posts

Jay Peters, writing at The Verge:

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket experienced an engine failure after it launched late Thursday night from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The mission, Starlink Group 9-3, was carrying Starlink satellites and failed to reignite its upper second stage after developing a leak. “Upper stage restart to raise perigee resulted in an engine RUD for reasons currently unknown,” Elon Musk said overnight, confirming that the engine experienced a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.”

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While working on another project, I came across a Steve Jobs interview that I hadn’t heard before:

I know WebObjects is the butt of jokes these days, but hearing Jobs speak about in 1996 has given me a new appreciation for what NeXT was trying to do with it.

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The folks at DEVONtechnologies have a new free app out for Mac users, and it’s one that may seem familiar in some great ways:

You want to learn more about your Mac’s current network connection or test if a remote server is still alive or already swimming belly-up? Your connection to a server is slow and you want to find out more about what detours your data packages take on their way to their destination? Or you’re on the hotel Wi-Fi and plan to flip out on the poor network speed based on proper empirical data?

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Earlier this week, it was announced that Aqara was shipping its new smart lock, the U200.

For a while, I’ve been thinking about a product like this for the door to my studio, so I jumped on it, ordering the $269 lock from Amazon.¹ I got that scar on my thumb running Ethernet cable through my old house like 12 hours ago. Be careful with knives!

I don’t have much experience with products in this category, but I do have a bunch of Aqara water sensors stashed around the house, under sinks and in the pan for our hot water heater. I’m also a fan of their smart home switches for triggering HomeKit scenes easily.

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This week on Connected:

John Voorhees joins Stephen and Myke to discuss the origins of Bluetooth, Phil Schiller’s new/old job, and the possibilities of a new HomePod. Then, they play a BRAND NEW game from the creators of The Rickies, The Annies, the Jeremies, and others.

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Shawn Hickman’s excellent app Sofa has arrived on two more platforms:

I’m happy to announce that Sofa is now available on the Mac and Vision Pro!

I had originally planned to have Sofa ready for Vision Pro when it launched in February, but I was deep in the middle of working on Sofa 4.0 (which launched in April). During May, I was focused mostly on 4.0 bug fixes and prepping for my trip to WWDC in early June.

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I saw this story break last night, but couldn’t figure out a way to link to it without using some language that is firmly against the 512 Pixels Style Guide. What a disgusting thing to do.

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If you’re looking for a deal on a bunch of cool, indie software, this is the event for you.

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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 Twitter.” 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.

MarsEdit supports editing posts in rich or plain text, and the latest update is especially great for Markdown fans. Now when you’re writing Markdown in plain text mode, MarsEdit applies live, beautiful syntax highlighting to make it easier to focus separately on the content and style of your posts.

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This week on MPU, David and I are joined by Sigmund Judge to discuss Apple TV hardware, tvOS, Apple TV+ content, and more.

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While working on another project, I came across this video of Steve Jobs speaking at Macworld Expo in the fall of 1997. It’s a stunning video for a few reasons.

In it, he announces no products. Instead, he shared some thoughts on how he viewed the mess that Apple had found itself in before it purchased NeXT. In the span of about half an hour, he announced a new Board of Directors and a wide-ranging partnership with Microsoft, complete with Bill Gates making his now infamous appearance via satellite.

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While working on another project, I came across this delightful blog post by Jay at The House of Moth, about the Power Mac G5:

How many fans does a Power Mac G5 have? Depending on the configuration this answer varies but you can be almost sure the answer is always one short. Let’s take a look at the Late 2005 Quad in this example.

– 2 intake fans (front inlet fan assembly) – 2 exhaust fans (rear exhaust fan assembly) – 1 fan in the PCI bay (speaker assembly) – 1 fan for the hard drives (media bay fan)

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