Hello Friends,

The pups are tired after a week with Hapy and Denise to play with them.  It was a bit of thermal shock for them as it was in the 90's when they left Key West and around 6° when they got back to Vermont.  Nevertheless,  here in Florida, we are starting to hear spring-like things from up north like people getting ready to tap maple trees and preparations for town meetings.

The impact of the COVID-19 virus was felt by Apple as they warned that it would be hard for them to meet their projected revenue numbers due to a slow down of production as workers make their way through quarantine and travel restrictions to get back to work.  With millions still under quarantine and many factories and stores not open, Apple both warned that sales in China would suffer and that production delays could impact sales.

I have chatted with my friend who is under quarantine in China and she spends her days volunteering disinfecting stairways and elevators and says she mostly just stays inside her home.  She cannot travel back to work and dangerously goes out only to stock up on food.  Hopefully, the virus gets under control soon so that people can go about their normal lives.

Black History Month: Mathieu Da Costa and Lake Champlain

Mathieu Da Costa was a free Black African who in the early 1600s was employed as a translator by French and Dutch traders and explorers. He is thought to be the first Black man to have visited Canada.

It was not unusual for Africans to act as translators for Europeans as it had been going on for 100 years before Champlain's time as Europeans explored their way down the African coast. This explains why Da Costa spoke French, Dutch, and Portuguese. But it is a mystery how Da Costa knew how to be an interpreter with the First Nations of America. He might have used "pidgin" Basque (a mixture of Basque and local), commonly used for trade in the Americas. (The Basques of northern Spain were frequent visitors to the fishery along the Atlantic coast.) But it is also possible that Da Costa had previously spent time in the Americas and had learned the languages of one or more of the Aboriginal peoples.

The only real historical "fact" that we have about Mathieu Da Costa is a document showing that he was in Holland in February 1607. Apparently the Dutch had kidnapped him from the French. The following year, 1608, Da Costa signed a contract in Amsterdam that committed him to sail with or on behalf of Pierre Du Gua de Monts as an interpreter on voyages to Canada and Acadia.

Da Costa's contract with Du Gua de Monts was to last for three years and it paid a considerable salary. We can thus assume that Da Costa accompanied Du Gua de Monts and Samuel de Champlain on one or more of their voyages to Acadia and the St Lawrence area.

The next bit of information that we have is evidence that Da Costa was put in prison in Le Havre, France, in December 1609. We don't know why but there were references to "insolences" suggesting that Da Costa had an independent spirit and spoke his mind.

Da Costa's appearance in Canada is commemorated at the Port-Royal National Historic Site, in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia. The Mathieu Da Costa Challenge is an annual creative writing and artwork contest launched in 1996. The Challenge "encourages youth to discover how diversity has shaped Canada's history and the important role that pluralism plays in Canadian society."

Learn How to Examine Your iPhone’s Battery Usage

A common question we hear is, “Why is my iPhone/iPad battery draining so fast?” Luckily, Apple provides tools that help you see exactly how your iPhone uses its battery over the last 24 hours and—with less detail—over each of the last 10 days. Plus, you can tweak settings that will improve battery life, both in the here-and-now and for as long as you have your iPhone. To access these tools, go to Settings > Battery.

Useful Battery-Related Options

Before we get into what you can learn from the Battery screen, there are two options worth noting:

• First, on the main screen, you’ll find the Low Power Mode switch. If you’re worried about running out of power before you can recharge on a particular day, enable Low Power Mode. iOS automatically offers to enable it if your battery drops to 20%, and that’s a good idea unless you can plug in soon. Low Power Mode mostly disables background activity like mail fetching and photo syncing. (If you want to enable Low Power Mode regularly, make that easy by adding it to Control Center via Settings > Control Center > Customize Controls.)
• Second, tap Battery Health, and in that screen, enable Optimized Battery Charging. It lets iOS 13 learn from your schedule to ensure that your iPhone spends less time fully charged unnecessarily, which can cause the battery to age more quickly. Leave this option off if you don’t charge on a regular schedule.

About That Maximum Capacity Percentage

Whenever we hear complaints about iPhone batteries, the first place we look is in the Battery Health screen to make sure the battery is healthy. Apple says that iPhone batteries are designed to retain up to 80% of its original capacity after 500 charges. The higher the Maximum Capacity number, the better. Usually, anything above 90% is OK, although we start to hear of problems when the Maximum Capacity is in the upper 80s, and numbers below 85% are fairly likely to cause problems. The only solution to a battery with a low Maximum Capacity is replacement; contact us for our advice on the best way to do that.

Identifying Battery Hogs

Assuming the battery’s Maximum Capacity is high enough, the next place to look for what might be causing excessive battery drain is in the Battery Usage By App section of the Battery screen; look below the graphs, and tap Show Activity for more details.

Scrutinize the entries at the top because they’re the ones that have used the lion’s share of your power. In the screenshot above, No Cell Coverage (which causes the iPhone to waste power searching for cell towers) was the worst offender. You can’t do anything about that (unless it’s indicative of putting the iPhone somewhere it can’t receive a signal or a failing cellular radio).

For the apps underneath, make sure they’re not working too much in the background unnecessarily. “Unnecessarily” is key—if you see Photos at the top of your list and Show Activity reveals a lot of background activity, it’s probably related to it uploading or downloading a lot of images from iCloud Photos. But if you can’t imagine why a particular app is sucking down precious power, it’s time to force quit the app or power cycle the iPhone. And if the problem continues, it might be time to reset the iPhone and restore from backup, just to clean things up.

Analyzing Battery Usage

For figuring out which app might be causing unusual battery drain, it’s usually best to keep the time frame in the Last 24 Hours, but if you’re trying to track down a pattern of app behavior, it can be useful to switch to the Last 10 Days using the toggle above the graphs.

Most people don’t realize these graphs aren’t just pretty pictures. You can tap in the graphs to select 1-hour chunks of time in the Last 24 Hours graphs, or 1-day chunks in the Last 10 Days graphs. When you do that, the Battery Usage By App list changes to focus on just the apps used in the selected time period. That’s helpful for tracking down exactly what was happening when the battery drain took place.

We’d like to say that you can use these tools to figure out nearly anything that’s causing your battery to drop precipitously, but there are issues that the Battery screen doesn’t expose. For instance, after you upgrade to a new version of iOS or switch to a new iPhone, background tasks will likely work hard for a while indexing all the content on the device. Most issues like that should go away quickly, though.

Regardless, it’s worth looking in the Battery screen whenever you feel that your battery life isn’t what it should be. Whether it’s a rogue app or the revelation that you need a new battery, it will provide some guidance. And if you’re still in the dark, let us know, and we’ll see what we can do to help.

(Featured image by Tyler Lastovich from Pexels)

I find it sorta humorous to watch the politicians argue over health care. We pay more than twice what every other country pays for health care and we have millions uninsured or underinsured and our health results are not stellar.  We already pay more than any other country so I just do not understand the argument that says we cannot afford to give all of us health care as a human right!

Your Kibbles & Team,
Don and Emily