The iMac G4 is one of my favorite designs to ever come out of Apple. If you aren’t familiar with it, this PDF is a great place to start.
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Liftoff #14: Outside the Gates⇢
During the last fortnight, humankind detected gravitational waves for the first time and Jason spent some time at NASA’s Ames Research Center.
My thanks to these sponsors:
- Luminos: A fantastic astronomy app, 10 years in the making! Now with an Apple Watch app for skygazing!
- Squarespace: Build it beautiful. Use code ‘LIFTOFF’ for 10% off.
Mac System 1.0⇢
Dan Vanderkam, writing in 1998, about the very first version of the Mac’s operating system:
OK, the last first glimpse difference is probably the biggest shocker. In the disk, you can see the icon of a system folder. You can also see that there’s only 196K in the disk! This means that the system folder on it must be positively tiny! Well, as you can see from the list view at the right, that’s darned true. Yes, that’s the COMPLETE system folder! For some comparison, look at it this way: In system 7, the scrapbook file alone is usually twice as large as this system folder! Ahh, if only apple still made things this small. Nowadays, a full system folder easily tops 100 megs, and can easily have over a thousand items in it. A thousand! That’s a far cry from the six that made up the original system folder.
The Malware Museum⇢
Relive some of the horror of the 1990s:
The Malware Museum is a collection of malware programs, usually viruses, that were distributed in the 1980s and 1990s on home computers. Once they infected a system, they would sometimes show animation or messages that you had been infected. Through the use of emulations, and additionally removing any destructive routines within the viruses, this collection allows you to experience virus infection of decades ago with safety.
Creative Cloud nuking hidden folder content⇢
We’ve encountered an issue on the Mac where Adobe Creative Cloud appears to be removing the contents of the first hidden folder at the root of the drive, in alphabetic order. By happenstance, the first hidden folder on most Backblaze customer’s internal drive is the .bzvol folder.
WTF, Adobe. This is why we can’t have nice things; I guess this is a vote in favor of enforced sandboxing on the Mac.
My Notebook Dilemma
Currently, I’m using a Mid 2015 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display. It has an 2.5 Ghz i7, 16 GB of RAM and a 1 TB of SSD storage. It’s the fastest, most capable Mac I’ve ever owned.
I bought it right before going independent with Relay FM. I knew that I’d have a desk at home as well as space at an office I share with my brother’s non-profit.
I went with the 15-inch because I thought I’d be using it as a notebook way more than I actually do. Both of my desks have external displays, keyboards and mice. I simply show up, plug my computer in and hit the ground running with whatever I need to get done. I’m carrying a 15-inch laptop that lives most of its life as a desktop replacement. At home, the MacBook Pro doesn’t even get to be opened; I have it perched in a BookArc: 
Physicists detect gravitational waves⇢
A team of physicists who can now count themselves as astronomers announced on Thursday that they had heard and recorded the sound of two black holes colliding a billion light-years away, a fleeting chirp that fulfilled the last prophecy of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
That faint rising tone, physicists say, is the first direct evidence of gravitational waves, the ripples in the fabric of space-time that Einstein predicted a century ago. And it is a ringing (pun intended) confirmation of the nature of black holes, the bottomless gravitational pits from which not even light can escape, which were the most foreboding (and unwelcome) part of his theory.
NASA’s 2017⇢
Jason Snell, writing for Yahoo Tech:
While the give and take between NASA and Congress is sure to go on — with the election of a new president later this year as a complicating factor — the fact is that NASA has a $19 billion budget for 2016 and a $19 billion budget proposed for 2017. Here’s some of what the agency is planning on doing with that money.
Kbase Article of the Week: AirPort Card Replacement Instructions for the PowerMac G4 Cube⇢
Got a Cube, but Ethernet has you down? This PDF is your friend.
Connected #77: This Feels Like Therapy To Me⇢
On this week’s Connected, This week, Federico and I discuss the culture surrounding app updates and answer some listener questions.
Upgrade #75: You Are Terrible to Sick People⇢
This week, with Myke on sick leave, I joined Jason Snell to talk about Apple’s first-party apps, the future of the Mac and VR pizza.
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