Droids, Drones, Scooters, Cars and USB C

Mississippi joined North Carolina and several other states that have passed laws that legalize discrimination against LGBT folks. Vermont banned non-essential government travel to those states and our Governor sent a letter to entice PayPal to move their 400 jobs to Vermont after they announced they were cancelling their expansion into NC. Good idea, because Vermont has always been a leader in banning discrimination from being the first state to make slavery illegal to the first to enact civil unions.

It looks like a cold weekend in Vermont and I won’t bore you with the forecast down here in the Keys but I hope you have an awesome weekend!

Thank you so much for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

_Don, Emily, Hadley & Amy_

Speed Up Your Fingers with Text Expansion

With all the advances in computing and communications, it’s amazing that–after nearly 150 years!–we still use the keyboard layout from the world’s first practical typewriter for entering text into our Macs, iPhones, and iPads. Sure there are some improving dictation solutions out there but typing is by far how we input text. But we have not gotten that much better as typists, nor do we enjoy typing more–if anything, we increasingly abbreviate to avoid typing, hence “LOL, BRB, etc.” Text messaging aside, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to type less without compromising meaning or making your text look like it was composed by a trained monkey? Thanks to text expansion features built into OS X and iOS, and extended with third-party utilities, you can.

For basic text expansion capabilities in OS X, look in System Preferences > Keyboard > Text, and in iOS 9, go to Settings > General > Keyboard > Text Replacement. For both, you can enter a phrase, and a shortcut that expands into that phrase when typed and followed by a space or punctuation character. (Tip: If text expansion doesn’t work in a Mac app like Mail or Safari, make sure Edit > Substitutions > Text Replacement is selected.)

If you’re signed into the same iCloud account on both your Mac and your iPhone, for instance, the text expansions sync between them automatically. So, you can type “smh” and tap the Space bar to get “Shaking my head!” typed out for you, regardless of what device you’re using. (Another tip: don’t create abbreviations that you will also want to type normally. It might seem like a good idea to use “np” for “No Problem,” but that will get in the way of talking about Nurse Practitioners.)

With such a useful feature built into OS X and iOS, why would you want to spend money on a third-party utility, like “**TextExpander**”:https://smilesoftware.com/textexpander (Mac and iOS), “**Typinator**”:http://www.ergonis.com/products/typinator/ (Mac), or “**TypeIt4Me**”:http://www.ettoresoftware.com/products/typeit4me/. Unfortunately, OS X’s text expansion feature doesn’t work in all apps (it likely won’t work if the app lacks the Edit > Substitutions > Text Replacement menu command). The interface for creating new substitutions is cramped and hard to work with, you can’t configure the trigger characters that cause abbreviations to expand, and you can’t include text with styles, variable text like the date, or even graphics.

That’s where text expansion utilities shine. They can include styled text and graphics in expansions, insert the current date and time, respect case when expanding abbreviations, include the contents of the clipboard in expanded text, automatically fix common typos, create fill-in-the-blanks snippets that you customize on each expansion, and much more.

Here are some ideas for the kinds of things you might want to turn over to your computer for typing:
Long or complex words or phrases, such as scientific names. Aedes aegypti, anyone?

*Your address, phone number, and email address. One of my favorites is “@d” which inserts my email address. I get real tired of typing email address, phone numbers, etc. Text expansion speeds that up!

*Boilerplate text for common email replies.

*The current date and/or time.

*Special characters, so blb could expand to the British pound symbol £.

*Unix commands for Terminal, such as using ssh to log in to a remote computer.

I am sure you can come up with dozens that might work for you and speed up your typing. So think about what bit of text you might want expand automatically and give text expansion a try today!

For more than half a century, Riley B. King – better known as B.B. King – defined the blues for a worldwide audience. Since he started recording in the 1940s, he has released over fifty albums, many of them classics. He was born September 16, 1925, on a plantation in Itta Bena, Mississippi, near Indianola. In his youth, he played on street corners for dimes, and would sometimes play in as many as four towns a night. In 1947, he hitchhiked to Memphis, TN to pursue his music career. Memphis was where every important musician of The South gravitated, and it supported a large musical community where every style of African American music could be found. B.B. stayed with his cousin Bukka White, one of the most celebrated blues performers of his time, who schooled B.B. further in the art of the blues.

B.B.’s first big break came in 1948 when he performed on Sonny Boy Williamson’s radio program on KWEM out of West Memphis. This led to steady engagements at the Sixteenth Avenue Grill in West Memphis, and later to a ten-minute spot on black-staffed and managed Memphis radio station WDIA. “King’s Spot,” became so popular, it was expanded and became the “Sepia Swing Club.” Soon B.B. needed a catchy radio name. What started out as Beale Street Blues Boy was shortened to Blues Boy King, and eventually B.B. King.

In the mid-1950s, while B.B. was performing at a dance in Twist, Arkansas, a few fans became unruly. Two men got into a fight and knocked over a kerosene stove, setting fire to the hall. B.B. raced outdoors to safety with everyone else, then realized that he left his beloved $30 acoustic guitar inside, so he rushed back inside the burning building to retrieve it, narrowly escaping death. When he later found out that the fight had been over a woman named Lucille, he decided to give the name to his guitar to remind him never to do a crazy thing like fight over a woman. Ever since, each one of B.B.’s trademark Gibson guitars has been called Lucille.

B.B. was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame in 1984 and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987. He received NARAS’ Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award in 1987, and has received honorary doctorates from Tougaloo(MS) College in 1973; Yale University in 1977; Berklee College of Music in 1982; Rhodes College of Memphis in 1990; Mississippi Valley State University in 2002 and Brown University in 2007. In 1992, he received the National Award of Distinction from the University of Mississippi.

B.B. King came to Vermont many times and I had the pleasure of being at several of his concerts. He died last year at the age of 90 and was performing to sold out crowds right up until he died. B.B. King is gone but the –The Thrill is Gone- lives forever.

It is definitely feeling like spring here in Key West as the flowers are blooming and we wake up each morning to the birds singing (okay and the roosters crowing, too). I get the morning snow (or lack thereof) report from Emily every day and spring hadn’t quite arrived up in Georgia when I was there, either.

Grace and I are heading up to the 75th Annual Daytona Bike Week for a couple days and then hitting a Cirque du Soleil show in Miami on the way back. Somewhere in there I will be writing Kibbles, perhaps on my iPad mini 4.

Thank you for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

_Don, Emily & Hadley_