512 Pixels

NASA:

NASA is targeting the next launch attempt of the Artemis I mission for Monday, Nov. 14 with liftoff of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket carrying the Orion spacecraft planned during a 69-minute launch window that opens at 12:07 a.m. EST. Artemis I is an uncrewed flight test to launch SLS and send Orion around the Moon and back to Earth to thoroughly test its system before flights with astronauts.

Inspections and analyses over the previous week have confirmed minimal work is required to prepare the rocket and spacecraft to roll out to Launch Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Florida following the roll-back due to Hurricane Ian. Teams will perform standard maintenance to repair minor damage to the foam and cork on the thermal protection system and recharge or replace batteries on the rocket, several secondary payloads, and the flight termination system. The agency plans to roll the rocket back to the launch pad as early as Friday, Nov. 4.

Backup launch windows include:

• Wednesday, Nov. 16 at 1:04 AM Eastern
• Saturday, Nov. 19 at 1:45 AM Eastern

Apple Support:

When you take pictures with the built-in iSight camera in your iMac G5 (iSight), the resulting images may look blue or green in Photo Booth or iChat instead of full color.

This can happen when your display’s Colors setting is set to “Thousands” in the Displays pane of System Preferences. To fix your photos, just modify the settings to display millions of colors instead of thousands.

Benjamin Mayo has noticed something new going on with Apple’s website:

Apple appears to be rolling out a wide-reaching branding change about how it refers to its Mac portable lineup. Up until recently, Apple officially referred to the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro as “Mac notebooks” or just “notebooks,” leaning on the relatively outdated industry terminology of notebook computers.

But now, everything user-facing appears to be slowly converting to using a “laptop” nomenclature. Updates to the Apple Online Store product pages, articles in the Apple Support knowledge base, and even the Mac operating system is beginning to reflect this branding update.

At the risk of sounding old and cranky, I always liked “notebook.”

Unite 4 for macOS allows you to turn any website into an app on your Mac. Using a lightweight, WebKit powered browser as a backend, you can easily create isolated, customizable apps from any site.

Unite 4 includes dozens of new features, including support for native notifications, new customization options, and much more. Unite apps also serve as a great alternative for resource hogging Electron apps or half-baked Catalyst apps.

Some examples of apps you could create in mere minutes with Unite:

• A Gmail web client that behaves like a native mail client.
• A status bar app for Apple Music or Overcast
• An isolated workspace for apps that may track you like Facebook
• A Google Meet app that works efficiently without using Chrome
• A fully featured Instagram app that has a resizable window
• A Robinhood, Figma, or Roam Research app for your desktop.

The newly launched Unite 4.2 makes the experience even better, with built-in password management, fully-featured status bar apps, and much more.

512 Pixels readers get 20% off this week when you purchase Unite 4 at bzgapps.com/unite512 or when you use the promo code ‘512Pixels’ at checkout.

You can also try Unite for 14 days absolutely free or use it as part of your subscription if you’re a Setapp subscriber!

This week on MPU:

With David settling in at his new studio, the guys take some time to talk about their desk setups, what’s in their bags and what they carry with them daily.

William Shatner, in his new book, writing about his trip with Blue Origin:

I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things—that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe. In the film “Contact,” when Jodie Foster’s character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, “They should’ve sent a poet.” I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound.

It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna … things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.

Benj Edwards, writing at Ars:

In the early 2000s, Americans who wanted to catch the local weather forecast at any time might turn on their TV and switch over to Weatherscan, a 24-hour computer-controlled weather forecast channel with a relaxing smooth jazz soundtrack. After 23 years, The Weather Channel announced that Weatherscan will be shutting down permanently on or before December 9. But a group of die-hard fans will not let it go quietly into the night.

Alex Heath, in the best lede I’ve read all week:

Meta’s VR social network Horizon Worlds — the company’s flagship “metaverse” app — is suffering from too many quality issues and even the team building it isn’t using it very much, according to internal memos obtained by The Verge.

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.