SpaceX plans to send its Dragon spacecraft to Mars as early as 2018, the company announced today — marking a major first step toward CEO Elon Musk’s goal of sending humans to the Red Planet. The company didn’t say how many spacecraft it will send, but hinted it would conduct a series of these Dragon missions and that it would release more details soon. In a tweet, the company indicated that the capsules would fly on SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, a bigger version of its Falcon 9; the rocket will launch the capsules to the planet to test out how to land heavy payloads on Mars. If successful, the endeavor would make SpaceX the first private spaceflight company to land a vehicle on another planet.
My family and I are getting some much-needed time away starting tomorrow. For about a week, we’ll be in a different part of the country, and I’ll be offline and not working for the first time in three years. It feels weird and vaguely irresponsible to take time off as a self-employed person, but it’ll be good for all of us.
I’m really excited to announce that we’ll be doing a live Connected (along with Jason Snell and Serenity Caldwell) at WWDC this year:
On June 13 at 6 PM we will be hosting an event at 111 Minna Street in San Francisco. Come grab a drink at the bar and hang out before a live panel starts covering that morning’s news. Hosts from Connected will be joined by Serenity Caldwell and Jason Snell.
Apple today updated MacBook with the latest Intel processors, improved graphics performance, faster flash storage and an additional hour of battery life, making the thinnest and lightest Mac better than ever. Featuring an all-metal unibody enclosure, MacBook is now available in four aluminum finishes — gold, silver, space gray, and for the first time on a Mac, a gorgeous rose gold. With a stunning 12-inch Retina display, highly responsive full-size keyboard, Force Touch trackpad, versatile USB-C port and all-day battery life in a design that is just 2 pounds and 13.1 mm thin, MacBook is the future of the notebook.
It’s hard to tell from the specs page, but hopefully this processor bump will be enough to push the MacBook closer to the mainstream.
Speaking of mainstream notebooks, the MacBook Air survived today’s update, but the only change is that the 13-inch models all come with 8 GB of RAM as default.
Although the Apple website has not been updated with any new info, Siri is proudly proclaiming that WWDC 2016 will indeed be held in San Francisco from June 13th to June 17th. Although Siri didn’t explicitly say, it is almost certain that WWDC will once again be held at Moscone West, simply because it’s the best choice of venue for an event like this in San Francisco.
So either someone on the Siri team got excited, or something happened to delay the official announcement. While those dates have been rumored for some time, for those trying to plan a trip to San Francisco, Apple’s last-minute announcement each year is a point of stress. Siri leaking it may be funny or cute, but I think the company would do better by its developers and community to announce the dates earlier than mid-April each year.
Argentum Camera is a black & white camera app built from scratch with street photographers in mind. Free of any excess settings it lets you take high quality black & white images with one tap. No complicated adjustments, no need for post-processing, no selfies.
Argentum processes the images in real time applying one of the six filters, each inspired by an iconic photographer, such as Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson or Irving Penn. You can further adjust the tones by changing EV compensation or light up the scene using a torch mode. The adaptive layout of the interface places the shutter button under your thumb in landscape mode making Argentum easier to handle on larger iPhones. The whole experience is built to be seamless, so you can stop focusing on the camera and start focusing on capturing the moments you witness.
Argentum strikes the perfect balance between ease of use and functionality. Being simple but powerful it is purely about capturing photos and enjoying the process. Check it out; lose yourself in monochrome.
Obviously, the setup for this was more complicated than what we normally use to record a show like this, so I thought it would be fun to share how we did it.
Here’s a timelapse of everyone helping set the room up, courtesy of Doug Beal:
Here’s the tech we used to record the audio and stream it on the site:
The hosts spoke into Shure BETA 58A microphones. The 58 is a solid vocal mic, and one that’s easy to use and setup. We ran a 4th mic for a live Q&A session that followed the main show.
We ran these mics into a Zoom H6 portable recorder. Instead of running on the 4 AAs the Zoom will accept, we opted to run it off the optional external power supply. The Zoom recorded each microphone directly to a .wav file on an SD card. The Zoom was sitting on the table in front of Myke so he could monitor levels using the built-in display and adjust them if needed.
(A little bit of Gaffer tape kept everything in place.)
To stream the show — and record a back up in QuickTime — I ran from the Line Out on the recorder to my MacBook Pro via a USBPre2. This is part of my normal recording setup, and while expensive, is an incredibly powerful and flexible piece of gear.
Once I had signal at the Mac, streaming was as easy as telling Nicecast to use the USBPre2 as its source and boom we were live.
I like the challenges presented by producing a live podcast. The tech requirements are different, as is the environment. The Pen Addict community is amazing, and it’s always fun to do something new and exciting with them.
I’ve been a long-time fan of Matt’s work, and I know how hard he and his coworkers have toiled over this rebranding. Matt cares about the details. Imprint is fantastic, and I’m excited they can finally share it.
