Relay Turns 11 ⇢

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Relay 11

Today marks Relay’s 11th birthday, as noted by Myke Hurley:

In recent months, there’s been a fresh wave of chatter about the “death of podcasting” — this time aimed at anything expensive or audio-only. I often joke that I’ve seen podcasting declared dead three or four times over the course of my career, and this is simply the latest chapter.

What many people fail to recognise, or have only just realised, is that this medium thrives when shows are made by people who care — people who are passionate and started podcasting simply because they loved it. The kinds of shows we make — talk shows for niche audiences — continue to succeed long after the big-budget projects fade away. Why? Because we have an audience that supports us, grows with us, and changes with us.

Our listeners care — they care about what we create, and they care about the conversations we have. That’s the true joy of this medium, and it’s why I keep showing up every day — more than 4,000 days later.

For a long time, people told us that shows like ours wouldn’t last, so to see our little network continue to provide hours of commentary and entertainment each week is a true blessing.

Sponsor: DEVONthink: Store, Organize, and Work the Smart Way ⇢

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We’re all dealing with more information than ever, and it’s becoming increasingly complex. You need bulletproof financial documents for audits, collaborative tools for your team, and AI that can actually help.

DEVONthink 4

DEVONthink 4.0 Copernicus1 is here, and it’s designed to work with you, not against you. Its AI integration is incredibly useful — it can analyze your documents, write summaries, suggest tags, and you can even create AI-based automations for specific tasks.

If you keep financial records or other documents that need to be audit-proof, then DEVONthink 4’s new audit features have you covered.

Working with a team? The new web interface lets everyone access shared databases and collaborate instead of just emailing files back and forth. Automatic versioning means you’ll never accidentally lose an important change, and the enhanced automation handles the boring stuff so you don’t have to.

Don’t spend another year fighting with your documents. Download DEVONthink 4.0 Copernicus and see how AI-powered document management can make your work easier.

  1. The DEVONtechnologies team named version 4.0 after the Copernicus moon crater and its namesake, astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, who ultimately changed the way we see and experience the universe. ↩

MacSurfer Returns ⇢

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I’ve been in this racket long enough to see plenty of other websites, podcasts, and commentators come and go.

One of those names from the past is MacSurfer, an old-school link aggregation website keeping up with news from across the Apple ecosystem. Back in the day, getting a link on Macsurfer’s Headline News would mean serious traffic for a younger version of me.

While I first knew about MacSurfer in 2005 or so, I was a decade late; the site started back in 1995 WHEN I WAS JUST NINE YEARS OLD. Sadly, it was shuttered in 2020 due to revenue issues, but weirdly, the site seemed to spring back to life this week. Eric Schwarz was able to chat with its new owner, Ken Turner:

Eric Schwarz: It sounds like you were a fan of the old MacSurfer, what are you hoping to do with its revival?

Ken Turner: I joined Apple as a software engineer in 1997 and my manager told me about MacSurfer in one of our first meetings (really!) I became an almost daily visitor ever since. When it went dormant several years ago, I missed a daily news roundup of everything happening in the Apple world. My hope, partially selfish, is to bring it back to fill that need again.

After reading the entire thing, I’m encouraged that Turner is excited to bring back the site, and I think he has some interesting ideas on how to do it.

An Exploration of Lotus Agenda ⇢

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Kevin Lipe, in a follow-up post to his Pocket 8086 series here on 512:

I’d been Agenda-curious for a long time, but never tried to actually use it for real. I booted it up on my Pocket 8086, watched cards crawl into place, watched queries resolve themselves into slices of sense, and realized with annoying clarity: none of the modern “task management” apps I’ve used—not Todoist, not OmniFocus, Amazing Marvin, Remember the Milk, not Microsoft To Do—could do any of this. Not really. Agenda wasn’t “a to-do list.” It was a cognitive environment, a place where items could belong to more than one thing at once, where priorities didn’t march in a line but emergedfrom the way pieces related to one another.

This is not a user guide (Tavis Ormandy already wrote a careful, generous one here). It’s more of a lament—or maybe more of a small civic memorial—for an unexplored avenue in productivity software that modern tools only approximate in fragments. The utopian tools-for-thought vision of Agenda didn’t vanish because it was wrong; it vanished because it was weird and unprofitable.

Mr. Musk Goes to Nashville ⇢

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Another Elon Musk company is doing things in another Tennessee city, as Hannah McDonald reports:

Aerial footage from Sky 5 shows a freshly dug pit near the base of the State Capitol, a visible sign of progress on The Boring Company’s controversial underground transportation project in Tennessee.

The 10-foot-deep, 20-by-20-foot test pit was dug this week to study the rock beneath downtown. It’s part of the company’s plan to eventually shuttle passengers between the airport and downtown in Teslas through twin tunnels, aiming for a nine-minute trip by 2027.

“By the way, tough place to tunnel in Nashville,” said Steve Davis, CEO and President of The Boring Company. “You have extremely hard rock, like way harder than it should be.”

The initial digging began before the company asked the city for official approval.

Blood Oxygen Feature Returning to U.S. Apple Watches ⇢

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Chance Miller has the details:

Apple has announced that it will release a software update for iPhone and Apple Watch later today with a “redesigned Blood Oxygen feature” for Apple Watch users in the United States. This comes over 18 months after Apple began selling the Apple Watch without the Blood Oxygen feature in America due to a patent dispute.

The new feature will be made available as part of iOS 18.6.1 and watchOS 11.6.1 updates. 

In a statement to 9to5Mac today, an Apple spokesperson said:

“Apple will introduce a redesigned Blood Oxygen feature for some Apple Watch users in the U.S. through an iPhone and Apple Watch software update available later today. With this update, sensor data from the Blood Oxygen app on Apple Watch will be measured and calculated on the paired iPhone, and results can be viewed in the Health app. This update will be available for Apple Watch Series 9, Series 10, and Apple Watch Ultra 2 users in the U.S. who do not have the original Blood Oxygen feature.”

It’s bananas to me that this has carried on so long.

Research Shows High Nitrogen Dioxide Concentration Levels Around xAI’s Memphis Site

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If you’ve been keeping up with my writing about xAI in Memphis, you’ll know that the company is relying on natural gas turbines to generate power to keep Grok up and running. Those turbines have been at the center of national coverage, and the issue isn’t going away, with xAI and its partners set to use turbines to power the company’s new data center, set to come online at any point.

There have been legal and ethical debates over these turbines and the pollution they cause. That’s where Andrew R. Chow at TIME comes in, with a new report:

Researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, at the request of TIME, ran an analysis on the air quality in South Memphis over the last couple of years, based on public satellite data from NASA and the European Space Agency. They found that average concentrations of nitrogen dioxide have increased by 3% when comparing the periods before June 2024 and afterward. They also found that peak nitrogen dioxide concentration levels have increased by 79% from pre-xAI levels in areas immediately surrounding the data center, and by 9% in nearby Boxtown.

Because high concentrations of air pollutants pose greater health risks than lower concentrations, the researchers said, focusing on these spikes—rather than just averages—offers more meaningful insight into potential health impacts. It’s the first major effort to quantify the turbines’ environmental impact using publicly available data.

The story goes on to quote a friend of mine:

Austin Dalgo, an academic primary care physician in South Memphis, calls the jump in peak nitrogen dioxide concentration levels “alarming,” and believes that they “significantly increase the risk to residents’ health.”  The EPA writes that a high concentration of NO2 can aggravate respiratory diseases, particularly asthma.  

“The xAI turbines are leading to a public health crisis in Memphis by releasing nitrogen oxides—pollutants known to directly harm the lungs,” Dalgo tells TIME. “These emissions pose the greatest risk to our city’s most vulnerable residents, including children, the elderly, and individuals with respiratory conditions like asthma and COPD.”

xAI’s reliance on gas turbines seems to have shrunk at its first data center, but the second, larger site is poised to require even more of the equipment.

Chow’s entire article is worth your time.

CarPlay’s Messages App for iOS 26 is Bad

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I’ve been running iOS 26 for a while now, and there’s something that has been bugging me. The Messages app in CarPlay is a disaster:

Messages in CarPlay iOS 26

I took some time to edit my friends and family out of this screenshot, but the layout and conversation names are exactly as they appear in real life.

Here are some of my issues:

  • It’s great that CarPlay’s Messages app now respects pinned conversations, but displaying them in anything but the 3-across grid from iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and macOS breaks muscle memory in the one context where muscle memory is the most important.
  • Truncated names look terrible. I understand it on the Apple Watch, but even on the 7-inch screen in my Tacoma, there should be room to see first and last names. Making the favorites larger — and preserving their order — would help fix this.1
  • The unread badges should be in a consistent location. CarPlay shows badges for favorites to the upper-right of the image, whereas conversations in the list below have them on the left. This is something done only in CarPlay; every other Messages app shows unread dots to the left of the conversation name.
  • The “Messages” label at the top of the screen is off-centered.

All of this adds up to an interface that feels mostly forgotten. Messages should be consistent across platforms, and I hope Apple takes some time to readdress this before shipping iOS 26 this fall. Right now it looks like an Android phone app that got installed on a tablet.

I believe the Messages UI could more or less copy what the folks working on Phone have done. A place for favorites and recents, in two different views, could work nicely:

Phone in CarPlay iOS 26

This was filed with Apple as Feedback FB18960216.

  1. I suppose a bunch of folks are using Contact’s Short Names settings, which helps with the truncation issue. ↩

Elon Musk Promises to Sue Apple Over Grok’s App Store Ranking ⇢

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Jess Weatherbed, reporting for The Verge:

Elon Musk says that his artificial intelligence company xAI “will take immediate legal action” against Apple for allegedly manipulating its App Store rankings to the advantage of rival AI apps. In a series of X posts on Monday night, Musk suggested that Apple was “playing politics” by not placing either X or xAI’s Grok chatbot in the App Store’s list of recommended iOS apps, and that he had no choice but to file a lawsuit.

“Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation,” Musk said. “Why do you refuse to put either X or Grok in your ‘Must Have’ section when X is the #1 news app in the world and Grok is #5 among all apps?,” the xAI CEO asked Apple in another post, which is now pinned to his profile.

I’m sure none of these things are factors when it comes to the app’s ranking and this lawsuit:

Personally, I’d like to see Apple enforce its own App Store rules here. Currently, the Grok app has a 12+ age rating. Given the sexual content that is so easily accessible through the chatbot, that sure seems low to me.