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512 Pixels

512 Pixels is a blog covering Apple, computer history, design, and other fine nerdery, written by Stephen Hackett.

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xAI Purchases North Mississippi Site

512 Pixels ·

2025/07/18

It appears that xAI has purchased the former natural gas plant in Southaven, Mississippi that the company was eyeing for electricity generation. Samuel Hardiman, for The Daily Memphian: The land, a former natural gas plant located at 2875 Stanton Road, is just off Tulane Road, which also extends north into Memphis and is the same […]

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Microsoft’s Mac Lab

512 Pixels ·

2025/07/18

In a group chat earlier, a buddy of mine brought up Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit and I had a flashback to this 2006 blog post by David Weiss: I’m going to write a little bit more about what I do to help MacBU ship great software and provide some color around what’s it’s like to […]

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Calm Down, CarPlay

512 Pixels ·

2025/07/17

This morning, I pressed the little button on my Tacoma’s steering wheel to trigger Siri in CarPlay. I asked it to start a text to Myke Hurley. As you can imagine, this is something I do often when driving. Instead of asking me what I wanted to say, Siri inquired about what app I wanted […]

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Apple Reseller Training: The Power Macintosh

512 Pixels ·

2025/07/17

If you were an Apple Reseller in 1994 and were curious about Apple’s move to the RISC-based PowerPC platform, this video was for you:

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Ars Technica Spent a Week with CarPlay Ultra

512 Pixels ·

2025/07/17

Michael Teo Van Runkle drove a Aston Martin DB12 Volante for a week for a blog post. As one does.

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The Shelby County Health Department Accused of...

512 Pixels ·

2025/07/16

As previously reported, the NAACP and Southern Environmental Law Center have been planning to sue xAI over its use of gas-burning turbines to power its datacenter in Memphis. As Ashley Belanger writes at Ars Technica, the groups are appealing the new government-issued permit by which 15 of the turbines are operating: In their appeal, the […]

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Apple Seminar: The Power Macintosh

512 Pixels ·

2025/07/16

If you were a professional Mac user in 1994 and were curious about Apple’s move to the RISC-based PowerPC platform, this video was for you:

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Grok Update Includes Sexually-Explicit AI Character

512 Pixels ·

2025/07/16

On Monday, xAI updated its Grok app with two new AI-powered characters that users can chat with. As Casey Newton writes at Platformer, one of the characters seemingly runs headlong into Apple’s App Store rules about “overtly sexual or pornographic material.” Here’s Newton, writing about the spicy one: The other is an anime goth girl […]

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On the Rumored Slate of iPhone 17 Colors

512 Pixels ·

2025/07/16

Filipe Esposito at Macworld: To recap, some leakers have already reported on the potential colors for some of the models in the iPhone 17 family. For instance, a leaker known as Majin Bu said that Apple had been experimenting with purple and green versions of the iPhone 17 base model. The leaker also claims that […]

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Upgrading an Opal Tadpole Webcam

512 Pixels ·

2025/07/15

Rafa Conde put together a cool little project and outlined it on Mastodon: Today I decided to open up my Opal Tadpole webcam, because I was curious to see how they managed to make it so small… and to my surprise the camera was not installed directly to the board, but with a cable instead!

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Sponsor: MarsEdit 5

512 Pixels ·

2025/07/14

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 […]

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WWDC 2001: Make it Aqua

512 Pixels ·

2025/07/14

Another fun old Apple video to kick off the week:

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Mac Power Users #805: The Most MPU Possible

512 Pixels ·

2025/07/13

On this feedback episode, David and I answer listener questions about Apple’s current betas, then revisit networking, dictation, email, going paperless, and more. This one really hits all the classic MPU topics.

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LisaGUI

512 Pixels ·

2025/07/11

Andrew Yaros has rebuilt the Lisa’s user interface on the web, and it is glorious: LisaGUI is a web OS inspired by the Lisa Office System, Apple’s first graphical user interface (GUI). It aims to perfectly recreate the Lisa’s iconic 1-bit UI directly in your browser.

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Capsule

512 Pixels ·

2025/07/10

My pals over at Snailed It Development have shipped a new iPhone app that I have really come to appreciate over the last several months I’ve had access to the beta. It’s called Capsule, and it’s a medication tracking app built with the attention to detail only a group of indie developers could deliver. For […]

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Connected 560: I Wanna Put the Beast on My Face

512 Pixels ·

2025/07/09

This week on the show: Samsung has new folding phones, Liquid Glass has a new look, and Apple has a new COO.

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The State of Mac Hardware in 1999

512 Pixels ·

2025/07/09

I had only seen parts of this old WWDC session before this week, but it’s a fascinating one. The iMac segment in particular is fun, and the Macintosh Portable’s appearance caught me by surprise:

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A History of the Mac’s Settings

512 Pixels ·

2025/07/09

Marcin Wichary had put together something insanely great: As a designer, I’m meant to dislike settings. As a user, I love them. Every year I celebrate Settings Day: a day when I take a look at the options and toggles in all the apps I use. I do this out of curiosity – what was […]

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Grok Goes Full Nazi

512 Pixels ·

2025/07/09

Kate Conger at The New York Times: In its dedicated account on X, which Mr. Musk owns, the chatbot praised Hitler, suggested that people with Jewish surnames were more likely to spread online hate and said a Holocaust-like response to hatred against white people would be “effective.” X deleted some of the posts on Tuesday […]

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FireWire’s Introduction and Importance

512 Pixels ·

2025/07/08

If you’ve been wondering why so many of us are sad about the end of FireWire — despite it being well past its prime — you have to go back to its start. FireWire was first introduced with the “Blue and White” Power Mac G3 back in 1999. This is mine, a machine I used […]

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