Halloween!

We need your help! Halloween is just around the corner and that means our annual Halloween contest is upon us. Each year we encourage all of our staff to dress up for Halloween. We take photos of everyone in their costumes and for those staff members who fail to dress up, it’s our chance to fine tune our photoshop skills and decide their costumes for them! We will be posting next Friday, October 30th, on our website a ballot and photos of all our staff in their Halloween best. Here is where our readers and customers come in, your votes decide who wins the best costume of 2015 and by voting you will be entered to win a prize as well.

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  • _Dear Friends,_

    It’s that time of year again; a few snowflakes fell over the weekend signaling that winter is around the corner. Don and Grace headed south earlier this week and officially bid farewell to winter before it even begins. Palm trees and beaches await them in sunny Key West. I have to be honest, I can’t say that I am a huge fan of winter either; winters are a lot of work! I have an aging horse barn that requires special care in the winter and frequent trips up on the roof to remove snow. My woodpile ends up inevitably buried in a cocoon of ice and snow by about mid-February and last year a new twist as our water hydrant in the barn froze up several times. However, this year I am going into the winter with a glass half full mentality. We built a brand new wood shed for our firewood and bid farewell to giant tarps keep our wood day. Next spring we will be building a new horse barn so with any luck this is the last winter of frequent shoveling and my oldest daughter and I have a season pass for skiing this winter. I am looking forward to winter this year!

    New emojis! **iOS 9.1** came out yesterday and if you’re a fan of emojis then this is the update for you. **iOS 9.1** features over 150 new emoji so you can easily have endless visual conversations with your friends. There are several new faces from the zipper mouth to money mouth, and you can update your friends on the forecast with new weather clouds and brag to your co-workers about your vacation spot with new scenery emoji. In playing with these new emoji we have found that recipients of these new emoji will also need to be on **iOS 9.1** to view them. We discovered these new images will appear as only a “?”. Other updates to **iOS 9.1** included “**security updates**”:https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205370 and included an update to live photos. Live photos will now sense when you raise or lower your iPhone so as to not record these movements. The live photos is still only a feature in the new iPhone 6s.

    This week I have put together an exclusive bundle for Kibbles subscribers only, save $25 on a “*Belkin Wemo light switch and outlet!*”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900001992/special-get-a-belkin-wemo-power-switch-and-wemo-led-lighting-starter-kit-for-74-99 A great way to add a touch of security to your home by turning on and off lights when your not there, or just wowing your friends when they come over to visit. My favorite use is to secretly plug our Christmas tree into the outlet and show my younger nieces and nephews during the holidays how to turn the tree on and off with a magic wave of my hand.

  • A HUD for Your Vehicle: HUDWAY & HUDWAY Glass

    I recently happened across a Kickstarter campaign for an interesting product called the “*HUDWAY Glass*”:https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/361842686/hudway-glass-keeps-your-eyes-on-the-road-while-dri: a car mount for iPhones and Android mobile devices which includes a special glass for use as a heads-up display (HUD). The Kickstarter has already been fully backed (as of this writing, well over 2x their original goal), so the HUDWAY Glass should get produced and sold for $49, which is a very fair price. They’ve already had an app on market for over a year called “*HUDWAY*”:http://hudwayapp.com/ (hence the name of the HUDWAY Glass mount itself), so I decided to give it a test drive (quite literally) over the past couple weeks.

    HUDs are very helpful for keeping your eyes on the road as you only need to refocus your eyes within your normal windshield view, keeping your view of the road and any obstacles still in the background. It’s surprising how far you can go at highway speeds in the second it takes you to look down at your speedometer and back up (95ft at 65 MPH). There’s a reason that fighter jets tend to use HUDs! The HUDWAY app itself can be used in either a normal dash mount, or in HUD mode with the image flipped vertically do it’s legible in the reflection of your windshield (or a product like the coming HUDWAY Glass). It shows speed, a road direction preview, navigation directions and some other minor niceties that are better for serious driving or racing (one of the founders has rally racing as a hobby). Showing the basics on your windshield helps clarify speed & upcoming turns, reduce distraction, and can also help in the dark or inclement weather–we certainly see enough of that in Vermont!–by showing you what the upcoming twists and turns in the road are like (including highlighting sharp turns).

    HUDWAY uses your device’s GPS to determine speed and supports getting routes & directions from Apple Maps, Google Maps, or Open Street Map, so there are quite a few options there. I find the directions to be well timed and accurate. In areas with more complex roadways, it’d probably be helpful if it gave you more information about which lane to use, but I’m not sure if that’s a limitation of HUDWAY or of its various sources of navigation directions. The one downside I do see is that the HUDWAY app itself requires you to specify a route between two destinations. That works fine for my commute, but for general errands, it’s a bit of a pain to configure. They have a separate Speedometer app coming out in November which will be more useful for that type of use, which I am looking forward to.

    When Vermont started banning handheld devices for drivers (I could never, and was not interested, in texting and driving anyway), I installed an aftermarket stereo with hands-free Bluetooth support that works very well with my iPhone 5 & Siri for calls and controlling audio playback. Since I have a nearly 100 mile round-trip commute up hill and down dale to our headquarters in the Mad River Valley, I tend to queue up my favorite podcasts and just drive. My phone sits there charging all the time, so having it running HUDWAY on my dash puts it to good use. Plus, that means there’s even less temptation for me to pick it up. I use a waterproof “*LifeProof fre*”:http://www.smalldog.com/search?search=lifeproof+fre+case case on my iPhone 5 (which has been great) and that tends to add quite a bit of glare, so it’s not really visible in daylight at all, but it works wonders at night. Fortunately, this time of year I’m driving home in the dark, so it’s still useful. That said, the daylight usage is the problem that HUDWAY set out to resolve with the HUDWAY Glass. Plus it keeps it secured to your dash to it doesn’t slide during cornering or braking, so I’m planning to pre-order one.

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    There are a couple of minor downsides that I have run into. First, and this could be that my older iPhone 5 does have as accurate an accelerometer & GPS, the speedometer does not appear to be as accurate at highway speeds (fortunately, it only seems to over-estimate my speed by a few MPH). Second, you really need to have your device’s brightness turned all the way up, so it really draws down the power if you’re not charging it. The power draw isn’t much of a problem since I use a 17W “*Hammerhead USB Auto Charger*”:https://www.hammerheadcase.com/product/72/2-port-auto-charger, but it does mean I can no longer get a full charge if it’s running low before I start my commute. On the few occasions I’ve forgotten my phone on the dash and left it running, I’ve come back to a completely dead phone. Oops. I wouldn’t advise leaving your iPhone on your dash anyway, as I’ve seen far too many break-ins.

    For me, with a long commute through varied terrain and weather and a good hands-free stereo, it really modernizes my older commuter car and puts my phone to good use. I hope to pick up the HUDWAY Speedometer app when it’s released next month. I think we’re going to see an increasing number of hardware solutions that are currently integrated into vehicles as expensive options (navigation, HUDs, etc.) moving out to our phones and the HUDWAY Glass looks like it’ll help that transition nicely and hopefully keep drivers–and me!–safer.

  • Soccer season comes to an end for us this weekend with my oldest daughter’s annual soccer jamboree on Saturday and I am looking forward to some pumpkin carving on Sunday. I admit we still haven’t finished cleaning out our camper from the summer and it still needs to be washed and winterized before being tucked away for winter. It’s looking like another busy and productive weekend at my house!

    Thank you for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

    Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

    _Emily, Morgan and Scott_

  • Go Wireless!

    I am a huge fan of wireless technology. I have been slowly updating my home office to be as wireless as I can with speakers from Sonos and all of my computer accessories from my keyboard to printer are wireless as well. One area that I had not ventured into yet has been wireless headphones. I am often working at home, and because my office space is part of my main living space, I often have to have headphones while working. It was only recently that I started to use wireless headphones and frankly I can’t believe I hadn’t started to use this technology sooner! “*Urbanears*”:http://www.smalldog.com/category/?mmfg%5B0%5D=Urbanears has a bluetooth option in their popular Plattan line up, the “*Plattan ADV*.”:http://www.smalldog.com/product/87175/urbanears-plattan-adv-bluetooth-indigo I was able to easily link the headphones to my computer and no longer felt tethered to my desk when working. With the bluetooth headphones I could easily leave my desk for a glass of water or to let dogs out without missing a beat. The battery easily lasts all day and unlike some other bluetooth headphones, you can easily plug them into your computer or device directly with a cable should you forget to charge them. I also linked up these headphones to one of my iPads. These headphones allow you to have them linked with up to 8 devices, so you can easily use them from one device to the next without having to pair and unpair constantly.

    Over the ear headphones are great for around the home and office, but not the most practical when you’re exercising. As mentioned a few weeks ago I have begun trying to get out and move more in recent weeks, and carrying my iPhone in my hand or pocket when out for a run was becoming a bit of an annoyance. The “*Ourdoor Tech Orcas*”:http://www.smalldog.com/product/85798/outdoor-tech-orcas-wireless-sweat-proof-earbuds-black are the perfect solution. With the bluetooth on my Apple Watch I easily paired these headphones with my watch, synced a playlist to my watch and left my phone behind! The headphones are lightweight and comfortable. I am not a fan of in ear headphones and I was skeptical that these headphones would work well for me, but I was pleasantly surprised by how well they stayed in my ears and with the quality of the sound. Many in ear headphones begin to wiggle out of your ears or provide sub par sound quality, but these headphones have truly made me change the way I think of in-ear headphones. As an added bonus they also feature a built in microphone. This feature isn’t something that I can say I have taken advantage of, but it’s certainly nice to know I could take a call if I needed to.