Connected #209: Secret NBA Training ⇢

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This week, on a very busy Connected:

Federico is sore about coming in second place, but we’re all winners, because Apple has new iPhones and Apple Watches.

Well, not Federico. He still came in second place.

Don’t miss the B-Side, on which I talk with John Voorhees about Ken Kocienda’s book Creative Selection.

My thanks to our sponsors:

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Apple Watch Series 4 Slightly Larger Than Series 3

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Per some sleuthing by Mikah Sargent,1 here are the new case sizes:

  • Series 3 38mm — Height: 38.6mm / Width: 33.3mm / Depth: 11.4mm
  • Series 4 40mm — Height: 40mm / Width: 34mm / Depth: 10.7mm
  • Series 3 42mm — Height: 42.5mm / Width: 36.4mm / Depth: 11.4mm
  • Series 4 44mm — Height: 44mm / Width: 38mm / Depth: 10.7mm

Apple says all old bands are compatible across the new generation of watches, which is great.

  1. He had to compare Apple’s webpages for the bands themselves, as the “Compare Apple Watch Models” page doesn’t list dimensions for some reason. ↩

NASA Completes Orion Parachute Testing ⇢

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NASA’s new crew capsule is one step closer to flying, as Chris Bergin reports:

The Orion Program has concluded its drop test series for the spacecraft’s parachute system, with a successful return to terra firma on Wednesday. The three chutes will allow Orion to conclude its mission with a gentle splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. Ensuring the system was safe, including during the loss of a chute, has been the main goal of the test series that has been ongoing for around a decade.

Orion will fly atop NASA’s new SLS rocket, which is currently being developed. The first flight of the new stack, dubbed EM-1, will be without a crew, but the second flight will have astronauts aboard, marking the start of a new era of NASA spaceflight in the post-shuttle world.

10 Years of 512 Pixels

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Tomorrow marks the 10th anniversary of this blog.1 Excuse me while I catch my breath after writing that.

The original name of the site was ForkBombr. I bought the domain from a friend for a couple of slices of pizza. That name may seems weird, but its a programming term that I thought was clever. The idea was that a single interest could spin up into an obsession, and as it was 2008, I had to drop the e from the name.

I started the site after leaving my job at my local Apple Store, where I worked as the Lead Genius. I left that job to run the service shop at a now-defunct Apple-Authorized Service Provider. I figured my experience gave me a fairly unique perspective on things. Over the years, my time at Apple has become less and less relevant, but it still shapes how I think about the company and its products.

My first post on the site was named “Dear Reader(s).” Here’s a bit from it:

Don’t suck.

With that phrase, one of my mentors has repeatedly set me straight. And with that phrase, I’m launching ForkBombr.

ForkBombr is going to focus on the things I focus on. Seems easy enough. So be prepared to see a lot on photography, internet journalism and Mac geekery.

My pitch was pretty simple, and drew heavily from this post by Merlin Mann about blogging.

Scrolling through a decade of writing is really weird and uncomfortable at times. I have some posts that haven’t stood the test of time very well. I have others that I consider some of the best writing I have ever published.

Regardless of how a single post has aged, overall, I’m proud of what the nearly 8,000 posts in my WordPress database represent: thoughtful consideration (and some jokes) about the things that interest me. Those interests have changed over time, but they are why I keep this site going. I want to share my ideas and things I find with readers who will find them just as cool or thought-provoking as I do.

The biggest example of a new topic in the 512 Venn diagram this is my passion for Apple history. I wasn’t in that world a decade ago, but 512 Pixels has grown into a major resource for the topic as I have gone further down the rabbit hole.

In 2010 or so, I made a real push at turning 512 Pixels into an Apple news site. I published a bunch of stuff, hoping to grow the site into something I could do full-time. That didn’t work, and I got pretty cranky about having a blog, but I stuck with after rediscovering the foundation on which it is built.

512 Pixels has never paid my bills; The Age of Blogging for Profit is mostly behind us, but in a way, I find that freeing. I’d much rather have a site like this be member supported, as I want it to be a hub for nerds like me.

Thanks for an amazing ten years. Let’s keep this party going for another decade or four.

  1. As tomorrow is going to be very busy with the Apple keynote, I wanted to share this today. ↩

Love Not Lost ⇢

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Perhaps the most heartbreaking thing about childhood cancer is the loss of the future. Danny Thomas, the founder of St. Jude believed that no child should die in the dawn of life.

Nine and a half years ago, my wife and I faced this as young parents. Thanks to the work of St. Jude, today our son is in third grade. This morning, he ate breakfast, got dressed and went to school. He has a dentist appointment this afternoon and got a haircut a couple of weeks ago. He loves music and is a huge people person.

St. Jude kids are special. They bring joy to everyone they meet, and I think a lot of that has to do with what they represent. Kids who have survived cancer are time travelers. They show that the future isn’t certain, and that sometimes, just sometimes, we can defeat the darkness it promises.

I was reminded of this when I read this article in The New York Times. Written by Vincent M. Mallozzi, it speaks to this idea of losing the future to cancer, and how we can reclaim it. Mallozzi shares the story of Lindsey Wilkerson and Joel Alsup, who were married on the St. Jude campus last week. Go read it, then go donate to St. Jude, where doctors and researchers and nurses and chefs and child life specialists and therapists and teachers and fundraisers and IT people and surgeons and nutritionists and more work tirelessly to redeem the future for kids like mine.