512 Pixels

Lightning Turns 10⇢

Mitchell Clark, at The Verge:

In September 2012, Apple introduced the iPhone 5 — it was bigger, faster, and more powerful than its predecessor, but perhaps the most revolutionary change was how you charged it. Onstage to introduce the new phone, Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller announced that the company was switching from the 30-pin connector that had been on every iPhone to date over to a small new port called Lightning. Lightning seemed to be everything its predecessor and competitors were not: reversible, compact, and robust. Schiller called it “a modern connector for the next decade.”

The benefits of Lightning over the 30-pin Dock Connector were very real. Moving to USB-C won’t replicate that, but it will make living (and traveling) with an iPhone more convenient than ever.

Magic Lasso Adblock: 2.0x Faster Web Browsing in Safari⇢

My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring 512 Pixels this week.

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By cutting down on ads and trackers, common news websites load 2x faster and use less data. Along with blocking all web ads, the app now also includes best-in-class YouTube ad blocking to also block video ads.

With over 4,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.

Download Magic Lasso Adblock for free today from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.

Clippy Was Born on the Mac⇢

Benjamin Cassidy, in a really fun article looking at the life — and death — of Clippy:

Clippy was born on a Mac. When Kevan Atteberry was hired to design characters for Microsoft Bob and Office 97, he’d shuttle between the company’s leafy grounds and his Bellevue studio space, where a desktop made by a certain rival awaited. Animation required using Microsoft’s proprietary software, but before hustling files over to HQ, he could tinker in his second-floor walk-up with tons of light and a landlord who never raised the rent. It was here he picked up a Ticonderoga two-and-five-tenths pencil and started outlining an infamous paperclip. Digitizing it just meant closing the blinds and booting up the Macintosh he preferred to his employer’s PCs.

“This is my original Clippy,” Atteberry says one recent morning, pulling up an image on an iMac.

via Christina Warren

Twitter Had Plans to Build an... OnlyFans Competitor⇢

Zoe Schiffer and Casey Newton have published an in-depth piece at The Verge that dives into a plan Twitter was working on to become more profitable:

In the spring of 2022, Twitter considered making a radical change to the platform. After years of quietly allowing adult content on the service, the company would monetize it. The proposal: give adult content creators the ability to begin selling OnlyFans-style paid subscriptions, with Twitter keeping a share of the revenue.

Had the project been approved, Twitter would have risked a massive backlash from advertisers, who generate the vast majority of the company’s revenues. But the service could have generated more than enough to compensate for losses. OnlyFans, the most popular by far of the adult creator sites, is projecting $2.5 billion in revenue this year — about half of Twitter’s 2021 revenue — and is already a profitable company.

According to the article, Twitter was pretty far down this road, but the project hit a wall when a team of 84 employees dubbed the “Red Team” made a discovery:

“Twitter cannot accurately detect child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity at scale,” the Red Team concluded in April 2022. The company also lacked tools to verify that creators and consumers of adult content were of legal age, the team found. As a result, in May — weeks after Elon Musk agreed to purchase the company for $44 billion — the company delayed the project indefinitely. If Twitter couldn’t consistently remove child sexual exploitative content on the platform today, how would it even begin to monetize porn?

It is horrific to read how bad Twitter is at detecting CSE. Whoever has been charge of that at the company should be fired, with real experts bought in.

Beyond that, it is just wild to think that Twitter was exploring launching an adult content service in the first place. I imagine it would have upset a sizable portion of their user base and would have created issues with companies like Apple who famously doesn’t allow content like this on the App Store.

I’m starting to think the folks who make up Twitter’s leadership are not very good at their jobs.

Kbase Article of the Week: LaserWriter: Composition of the Drum Coating⇢

Apple Support:

The LaserWriter drum is an organic photo-conductive layer laid on the surface of an aluminum cylinder. The ingredients of the organic layer are:

wt% OSHA (PEL) ACGIH (TLV)

aluminum alloy 95.0-98.0 - -

titanium dioxide

(13463-67-7) 0.5-2.0 * 15mg/m3(TWA) 10mg/m3(TWA)(Dust)

(20mg/m3)(Stel)

Binder resin 0.5-2.0 - -

Organic semiconductor 0.3-0.8 - -

Carcinogens: no ingredient is listed on the latest NTP Annual Report on carcinogens, IARC Monograph, or OSHA listing.

I have no idea what any of this means.

Relay FM for St. Jude⇢

Today, we’re announcing Relay FM’s 4th annual fundraiser for St. Jude. Over the last three years, the Relay FM audience has raised $1.5 million for this incredibly important institution. $700,000 of that was raised in 2021 alone.

(Y’all are awesome!)

If you’re new to St. Jude, here’s a bit about what it does:

The mission of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is to advance cures, and means of prevention, for pediatric catastrophic diseases through research and treatment. Consistent with the vision of our founder Danny Thomas, no child is denied treatment based on race, religion or a family’s ability to pay.

There is a lot there to unpack. In the 60 years since it was founded here in my hometown of Memphis, TN,1 treatments developed at St. Jude have helped increase the overall childhood cancer survival rate from 20% to more than 80%.

The research that fuels those treatments is shared and used around the world.

In May 2009, I got a crash course in what St. Jude can do when my oldest son was diagnosed with brain cancer. He underwent multiple operations, 18 rounds of chemotherapy and more rehabilitative service appointments than I can count. All of this treatment was provided without charging my young family a dime.

This let us focus on Josiah’s care, not our checkbook. We knew he was getting the best treatment on the planet for his disease, and that treatment saved his life. Today, he is doing incredibly well. He loves music and dancing, and like his old man, is working on the student newspaper at his school.

That’s why we spend the month of September talking about St. Jude and raising money to continue its mission. We’d love to have you join us this year.

As always, we invite you to make a donation! Donors who make an individual gift of $60 or more will receive a digital bundle including a wallpaper and macOS screensaver pack and those who make an individual gift of $100 or more will receive a set of stickers in addition to the digital bundle.

The campaign this year includes the ability for you to start your own fundraising campaign to help us reach our goals, while earning exclusive Relay FM merch. Fundraisers who raise $1 or more will receive an exclusive St. Jude limited edition of the Relay FM challenge coin. And fundraisers raising $250 or more will also receive a unique deskmat, featuring the cartoon heads of a couple of podcast network co-founders you may know. It’s very good. You can donate or sign up to fundraise on our campaign webpage. Thank you.


  1. In fact, St. Jude was first fully-integrated children’s hospital in the southern United States. ↩︎

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Unite 4 for macOS⇢

My thanks to Unite 4 for macOS for sponsoring 512 Pixels this week. It 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.

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!