posts

Thanks to Cameron Kaiser’s excellent blog Old Vintage Computing Research, I have a growing interest in the Apple Network Server line of computers. One of Kaiser’s posts mentions the ANS 300, a model I wasn’t familiar with at the time.

Turns out, it is wild. Tom Owad wrote about it back in 2004:

The Apple Network Servers are high end servers built by Apple that run IBM’s AIX variant of UNIX. Pictured above is the Apple Network Server 700, Apple’s top-of-the-line server with a 180 MHz PPC 604e processor, two power supplies, 7 removable drive bays and 2 fixed drives. The ANS 500 had a slightly lesser configuration, with a 132 MHz 604e, only one power supply, and 7 removable drive bays. Both have locking wheels on the bottom (handy since the unit weighs about 80 pounds!) and a locking/sliding 3-position translucent door to cover the drive bays. The power supplies are removable via a handle behind the purple removable “grille” in the bottom. These units were specifically designed to be highly serviceable yet very secure.

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I joined Jason Snell, Andy Ihnatko, and Shelly Brisbin on this week’s show to talk about our iPhone Duo impressions, reports of cracking phones, and Apple’s busy week of releases.

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If you are looking for a Duo, you may get lucky at your local Apple Store. I was at mine half an hour before opening, was the first person in line, and one of just three folks who were able to buy one.

I have like 90 minutes of time with it, but uhhhh this phone is weird.

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Same designs as before, now just a good bit faster.

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Do you read Markdown on your Mac? Plans, notes, READMEs, the files your AI writes for you all day? Then why not make every one of them a pleasure to read? Mardo is the best Markdown viewer ever made. Select any Markdown file in the Finder, press Space, and Quick Look shows it beautifully rendered — tables, code, diagrams, math, and all.

Then watch it come alive. Leave that preview open while Claude Code, Codex, or any other app rewrites the file, and every change arrives in real time, right there in Quick Look, without moving you from the line you were reading. And when a file gets enormous, Mardo doesn’t flinch. It opens a 50 GB Markdown file in about an eighth of a second and lets you jump anywhere in it instantly.

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No ProMotion feels like a miss, but the water and dust resistance is pretty cool.

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A post from November 2021 titled The 14-inch MacBook Pro Resets the Timeline is one of my favorite things I’ve written in the 18-year history of 512 Pixels. In it, I reviewed the first 14-inch MacBook Pro as if the 2016-era MacBook Pros never existed.

But of course, they did exist, and were announced ten years ago this week. Here’s a bit from Apple Newsroom back on October 27, 2016:

Apple today introduced the thinnest and lightest MacBook Pro ever, along with a breakthrough interface that replaces the traditional row of function keys with a brilliant, Retina-quality Multi-Touch display called the Touch Bar. The new MacBook Pro features Apple’s brightest and most colorful Retina display yet, the security and convenience of Touch ID, a more responsive keyboard, a larger Force Touch trackpad and an audio system with double the dynamic range. It’s also the most powerful MacBook Pro ever, featuring sixth-generation quad-core and dual-core processors, up to 2.3 times the graphics performance over the previous generation, super-fast SSDs and up to four Thunderbolt 3 ports.

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My thanks to Rogue Amoeba for sponsoring the site this week. Their app SoundSource adds powerful audio controls to your Mac that you’ll be glad to have. Save 20% with code 512SOUND.

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This link — which you gotta manually open in your browser — is the best thing I’ve seen on the Internet in a long time.

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Jason Snell:

In researching the Designed in California series, I was struck by just how quickly the iPod’s importance was overshadowed by the iPhone. There are barely more than five years between the launch of the iPod and the launch of the iPhone. While both products took time to grow into their markets, I think it’s still the case that the true “iPod era” was only a handful of years long, and it’s been entirely overshadowed by the product that came after it.

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After a decade-long hiatus, David Smith’s Check the Weather app is back. Here’s Underscore on Mastodon:

While I was learning to build for the Duo, I wanted to make an app that made sense in ALL the different poses. So of course I made a weather app! After a 10-year hiatus, Check the Weather is back, with a delightful new design that’s as flexible as the weather is changeable.

I’m a big weather radar nerd and wanted an app that put radar front and center, while still giving quick access to all essential info.

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Other than the lack of color in the app icon, I like a lot about this. IT IS LITERALLY LIQUID AND GLASS.

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