or symptom

If a FireWire audio device is connected to a Power Mac G5 (Late 2005) or an iMac G5 (Ambient Light Sensor) while the computer is restarting, the FireWire bus will stop responding and no FireWire devices will be detected on the bus. The device may stop responding or stop charging, depending on the specifics of the device.

Soltuion

You can restore the Firewire bus by resetting the SMU (System Management Unit).

I did not have “Apple Music Classical is announced as an App Store pre-order” on my bingo card for 2023. Not to mention that the app won’t launch on the iPad on day one.

David Smith, writing on Mastodon:

Widgetsmith just reached a truly remarkable milestone, its 100,000,000th download. I am genuinely staggered by this and incredibly grateful.

He continues on his blog:

A number that I can’t really wrap my mind around. A number larger than the population of all but 14 countries.

I was very conflicted about whether I should share and observe this milestone publicly. I am by nature a very shy, quiet person and not one to seek the spotlight.

Also, in the many years I’ve been working at this career I have very often been someone struggling to find traction and stability for my apps, and while I could be genuinely happy for the success of others, it also still stung painfully when I saw it.

My hope is that my 12+ years of consistent podcasting and blogging can speak witness to my motives here in communicating encouragement, not boasting.

Ultimately I decided to share this milestone for two reasons Gratitude & Community.

I know I am not alone in this feeling, but I’m going to add my voice to the chorus — none of this could happen to a nicer, more caring guy that David. I’m proud to be his friend, and proud of his achievement today.

Whoever was assigned to task to write a support article explaining the differences between the PowerBook G3 models drew the short straw that week at Kbase HQ:

This article describes the differences between the PowerBook G3 Series (Bronze keyboard) introduced in May, 1999, and earlier PowerBook G3 Series computers.

There are a number of visual cues for distinguishing the new PowerBook G3 Series.

They are:

• The keyboard and trackpad button have a bronze or mocha color.
• The inside display bezel has a white Apple logo at the top.
• The rear ports are all enclosed by the I/O door and the modem port is now in the rear of the unit.
• There are two USB ports.
• It has a single, manual eject PC card slot which supports Type I and II PC cards.
• The display clamshell latch mechanism release is on the base of the PowerBook instead of the clamshell.

Filipe Espósito, writing last week at 9to5Mac:

9to5Mac last month revealed a first look at the design of the entire iPhone 15 lineup based on CAD files used to build the phones and also compatible accessories. But one thing that remained unclear was the layout of the volume buttons, which reportedly will be capacitive rather than physical. 9to5Mac has heard from a source that iPhone 15 Pro will have new unified volume buttons, plus a “pressing type” mute button.

According to our source, who’s familiar with making certified accessories for Apple products, the iPhone 15 Pro models will ditch the separate volume up and volume down buttons for a new single button that works both ways depending on where the user presses it.

I didn’t link to this when it came out because I couldn’t work out why I felt so weird about the idea of the iPhone’s ringer switch going away.

It hit me today: the ringer switch is one (of the ever-shrinking number) of the hardware feature of the original iPhone that is still with us today.

Since the beginning, we’ve been able to flip a switch, without looking, and know that our iPhones wouldn’t make noise. Some of us flip that switch on a new phone and never switch it back to allow sounds at all. I am thrilled to read that the functionality will continue, even if I am a little sad¹ about losing part of the original iPhone design.

There’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the First Amendment in this country. It does not protect you from being banned from Twitter or moderated on Facebook or even in a Discord. It’s all about the relationship between the individual and the government when it comes to terms of speech. No matter how loud your conspiracy-slinging uncle cries foul, it’s just not the issue he claims it is.

Jon Brodkin over at Ars has a story that much more to the point where the First Amendment lives:

A proposed law in Florida would force bloggers who write about Gov. Ron DeSantis and other elected officials to register with a state office and file monthly reports or face fines of $25 per day. The bill was filed in the Florida Senate Tuesday by Senator Jason Brodeur, a Republican.

If enacted, the proposed law would likely be challenged in court on grounds that it violates First Amendment protections of freedom of speech and the press. Defending his bill, Brodeur said, “Paid bloggers are lobbyists who write instead of talk. They both are professional electioneers. If lobbyists have to register and report, why shouldn’t paid bloggers?” according to the Florida Politics news website.

Bloggers-as-lobbyists is just a wild argument. No one tell Brodeur that blogging is dead and all the real action is on social media.

That aside, this clearly seems to be an attempt to limit the speech of influential writers in Florida politics, as well as random folks writing on Medium.

This week on Mac Power Users, we sort through some follow-up before sharing their origin stories and reacting to a surprise or two.