I was playing around with my latest mini-project, an iMac G3 that I’m trying to get working, and I discovered an old relic. I was trying out various old hard drives of mine, to see which ones I could then use to install System 9.

What surprised me, was a single file in the root of the hard drive, named "blissful glitches.wav". Oh, and it was created on 1st September 2011.

I was pretty sure when I saw it what it most likely was. Because a very old hobby of mine was making and listening to Chiptune¹. So I assumed this was maybe a test recording I made. I personally used to use a program called LSDJ on a GameBoy to record my music, but I hardly ever actually finished something. But it turns out this one actually sounds finished.

After I listened to it, I could definitely remember the actual song, but I can’t remember anything about the creation, or when it actually happened. The date on the file is one thing, but it may not be the time I even recorded it from the GameBoy or even the time I started making it.

Anyway, I’ll cut to the chase.

Listen to blissful glitches.wav

Maybe this is where you ask for feedback, or “constructive criticism”. But I made this 7 years ago, and even back then, I always created for myself first.

Straight from the Instapaper blog:

To ensure Instapaper can continue for the foreseeable future, it’s essential that the product generates enough revenue to cover its costs. In order to do so, we’re relaunching Instapaper Premium today.

As a reminder, Instapaper Premium is a subscription for $2.99/month or $29.99/year that offers the following features:

• Full-text search for all articles in your account
• Unlimited Notes
• Text-to-Speech playlists on mobile
• Speed reading to get through all of your articles up to 3x faster
• An ad-free Instapaper website
• “Send to Kindle” using a bookmarklet or our mobile apps

Instapaper is back!

And that’s not all:

We are very sorry for the extended downtime and, as a token of our apology, we are giving six months of Instapaper Premium to all EU users affected by the outage.

I’m getting off Pocket this instant, and moving back to Instapaper.

Expect to hear more from me about this.

Matt Birchler:

9to5Mac has a good breakdown of what this jailbreak entails, but I will reiterate that you should not even think about finding this jailbreak. One, I don’t think that watchOS is really in need of a jailbreak community to push it forward right now, but two, this is an incredibly high risk jailbreak! – BirchTree

I completely agree with all the sentiments here.

If you were upset about Apple’s photo printing service no longer being available from the Photos app, you’ll be glad to know that the partner they used, Mimeo, now offer these identical services themselves.

“This is a real opportunity for us to expand our successes as a prominent Apple Photos extension since the beginning,” said John Delbridge, CEO, Mimeo. “We are really excited to see an increase in demand from countries like Australia and Japan in addition to our strong US customer base.”

It’s no longer integrated into the Photos app by default, but there is now the Mimeo Photos app, that will make the service available from Apple’s Photos app.

Lisa Brennan-Jobs (Daughter of Steve Jobs) has released an excerpt on Vanity Fair from her book, Small Fry.

It’s a long read, probably just over 10 minutes, but it’s yet another perspective at Steve’s life that not many would know about.

I can’t quote any single piece from it, I would end up including everything. All I can do is say – make sure you read it in it’s entirety.

Neil deGrasse Tyson talks with Brian Tong about his new series Cosmos: Possible Worlds and settles the world’s greatest debates! iPhone or Android? Kirk or Picard? Millennium Falcon or Enterprise? BB-8 or R2-D2?

A few things about Neil deGrasse Tyson you probably didn’t know before.

For now. Things change. A lot. And they’re hard to predict. – MKBHD

A very interesting video by Marques Brownlee (MKBHD), about why the Pixel 2 HD is no longer his daily Android phone, and also some opinions on how hardware can degrade over time.

I’m working on an app at work where I’m regularly implementing new sections/views. And I’ve become really fond of the “native” design look.
It’s something I’ve tried to do with TextCase and Slate, but it’s now spreading to my actual job.

I think it’s down to two facts:

• I like Apples design for apps.
• I don’t think users should have to “learn” a user interface.

There’s also a whole bunch of benefits you get from using native controls, such as accessibility support, and standard designs for certain contexts. An example of that is a system alert, where you specify if an action is a “cancel”, “destructive”, or “default”, and then the formatting is applied.

I’m not doing this as a way to make the apps feel more generic though, as I’m making use of accent colours, and in some cases, fonts, to make sure the “branding” still comes through.

Greg Kumparak, writing for Tech Crunch:

HipChat, the workplace chat app that held the throne before Slack was Slack, is being discontinued. Also being discontinued is Atlassian’s own would-be HipChat replacement, Stride.

I’m so happy about this. I use HipChat at work, because the company is invested in all of the Atlassian ecosystem. I’d much rather use Slack.

John Voorhees, the developer, podcast, and editor, has done an interview over at iPure. I must say it’s very fascinating, and there’s a sneak peak of something I’m sure a lot of people have been looking forward to.

How to get from apps development to writing for one of the best-known blogs about Apple? How works international team located over several continents? Who could replace Tim Cook? Our second interview with foreign speaker – John Voorhees, editor of MacStories.net and a passionate podcaster.