512 Pixels

Google / Nest in an email to customers:

In response to community issues caused by COVID-19, we’re temporarily adjusting your camera quality and bandwidth in an effort to conserve internet resources.

With so many people working and attending school from home, we’re stretching our resources in ways we haven’t before—including the internet. As local internet resources are stretched past their limits, you and many others may have noticed interruptions like dropped video calls or frozen screens. During this time, it’s critical for us to work together to ensure we find ways to help the community at large.

To answer the global call from ISPs to prioritize bandwidth for learning and working, in the next few days we’re going to be adjusting the quality and bandwidth setting on Nest cameras to the default setting.

This can be changed back manually on a per-camera basis.

I’ve put together a little video treat this week:

This is bananas:

When you have digital speakers connected to your Power Mac G5, your internal speaker will not mute–even if you select the mute checkbox in Sound preferences. But you can set the internal speaker’s volume low (in Sound preferences) as a workaround.

“Digital speakers” means speakers that connect to the optical Digital Out audio port with Toslink cables, and use the S/PDIF (Sony/Philips Digital Interface) protocol.

To mute the internal speaker, disconnect the digital speakers. Or, if you like, use a different kind of speakers to avoid this issue.

As The Incomparable’s resident space podcaster, I joined Jason Snell, Dr. Drang, Dan Moren and Kathy Campbell to discuss Apollo 13:

Put on a white vest, climb in your Corvette, and whatever you do, don’t stir the cryo tanks! It’s the 50th anniversary of Apollo 13 and the 25th anniversary of “Apollo 13,” so we’re here to discuss Ron Howard’s film, starring Tom Hanks, Ed Harris and an enormous collection of character actors. The real-life story of Apollo 13 is so unlikely that if they made it into a movie, you’d never believe it—but in 1995 they did, and you will.

Micro.blog offers blog hosting, native macOS and iOS apps, and a welcoming community built around independent microblogs that can be used for short- and long-form writing.

They wanted to do something for everyone who might feel isolated working from home, and who are looking for a new outlet to be creative and positive. To that end, the Micro.blog team has added free podcast hosting to all standard microblogs through the end of April.

They also think that podcasts and short videos could be valuable tools for teachers who are adapting their lesson plans for online classes. If you’re a teacher, email them for six months of blog and podcasting hosting at no charge.

You can learn more about Micro.blog here.

This week on Mac Power Users:

Dr. David MacDonald is a musician and professor with a unique way of using the iPad, Apple TV and GoodNotes together to engage and equip his students.

This was a fun interview, and I think Dr. David and Mr. Sparks spoke about music for about 2 hours after I left the Skype call at the end of our recording.

My thanks to our sponsors for this episode:

• Rogue Amoeba: A superior sound control. Get 20% off.
• The Omni Group: We’re passionate about productivity for Mac, iPhone and iPad.
• Freshbooks: Online invoicing made easy.
• 1Password: Have you ever forgotten a password? You don’t have to worry about that anymore.

Josh Dzieza and Nilay Patel at The Verge, with an update to a truly bizarre story. Foxconn has been buying up properties around the state of Wisconsin, but hasn’t told anyone what it is doing with the space.¹

When The Verge poked around, it turned out most of the buildings were empty. Foxconn’s Alan Yeung told The Verge it would issue a statement to “correct” The Verge’s reporting on the empty office space. Here’s where the current story starts:

Yeung made those comments on April 12, 2019. It is now April 12th, 2020, making it exactly one year since Foxconn promised a statement or correction regarding The Verge’s report of empty buildings in Wisconsin. That statement or correction has never arrived.

And the buildings are still empty.

And:

The Green Bay innovation center has also made no progress. In October of 2019, WPR reported that the projects appeared to be on hold. Several days later, Foxconn said it still planned to develop the innovation centers, and the company appeared to restart at least some of the projects, selecting contractors to renovate a floor of its Green Bay building. At the time, the company said it planned to renovate 4,800 square feet of office space to host company events and recruitment drives. It had originally planned to have 200 employees working in a 16,000 square foot space.

According to Kevin Vonck, the development director for Green Bay, Foxconn submitted plans towards the end of 2019 for an even smaller space: 3,500 square feet of office space for 49 people. But no permits have been taken out and construction has yet to begin.

Those innovations were supposed to push forward the company’s “AI 8K+5G ecosystem.”

Whatever that means.

Ground as broken on a factory for building LCDs, but experts said the construction plans couldn’t support the technology needed to build the panels, and no LCD-making equipment has been spotted on the site.

Also, Foxconn promised a giant glass dome building that would house a data center. So there’s that.

Foxconn is now saying that ventilators will be built in Wisconsin with the support of Medtronic.

My thanks to Rogue Amoeba for sponsoring 512 Pixels this week. Their app SoundSource lets you adjust the volume of any app relative to others, and play individual apps to different audio devices, all right from your Mac’s menu bar. Through May 10th, 512 Pixels readers can save 20% with coupon code 512TWENTY.

Sam Anderson has a wonderful profile of Weird Al in The New York Times Magazine. I read through it all this morning, and when Yankovic talks about his writing process, it really jumped out at me:

But it turns out that Weird Al approaches the composition of his music with something like the holy passion of Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Looking through the “White & Nerdy” file felt like watching a supercomputer crunch through possible chess moves. Every single variable had to be considered, in every single line. The song begins with a simple sentence — “They see me mowing my front lawn” — and even here Yankovic agonized over “lawn” versus “yard” and “my” versus “the.” He sifted through phrases in gradations so small, they were almost invisible:

Escher’s really still my favorite MC.

Tell ya Escher’s still my favorite MC.

Escher is my favorite MC.

Escher’s still my favorite MC.

MC Escher’s still my favorite MC.

MC Escher is my favorite MC.

Y’know Escher is my favorite MC.

Y’know Escher’s still my favorite MC.

For weeks at a time, Yankovic told me, he goes into a creative trance — what he calls “the zombie phase.” “I walk around the house with a thousand-mile stare,” he said. “My wife asks if I’m OK.”

This attention to detail clearly pays off in Weird Al’s music, and is something I’d love to be able to do in my writing, but rarely get to do.

So why does he work this way? The answer speaks volumes about how the musician thinks about projects:

“I could have written a whole second ‘White & Nerdy’ based on the alt lines,” Yankovic said. “I figure I’m going to be living with this song for a long time. We’ll probably be doing it onstage for the rest of my life. It’s got to be right.”

This week on Flashback, Quinn and I get our gamer on, exploring three failed game consoles: the Apple Pippin, Nintendo Virtual Boy and the Ouya. I own a Pippin, but didn’t know much about the other two before our research, and it was a lot of fun to learn about them.

My thanks to our sponsor:

• TextExpander, from Smile: Unlock your productivity with TextExpander. Get 20% off with your first year.

I’m sure all of this is just fine.

This week on the show:

This week, Myke talks about a sale on Cinema Displays, then the guys move on discuss Federico’s recent iPad article on modularity, the possibilities of widgets in iOS 14 and Stephen’s Mac Madness winner and picks.

My thanks to our sponsors:

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