512 Pixels

Leah Cheshier, writing yesterday for NASA:

NASA’s uncrewed Orion spacecraft reached the farthest distance from Earth it will travel during the Artemis I mission — 268,563 miles from our home planet — just after 3 p.m. CST. The spacecraft also captured imagery of Earth and the Moon together throughout the day, including of the Moon appearing to eclipse Earth.

Reaching the halfway point of the mission on Flight Day 13 of a 25.5 day mission, the spacecraft remains in healthy condition as it continues its journey in distant retrograde orbit, an approximately six-day leg of its larger mission thousands of miles beyond the Moon.

That distance breaks the previous record for distance from Earth achieved by a crew-rated vehicle set by Apollo 13.¹ As impressive as that is, the imagery is even better:

@[email protected] on Mastodon has made something amazing.

Every year, I spend some time in late November talking about Operation Broken Silence, a non-profit working to bring education to thousands of kids across Sudan, all of whom have been forced from their homes due to decades of conflict.

This year, OBS is hard at work bringing water to this region as well, and I’d love your help to make this possible:

You can learn more and donate here.

Apple Support, on the Control Strip:

To move the Control Strip:

1. Press and hold down the Option key.
2. Drag the tab at the end of the Control Strip. If you drag it more than halfway across the display, the Control Strip moves to the other edge. If you have more than one display, you can drag the Control Strip to the left or right edge of the other display as well. The Control Strip always stays on the left or right edge of your display.

Changing the display’s resolution from a smaller setting to a larger one and restarting the computer moves the Control Strip higher up on the display.

Record any audio, with Audio Hijack. Whether you want to save audio from individual applications like Safari or Skype, hardware audio devices like microphones and mixers, and even the entire system audio output, Audio Hijack can handle it. Simply put, if it can be heard on MacOS, Audio Hijack can record it. Use it to:

• Record conversations from Skype, Zoom, and other VoIP apps
• Save streaming audio from the web
• Create podcasts, both remote and in-studio
• Digitize vinyl
• And so much more

Noted tech writer Stephen Hackett has declared Audio Hijack “the best audio recording tool available for macOS, and … it just keeps getting better.” Who are we to disagree?

Visit our website to learn more and download a free trial of Audio Hijack 4. You’ll be glad you did!

This week’s episode of Mac Power Users is out:

OmniFocus expert Tim Stringer drops by the show to catch David and Stephen up on his businesses, his use of multiple Macs and how OmniFocus 4 is shaping up while in beta.

This week on Connected:

Myke is on vacation, so Stephen and Federico make a play for the hearts of the people.

Don’t miss the first link in the show notes.

It’s that time of year, so I’m happy to present my annual gift guide. If you have someone like me in your life, consider these suggestions:

• An Apple Lisa: A cool $9,999 on eBay
• Speedmaster Professional Moonwatch - $6,400.00 new from Omega
• This sick Macintosh t-shirt - $19.35 on Etsy
• “I was a Mac user when Apple was doomed” Enamel Pin - $12.12 on the Diesel Sweeties Store
• 20% off any annual Relay FM membership
• This sick Toyota pickup currently on Bring a Trailer. A clean first-generation 4-Runner is also acceptable.

Ron Amadeo, writing for Ars Technica:

Amazon is going through the biggest layoffs in the company’s history right now, with a plan to eliminate some 10,000 jobs. One of the areas hit hardest is the Amazon Alexa voice assistant unit, which is apparently falling out of favor at the e-com merce giant. That’s according to a report from Business Insider, which details “the swift downfall of the voice assistant and Amazon’s larger hardware division.”

Alexa has been around for 10 years and has been a trailblazing voice assistant that was copied quite a bit by Google and Apple. Alexa never managed to create an ongoing revenue stream, though, so Alexa doesn’t really make any money. The Alexa division is part of the “Worldwide Digital” group along with Amazon Prime video, and Business Insider says that division lost $3 billion in just the first quarter of 2022, with “the vast majority” of the losses blamed on Alexa. That is apparently double the losses of any other division, and the report says the hardware team is on pace to lose $10 billion this year. It sounds like Amazon is tired of burning through all that cash.

Wooooof.

John Gruber:

What is (was?) Alexa about, strategically? I’ve often heard that the vague idea was that people would buy Alexa devices for obvious stuff (playing music, setting timers) but that eventually they’d starting using Alexa to buy stuff from Amazon — and thus wind up buying more stuff from Amazon than they would if they didn’t have an Alexa device in their house. That never made sense to me. Buying stuff via voice commands seems inherently uncertain — like buying a lottery ticket where you need some luck to actually get the product you think you told Alexa to buy. Even if it works, how is it any better than just shopping at Amazon on your phone, iPad, or computer? It seems worse to me, and no more convenient. How do you comparison shop via voice?

If you didn’t order a 2023 Apple Calendar and still want one, there are just a few left!

Apple Support:

iCal and the calendar feature of Microsoft Entourage can be used together–as long as you have iCal 1.5 or later and Mac OS X 10.3.5 or later installed.

If you have earlier versions of iCal or Mac OS X, when you try to add an iCal invitation to an Entourage calendar, an alert box with an error message could appear; an Entourage invitation received with the Mac OS X Mail application could appear as plain text instead of as an attachment; or, when you try to import or add an .ics file from Entourage into iCal by double-clicking the file’s icon, an alert box might appear.

If you weren’t around in the Entourage days, you really missed something. I ran it for years in college (as my school handed out Exchange accounts to students), and it was the hub for so much of my digital life.