512 Pixels

Paul Kafasis shared a delightful story from Rogue Amoeba’s history:

In the realm of computers, bugs are generally a bad thing. Every year, our team ships dozens of free updates to eliminate bugs that are an inescapable byproduct of the countless variables in software development. Rarely, though, a bug can be beneficial. Back in 2002, a software bug saved Rogue Amoeba.

It started when we shipped the very first version of Audio Hijack. We wanted to give potential customers the ability to fully test the app prior to purchase, but we weren’t sure how best to limit that free trial. Our initial download provided 15 full days of completely unlimited usage.

I won’t spoil what happened.

It’s not new news that big tech companies have been looking at nuclear for powering their datacenter, but Google is making some news in my home state. Here is Amanda Peterson Corio, the company’s Global Head of Data Center Energy:

Today we announced the first deployment of Kairos Power’s advanced nuclear reactor — the Hermes 2 Plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee — through a new power purchase agreement (PPA) between Kairos Power and Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Marking the first purchase of electricity from an advanced GEN IV reactor by a U.S. utility, this agreement will enable 50 megawatts (MW) of nuclear energy on TVA’s grid that powers our data centers in Montgomery County, Tennessee and Jackson County, Alabama.

Last October, we began a long-term collaboration with Kairos Power to unlock up to 500 MW of nuclear power for the U.S. electricity system through multiple deployments of their small modular reactor. With this next step, we are creating a three-party solution where energy customers, utilities, and technology developers work together to advance new technologies that can help meet the world’s growing energy needs with reliable, affordable capacity.

TVA will buy power from the Kairos plant starting in 2030.

Oak Ridge is a name that may be familiar to some, as the site was part of the Manhattan Project. My wife’s grandmother worked there as a chemist many decades ago.

I don’t have strong feelings about nuclear power, but this is definitely another example of how the demands of AI and other services continue to grow at an alarming rate.

I just published what is a true annual tradition at Relay: a birthday Q&A with me and Myke.

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.

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 4.0 Copernicus ¹ 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.

This week on the podcast:

Brian Webster is the developer behind Fat Cat Software, home of PowerPhotos. The Mac app gives users a wide range of extra controls and tools to manage their Photos library. This week, he chats with Stephen and David about the app and its features.

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.

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 emerged from 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.

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.

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.

This week on the show, Myke and I discuss a new iOS app named Cassette, using Water Lock on the Apple Watch, the state of CarPlay in iOS 26, and new rumors about an entry-level MacBook.

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.