512 Pixels

David Pierce, writing at The Verge, has a great interview with Pixel hardware boss Rick Osterloh about the new watch, Google’s purchase of Fitbit and why anyone should trust Google to keep supporting this thing in the long run.

On this episode, we discuss what academic honors they would like to receive, what happened at the beach house and the new update to Spark. Then, David Smith drops by to talk about the Apple Watch Ultra.

On Connected Pro, AI recreates a crime scene.

Tim Bajarin, writing at Forbes:

In 1988, the father of the ThinkPad, Arimasa Naitoh, a Lenovo Fellow located in Japan, received a call about the need to spearhead a new portable computing venture in IBM’s research center in Yokohama, Japan. At the time, he was based in White Plains, NY but moved back to Japan to develop what has become the iconic ThinkPad line of portable computers.

I got to watch the development of the ThinkPad from the beginning. Mr Naitoh’s leadership, assisted by David Hill, who was instrumental in creating the unique ThinkPad design, made IBM at that time one of the most important portable computer companies in the market.

I may be a Mac guy, but I won’t lie, I’ve always loved ThinkPads.

Today, we have a bit of a history lesson via Apple Support:

The earliest seeds of modern electronic synthesizers began in the twilight years of the 19th century. In 1897, an American inventor named Thaddeus Cahill was issued a patent to protect the principle behind an instrument known as the Telharmonium, or Dynamophone. Weighing in at 200 tons, this mammoth electronic instrument was driven by 12 steam-powered electromagnetic generators. It was played in real time using velocity-sensitive keys and, amazingly, was able to generate several different sounds simultaneously. The Telharmonium was presented to the public in a series of “concerts” held in 1906. Christened “Telharmony,” this music was piped into the public telephone network, because no public address systems were available at the time.

It goes on from there, with four more pages of content for on the subject, all clearly written by someone passionate about synthesizers.

We just closed Relay FM’s annual St. Jude campaign, raising $706,397.10 for the life-saving work of St. Jude. This is an all-time high for our campaign, topping last year’s total of $701,220.26.

Thank you all. This means the world to me, my family and all of Relay FM.

Everyone knows that they should be backing up their computer, and Backblaze is an easy and secure way to back up docs, music, photos, videos, drawings, projects — all of your data. Files can be accessed via the mobile Backblaze app on iOS and Android, as we as Backblaze’s excellent website. If you experience a drive failure, Backblaze lets you download your files, or you can restore via mail, with a hard drive full of your data gets shipped to your door.

They’re good at this; Backblaze has restored 55 billion files for their customers. And they have nearly two exabytes of data storage under management and counting — that’s almost 2,000,000,000 gigabytes.

You can download a free, fully-featured trial at backblaze.com/512pixels. Unlimited computer backup for Macs and PCs starts at just $7/month. Backblaze is a lot of peace of mind for such a low cost.

This week on Mac Power Users, David and I share some of the treats we’ve found as apps are getting updated for iOS 16. Then, we talk through their first impressions of the Apple Watch Ultra.

We’re in the final days of Relay’s annual fundraiser for St. Jude. The campaign — and all community fundraisers — will close at 12 PM Eastern on Monday. If you haven’t given, now’s the time!

When the space shuttle program wrapped up 11 years ago, one of the many things that was lost was the ability to service the Hubble Space Telescope, which needed quite a bit of service back in the shuttle days.

For years, it has been understood that if anything major failed on Hubble after the last shuttle touched down, it could spell the end of the space telescope. Beyond hardware failures, the telescope’s decaying orbit also poses a long-term danger.

…but all that could be changing. Seth Kurkowski has details:

NASA and SpaceX signed an unfunded Space Act Agreement to produce a study on the capability of using Dragon to dock with Hubble and boost it into its original 372-mile orbit around Earth. This isn’t an announcement that SpaceX will do so, or a promise that NASA will sign off on the mission, but it is one step closer to having it become a possibility. According to both NASA Associate Administrator Thomas Zubuchen and Hubble’s project manager Patrick Crouse, the space observatory is in good condition and is expected to last well through this decade and beyond.

If this Hubble mission is deemed possible, the mission would launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 with a Crew Dragon.

This flight would probably be a part of The Polaris Program, which is run run by Jared Issacman, who flew to space on Inspiration 4 while raising money for St. Jude.

I won’t lie… I’m pretty tempted by this thing.

This week on the show:

Stephen has an Apple Watch Ultra. Myke dropped his iPhone. Federico’s security cameras came in very handy.

Oh, and Stage Manager is still busted.

The turn that this episode took is one for the ages.

The end of September draws near, which means we will be winding down our fundraiser for St. Jude on Friday. If you haven’t given to this life-saving work, now is the time.

Don’t miss our Closing Ceremonies:

Childhood Cancer Awareness Month comes to a close on Friday, as does our annual campaign for @StJude.

Join @imyke and @ismh for the Closing Ceremonies:

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— Relay FM (@RelayFM) September 26, 2022

If you are running your own campaign under the Relay FM umbrella, you have until noon Eastern on Monday, October 3 to raise money, so now’s a great time to make your final push.

As I write this, we’re approaching $550,000 raised for St. Jude this year, which puts us well over $2 million raised since 2019. It’s simply astonishing.