Ask any music lover about vinyl, and they’ll likely point to the warmth and dynamic quality of its sound. Now ask any music lover who also appreciates beautiful design and craftsmanship, and they’ll add that vinyl demands a machine as beautiful as the sound it emits. San Diego–based record console maker Wrensilva has been working at that intersection since 2016, treating its audio systems as pieces of furniture as much as machines for playing music. With the release of the Studio in White Oak, Wrensilva brings one of its most requested finishes to its smallest console.

Photography courtesy of Wrensilva

The White Oak finish is a natural evolution of the Studio console, released earlier this year. Already available on The Standard and M1 designs, the White Oak variation is now available on Wrensliva’s most compact model. At 31 inches wide by 17 inches deep and 33 inches tall, the Studio is designed to fit into smaller spaces without sacrificing the all-in-one functionality of the larger consoles. Building on the success of the original model, the new White Oak finish offers a lighter, breezier take on The Studio’s timeless design and construction.

Photography courtesy of Wrensilva

“White Oak has always been one of our most requested woods by both interior designers and customers. We love working with it due to its durability and easy elegance,” says Debra Salyer, co-founder and head of design at Wrensilva. “It has a certain soothing quietness to the grain and wood tone; I find the combination of the oak with the natural colored speaker screens lends a nice earthiness to a variety of decor schemes ranging from contemporary to even rustic interiors.”

Photography courtesy of Wrensilva

Attention extends down to the grain itself: The wood is milled to favor rift-sawn and quarter-sawn patterns over cathedral graining, creating a cleaner, more contemporary appearance.

The White Oak is paired with natural speaker fabric and caramel leather pockets, then finished with a water-based topcoat. The front door, carved with an undulating pattern, adds depth and movement while subtly improving acoustic performance; behind it is storage for up to 40 albums. Lift the smoked acrylic lid to access the turntable deck, where warm backlighting illuminates the lid and signature brass Wrensilva brandmark.

Photography courtesy of Wrensilva

Wrensilva’s signature sound remains unchanged in the White Oak edition. Developed in collaboration with Manny Marroquin, Giles Martin, and friends from the music community, the Studio pairs a floating, under-platter, belt-driven turntable with solid-state electronics, a 100-watt-per-channel Class D amplifier, and custom two-way bass-reflex speakers. Premium details include a frosted acrylic platter, one-piece magnesium tonearm, and Ortofon 2M Red cartridge.

Despite its decidedly analog appearance, the Studio isn’t limited to records. Listeners can switch between vinyl, Bluetooth, auxiliary input, and optional Sonos multi-room audio, allowing the console to accommodate contemporary listening habits alongside a record collection.

Photography courtesy of Wrensilva

The Studio in White Oak is now available at wrensilva.com and select DWR studios, starting at $9,900.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

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The worst part is how she's wearing a suit instead of an event t-shirt with holes in it.

The catastrophic hack of at least thousands of FBI officials’ personal data, including their addresses, phone numbers, and even their spouses, includes members of the FBI’s secretive hacking team, potentially revealing who exactly is in that unit, 404 Media has found.

The findings further highlight how sensitive the stolen data is, and how valuable it may be to criminals or to foreign intelligence agencies. There is very little public information about the FBI’s hacking unit, including the operations it conducts, the tools it uses, or which agents are part of it.

The FBI said in a statement it “is aware of a cyber-criminal enterprise group claiming a compromise of the FBIJobs.gov portal and alleged impact to FBI employee personally identifiable information (PII). While the point of breach is still undetermined — whether a third-party or the FBI’s enterprise — we are actively and aggressively investigating this matter and working closely with those third-party providers that support FBIJobs.gov to mitigate any and all risk.”

404 Media first broke news of the breach on Tuesday. The group responsible, ShinyHunters, shared a list of 5,000 alleged FBI officials with 404 Media. 404 Media verified parts of the data by cross-referencing it with open source records available in the research tool OSINT Industries, and previously compromised data in Darkside, a tool made by cybersecurity company District 4.

As well as the officials’ personal information, the list of 5,000 officials includes each person’s job title or team. Those include titles such as Special Agent, Threat Intake Examiner, and Major Cyber Crimes Unit. Reuters reported on Wednesday some of the job titles include those related to investigating China or Russia. 

404 Media found three of the entries in the data specifically mention “remote operations units.” The Remote Operations Unit, or ROU, is the FBI’s hacking unit. For much of the previous decade, the ROU was focused on making and deploying tools to investigate the dark web, according to a 2020 report from the Office of the Inspector General. The ROU was “instrumental” in developing the network investigative technique (NIT) — the FBI’s parlance for a hacking tool — the agency deployed on a dark web child abuse site the FBI ran for two weeks in order to identify site visitors.

After budget decreases, its focus has shifted to tools for national security investigations, the report says. Much of the rest of that report discussing the ROU is redacted.

The parts of the hacked data related to the ROU expose each person’s address, a list of phone numbers for them, and in some cases the name of their spouses and their phone numbers. 404 Media searched one of the ROU official’s phone numbers in Darkside, and found previously breached data indicating they used to work for the Secret Service.

One person in the data also appears to be a student, with the data describing them as a “student workforce trainee.”

The ROU has previously used classified hacking tools in ordinary criminal investigations, raising questions over whether defendants were able to scrutinize how evidence against them was collected.

You may have noticed that Apple has made our summers quite busy in recent years, keeping us on our toes by introducing first visionOS, then Apple Intelligence, then Liquid Glass. Relatively speaking, this summer’s operating system updates were a breath of fresh air! We do love new technology and we’ve enjoyed working with each new thing—but this summer we were relieved to update our apps to reflect Apple’s refinements from the last few years, rather than adapting our products for yet another new major technology launch. (Naturally, that reprieve didn’t last long! We now only have a handful of weeks to get ready for the launch of the iPhone Duo announced last week.)

First things first: we’re pleased to report all of our apps are ready for all of Apple’s platform updates, compatible universally across the board. This is no small juggling act, with OmniGraffle supporting three platforms, OmniOutliner and OmniPlan supporting four platforms, and OmniFocus supporting five platforms—especially while we’re simultaneously pushing forward on new major features of our own for each product.

We know that many of you want to be productive on the new operating systems right away, so it’s a priority for you that our apps be ready as soon as possible—and thus it’s a priority for us. We have a good track record of being available “day and date,” but that’s not automatic and there are no guarantees: our track record comes from prioritizing that work. So this year, as always, it’s a relief to be able to say today, on day one, that “we’re ready.”

Of course, each summer we also try to go beyond that foundation of basic compatibility to take advantage of whatever new developments Apple is introducing. This summer, that meant adapting our apps for this year’s refinements to Liquid Glass, while exploring how our apps can best leverage new capabilities coming with Apple’s refinements to Apple Intelligence and Siri AI.

So, what’s ready, and what’s changed?

OmniFocus 4.9 adds support for Siri AI, optional new date parsing assistance via Apple Intelligence, and a range of new and updated App Intents exposed as Shortcuts actions. Alongside full compatibility with macOS 27 Golden Gate, iOS 27, iPadOS 27, watchOS 27, and visionOS 27, this release fine-tunes design elements throughout OmniFocus and introduces a new option for customizing the behavior of the Perspectives Bar on iPhone.

OmniOutliner 6.3 includes new Liquid Glass refinements across all Apple’s platforms, making the app feel more at home on the new operating systems.

Our other apps which are now compatible with ‘OS 27 include: OmniPlan 4.11 (for all platforms), OmniGraffle 7.26 for Mac and OmniGraffle 3.23 for iPad and iPhone, and OmniPresence 1.10. (Even the latest test builds of OmniDiskSweeper and OmniWeb have been updated.)

On the automation front, we’ve added new API to OmniFocus and OmniOutliner that humans and tools can use to search the Omni Automation API. (How meta!) This means that as we work towards implementing the Model Context Protocol (MCP), that interface can be much more efficient by giving tools the ability to write scripts while only pulling in the documentation needed for the task at hand.

While building these updates, we explored how our apps can leverage new capabilities with Apple’s refinements to Apple Intelligence and Siri AI, as well as finding out what Siri and Apple Intelligence can and cannot do at this time.

Built for the Future of Siri AI and Apple Intelligence

Apple has built a really great foundation for the future of Siri. Siri started out answering questions about things it could find on the Internet (stock prices, sports scores, and so on). It grew to control your device in simple ways (start a timer, etc.) that expanded over the years. Now, leveraging Apple Intelligence, Siri AI understands a lot more of what we say, and has access to the personal context we already have on our devices—putting that information to use, while still keeping it private and under your control.

Giving Siri access to personal context is a big advance. I’ve always been able to search my computer for a locally stored document, but with Siri I can now ask questions about the content stored in those documents. I trust my computer with that content—it already lives on my device, after all—so it’s incredibly powerful to be able to ask the computer to reference and do something with it.

Let’s say we just had a meeting, and a team member sent out the minutes. I can ask Siri to create reminders in OmniFocus for the follow up items from that meeting. All of this can be done while keeping my data private and secure, on devices that are under my control. The system doesn’t need to copy my data elsewhere; it just has new ways of working with this data it already has.

It’s a tremendous leap forward for those of us who like to control our own data. And it’s still early days for this technology: we see potential for more progress in the future.

That said, there are some important limits worth noting.

In our testing we’ve found that the new Siri AI hasn’t yet learned how to work with app capabilities that it hasn’t specifically been trained on, even for App Intents that are available in Shortcuts and Spotlight. For example, its understanding of how to work with OmniFocus is based on how it’s been trained to work with the Reminders app. Our work in OmniFocus 4.9 means that Siri now knows about “reminders” in OmniFocus (i.e. actions and Inbox items), “lists” (i.e. projects) which contain reminders, and any “groups” (i.e. folders) that lists have been organized into. Siri can assign and edit reminder due dates, flags, repeat schedules, and notes and image attachments in OmniFocus. This is another great leap forward! But as soon as you try to go beyond what Reminders can do, you find its limits: for example, it doesn’t understand the distinction between due dates, planned dates, and defer dates.

Siri also doesn’t really understand much about how our document-based apps work, because Apple hasn’t trained it on our specific apps or anything equivalent. So, Siri doesn’t know how to make an outline, or a diagram, or a Gantt chart. We expect this to improve over time—after all, we’ve worked with other language models that do understand how to make those things—but it’s important to understand Siri’s current limits.

Siri now knows what’s on the screen, which gives it a lot more context than it used to have. And Siri has some ability to manipulate things on the screen—sometimes. However, Siri doesn’t actually know how to fully control the screen. It doesn’t yet understand how to activate controls, or invoke commands from menus such as our plug-in actions. Fortunately, on macOS Voice Control can fill that particular gap, and a few years ago we did a lot of work to implement Voice Control: with one install, you can control every menu command in OmniFocus using your voice. Voice Control and Siri are designed to work together cooperatively. You can ask Siri to do something; then use Voice Control to open a window, switch perspectives, or run a plug-in; then go back to talking with Siri. (To learn more, check out OmniFocus Voice Control page put together by our automation expert, Sal Soghoian.)

Taking a step back, a fundamental limit to understand is that language models are not perfect oracles. Models generate statistically probable responses to prompts, not actual answers to questions. Models don’t know fact from fiction. You can ask Siri questions about what it can and can’t do and try to explore its limitations, and it will make up plausible responses to those prompts. But those answers are often just made up, or regurgitated from its training set without true understanding. The answers may sound authoritative, but that doesn’t mean they actually reflect reality.

Overall, though, it’s exciting to see how much more capable Siri has become. And I haven’t even covered everything! Beyond Siri’s traditional capabilities, beyond personal context and improved language processing, Siri now also has Visual Intelligence to gather information from the world around you—combining Optical Character Recognition (OCR), handwriting recognition, shape recognition, and other visual AI technologies. For example, you can pick up a note with hand-written action items and ask Siri to add those items to OmniFocus. Or you can take a picture of a whiteboard and ask Siri to do things with that input.

Spotlight has been an important Mac technology for decades, and our apps have had strong support for Spotlight since it was first introduced in 2005. With Siri AI, Spotlight becomes even more important as a source for personal context. You can ask Siri about content in your OmniFocus database, so Siri can summarize the actions you’ve completed this week, or tell you what items you might consider working on soon.

There’s a lot here to celebrate! Apple’s advances are great. And, as noted above, we never take for granted that we’ll make our goal of having all our apps compatible on the day and date that the operating systems are released; so it’s a huge relief to have all of that work done. We celebrate that those updates are shipping!

Also, last week we celebrated the 34th anniversary of the Omni Group (the date we registered omnigroup.com)! Speaking of things we never take for granted, 34 years is quite a long time. Looking back at 1992, the Soviet Union had just dissolved at the end of the previous year. Meanwhile, from our neck of the woods in Seattle, Nirvana had taken over the music charts, and the novel Snow Crash had just popularized terms like “metaverse” and “avatar.” And, especially relevant to our tech world, NeXT was just shipping NeXTSTEP 3.0.

When we say this is our anniversary, “our” includes you: we couldn’t have made it this far without you. Thank you for supporting us through all these years! Of course, we’re looking forward to celebrating our 35th year next year as we continue this journey with you.

This is the original logo used by the Omni Group from 1992 until the Aqua redesign in 2001. (I created this on a NeXT using Pixar’s RenderMan with a hand-written text RIB source file, back when 3D renderings of marble carvings were still novel.)

(At the Omni Group, we make powerful productivity apps which help you accomplish more every day. Feedback? I’d love to hear from you! You can find me on Mastodon at @kcase@mastodon.social, or send me email at kc@omnigroup.com.)

Scientists have discovered that the removal of Earth's magnetic field influences the lifespans of fruit flies in complex ways, a finding that sheds light on the aging process as well as the risks of future human space travel, according to a study published in the journal Aging on Wednesday. 

All life on Earth has evolved under the planet’s geomagnetic field, a vast bubble lined with electrical currents that is generated in the core and extends out into space. This protective magnetic shield is a major factor in Earth’s habitability, as it wards off harmful radiation from space, allowing life to flourish on the surface. 

Many migratory animals—including fish, birds, and insects—can clearly sense Earth’s magnetism and use it for navigation. But much less is known about how the field interacts with living cells and their components, such as mitochondria, the famous “powerhouses” that generate most of the energy that fuels life.

To better understand this mystery, scientists observed two populations of fruit flies in a “hypomagnetic” shield system, a cylindrical benchtop apparatus that essentially blocks the influence of Earth’s magnetic field. One group contained “wild-type” healthy flies, while the other was made up of “mutant” flies carrying a gene defect called Pink1, which is associated with early-onset Parkinson’s disease in humans and specifically involves mitochondrial dysfunction.

The removal of the magnetic field’s effect extended the lifespan of the Pink1 group by 20 percent but reduced their mobility, whereas the healthy flies experienced just the opposite—reduced lifespan, but improved mobility. 

“We had an idea that there would be a difference just based on the fact that we know that every organism has developed under a magnetic field,” said Jacob Reed, a PhD student in bioscience at the University of Nottingham who co-led the study, in a call with 404 Media. “But we didn't really plan that there would be this difference in the experiment.”

“I think we're the first to show that there's an effect in an organism that has a disease phenotype,” added co-lead Lisa Chakrabarti, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Nottingham, in the same call. “We're really drilling into what the differences are between having that applied pressure or relieving it.”  

While there is a lot of research into the effects of hypermagnetic fields on life—meaning magnetic fields that are stronger than Earth’s—the “biological consequences of hypomagnetic fields remain poorly understood,” according to the new study.

To fill in this research gap, Reed developed an initial pilot study of diseased and healthy flies using the magnetic shielding apparatus, and was surprised to find that the Pink1 population of flies seemed to live longer.

“I was really confused at first,” Reed recalled. “I was thinking: ‘Why are these Parkinson's flies living longer than some of the wild-type flies?’ I had to double-check all of my data. From that, we realized that was what's happening and developed the experiment.”

The team observed dozens of diseased and healthy flies living in these hypomagnetic spaces over the course of their lives, which normally last about two months. In particular, they monitored shifts in the energy metabolisms and chemical outputs of mitochondria using quantum diamond sensors. 

The experiment showed that the absence of Earth’s magnetic field changes how cells age and produce energy, producing clear and measurable effects on longevity. The researchers also saw shifts in locomotion by tracking how far flies climbed upward against gravity in their containers. However, it will take more research to unravel the complex mechanisms that underlie these observable changes.

“This is the early stage, where we can say there is a very real effect,” Chakrabarti said. “As soon as you take off the geomagnetic field, there are physiological effects that we can measure in the mitochondria, in the cellular physiology, and in big things like lifespan and climbing as well. It's a definite interaction between Earth's magnetic field and physiology.” 

The researchers plan to build on their work by studying different organisms in hypomagnetic fields to see if they experience similar mitochondrial and behavioral changes. This work could eventually inspire therapeutic treatments for humans with various conditions, and could also help prepare astronauts for deep space missions beyond Earth’s magnetic field. It is already well-known that astronauts are exposed to harmful radiation outside of the magnetic field, but little is known about the specific impact of the absence of the field itself on human physiology.

“The link with interplanetary space travel is absolutely key,” said Chakrabarti. “There could be subtle differences that we don't really notice while we're on Earth. Unless we know what those parameters are to measure, we're going to be sending astronauts up there that are potentially going to really suffer over the short, or even or the longer, term.”

“All of this is out there at the moment, but what we're saying is that we definitely see a really reproducible and startling effect of removing the geomagnetic field,” she concluded.