MarsEdit 5 is a major upgrade to the preeminent Mac app for editing WordPress, Micro.blog, Tumblr, and many other types of blogs.
The new microposting feature makes it as easy to post to your own blog as it is to post to social media. When MarsEdit 5 is running on your Mac, just press a configurable global keyboard shortcut, write out your latest thoughts, and instantly publish to your blog.
Known as an app launcher and Spotlight replacement, Alfred can supercharge a wide range of tasks across macOS. This week on MPU, we discuss David’s new Field Guide on Alfred and our use of the application.
John Siracusa, writing at Hypercritical:
As far as I’m concerned, the only truly mortal sin for Apple’s leadership is losing sight of the proper relationship between product virtue and financial success—and not just momentarily, but constitutionally, intransigently, for years. Sadly, I believe this has happened.
The preponderance of the evidence is undeniable. Too many times, in too many ways, over too many years, Apple has made decisions that do not make its products better, all in service of control, leverage, protection, profits—all in service of money.
As I wrote about earlier this week, xAI has broken ground on a second data center on Tulane Road here in Memphis that will require an unbelievable amount of electricity. Today, the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce sent an email saying:
xAI is demobilizing turbines in Shelby County and has no plans to site any turbines at its Tulane location. The company continues to evaluate various power solutions for its Memphis facilities while working within all applicable regulatory frameworks.
Dyana Bagby, writing in 2024 for Georgia Public Broadcasting, the PBS/NPR affiliate in Atlanta:
The Atlanta City Council voted Tuesday, Sept. 3, to ban data centers along and near the Atlanta BeltLine and within a half-mile of MARTA stations.
The new legislation aims to preserve new residential and mixed-use developments, trails and green space along the 22-mile BeltLine trail loop encircling the city’s urban core. The council also wants to make sure the BeltLine remains focused on building more affordable housing and providing a safe space for pedestrians, cyclists and others in non-vehicular modes of transportation.
This week on the podcast, I answer questions about my new two-phone lifestyle, Myke wonders what Eddy Cue knows that he doesn’t, and then we discuss the Motorola ROCKR and last week’s injunction against Apple over its App Store policies.
Ariel Wittenberg for Politico, writing about xAI’s use of gas turbines to power its supercomputer in Memphis:
Just three miles away is Boxtown, a secluded neighborhood that officially became part of the city of Memphis in 1968, the year that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel downtown. While the annexation had come with the promise of connecting Boxtown to municipal utilities, many homes still had no running water or sewage service as late as the 1970s.
After linking to that New Yorker article about xAI using gas turbines to help power its first supercomputer here in Memphis, I opened my RSS client to see this article by The Daily Memphian’s Samuel Hardiman who writes:
Memphis Light, Gas and Water said Monday, May 5, that artificial intelligence company xAI’s second Memphis datacenter could require enough electricity to equal 40% of Shelby County’s demand.
On its website, the City of Memphis-owned utility said that xAI and the utility have discussed using up to 1.1 gigawatts of power at its Tulane Road datacenter. However, the utility said that amount of power is not poised to be delivered soon and is not being formally studied by MLGW.
Nick Heer, writing about rumors that the 2027 iPhone will feature a “truly edge-to-edge display:”
I know the Dynamic Island was a clever way of transforming a necessary hardware compromise into a signature feature, albeit an imperfect one. This is a fun visual design problem to have: a hardware improvement to the iPhone will, in time, render some well-considered software obsolete. I imagine this all-screen iPhone will be self-evidently cool and, so, the Dynamic Island just goes away. But I am curious.
I’ve been paying close attention to the on-going saga of xAI’s Memphis-based supercomputer, and how the company seems to be misleading both the public and our local officials on how much pollution it is causing.
The story is now gaining national attention. Bill McKibben at The New Yorker ( Apple News+ link) writes:
Memphis was, indeed, home to Elvis—but it was also, of course, where Martin Luther King, Jr., who came to the city to support striking sanitation workers, was assassinated, and it remains a place of sharp economic and racial division. It will surprise no one to learn that the neighborhoods in South Memphis surrounding Musk’s facility—including Boxtown and Westwood—are predominantly Black and also home to a number of industrial facilities, including chemical plants and an oil refinery. The area already has elevated levels of pollution compared with leafier precincts, and, according to Politico’s E&E News, “already leads the state in emergency department visits for asthma.” Those same neighborhoods came together at the beginning of the decade to fight, and ultimately defeat, the proposed forty-nine-mile-long crude-oil Byhalia pipeline, which would have run through the area. In that process, a new political star emerged: Justin Pearson, a young African American who rode that battle into the state legislature (from which he was later expelled for joining an anti-gun-violence protest on the floor of the Tennessee House after a shooting at a Christian school, only to soon be reappointed by the county and reëlected to office in the next election).
On September 1, 2016, a SpaceX Falcon 9 exploded while on the launchpad, leading the loss of an Israeli communications satellite:
In the weeks after the failure, it was reported that some at SpaceX (including Elon Musk) thought the accident could have been caused by a sniper firing at the rocket from the roof of a United Launch Alliance building a mile away. Now, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Eric Berger, we know just how hard the company pushed this theory with the government:
Do you love the Apple Notes document scanner, but would you like more flexibility in sending the scans to email, messages, files, or other apps? Then Simple Scan is for you. Simple Scan is the quick, easy way to scan paper documents to optimized, searchable PDF documents (or images) and send them almost anywhere.
Features include: