Errata

I talked a bit about the big Consumer Electronics Show last week and it is rapidly fading in the rearview mirror. I have gone to this show every year for the past decade or more. We actually exhibited our Chill Pill speakers and Hammerhead products at one CES but mostly I have come as a “buyer” to look for new products and trends.

The Las Vegas convention center is a gigantic venue and the CES show spills out into the parking lot in front but also into some of the surrounding hotels and resorts. The Sands convention center was the second largest and housed some of the more interesting booths. This was the location for 3D printing, health care, fitness, home automation, robots and drones. There were sophisticated baby monitors, constant reporting thermometers, implanted blood glucose monitors and even a company that sold wireless sensors that monitor your soil’s nutrients and moisture. Home automation was huge with several competing standards vying to challenge Apple’s HomeKit. This year more companies were showing HomeKit compatible products so I think that Apple’s vision of your interconnected home is not far off.

There are lots of ways to move from the Sands over to the LVCC but the best way is the free buses offered by CES. Cabs and the monorail are possible but the buses seem to be the fastest and they are free and comfortable. For me it was a great way to rest my weary feet for a few minutes before going to the other venue to continue walking through the crowds. At the convention center there are three main halls and the international pavilion over at the Westgate (formerly, Hilton). The Center hall is dominated by the big guys with gigantic booths for Samsung, Intel, LG and others. Those booths are usually mobbed so I quickly walked through to check out the TVs and moved on. The North Hall is where the iLounge was born and products for iPad and iPhone dominate that section. The biggest part of the North Hall, however, was the Auto section with concept cars being shown my several manufacturers including Ford, Audi, Mercedes and new electric car upstart Faraday.

In the past several years the iLounge area and the international area were dominated by all sorts of cases for iPhones and iPads. This year there were a few in each section but cases were definitely not the dominate category. Over at the international pavilion there were lots of hover boards but unlike previous years, demos of the scooters were restricted to the booth area. Nevertheless, all sorts of scooters were being shown. I searched for interesting USB-C products and found some hubs that were not quite ready for prime time and a bunch of cables. I did see the USB-C displays that incorporate a hub and that could be the real solution for the office set-up for the USB-C equipped MacBook.

I never seem to be able to coordinate my meetings by hall. It seems that I’ll have one meeting in the North Hall, the next in the South Hall and then another back at the hotel. I rode the buses a lot and got to see the whole show floor that way.

I did find some interesting products that we may add to our offerings, and had some great meetings so it was worthwhile to visit this show that is a window on future technology.

I got my start in using computers with CPM operating system and keyboard shortcuts were present there. I used them all the time so they come as second nature to me. But as I go out and talk with customers and help them with their Macs, I am surprised by the number of people that do not know that most of the things you can do with your mouse by clicking on a menu item can be done faster with keyboard shortcuts.

The first thing to learn about shortcuts are the symbols that are used to show these keys.

Command ⌘
Shift ⇧
Option ⌥
Control ⌃
Caps Lock ⇪
Fn

These work for your Mac Keyboard but if you are using a keyboard made for a Windows machine you need to substitute the Windows logo for the Command key and the Alt key for the option key. When you look at a menu in almost any application you will find the common commands for all these symbols next to them to indicate the keyboard shortcut. Here are some common ones:

Command-X **Cut** Remove the selected item
Command-C **Copy** the selected item
Command-V **Paste** the contents
Command-Z **Undo** the previous command
Command-A **Select all** items
Command-F **Find** open a Find window
Command-G **Find Again** Find the next occurrence of the item previously found
Command-H **Hide** the windows of the front app.
Command-M **Minimize** the front window to the dock
Command-M **New** Open a new document or window
Command-P **Print** the current document

Command-Space bar **Spotlight** show or hide the spotlight search field
Command-Tab **Switch apps** switch to the next most recently used app
Command-shift-3 **Screenshot** take a screenshot of the entire screen

As you can see, there are endless keyboard shortcuts to use, and these are only a small fraction of what you can do with “**keyboard shortcuts.**”:https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236 So the next time you find yourself wondering what you can do if your mouse suddenly stops working or if your just looking for a more efficient way to do something, keyboard shortcuts might just be what your looking for!

I remember only a couple years ago when drones were new and cutting edge technology. Now, there are huge sections of the show devoted to drones of all sorts: fighting drones, mini drones, paper airplane drones and dancing drones. I don’t know if it is the Star Wars influence but droids were everywhere, including “laundroids” for folding your laundry, grill cleaning droids, window washing droids and all kinds of robots.

3D printers were new and unique and again whole sections of the show were devoted to “replicators” making everything from iPhone cases to clothing to spare body parts. Several companies were there just to show their filaments for these 3D printers.

Scooters were everywhere. You know, the ones in the news that have the batteries that blow up. Well, literally dozens of companies were showing their versions and the original Segway had a booth, too. Some one-wheel scooters were there as well as shoes with wheels that zipped you around.

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Self-driving cars and technology for self driving cars dominated the North Hall and some concept cars were shown, too. My favorite was the Faraday electric car that looked like a single seat batmobile.

USB-C made its debut at the show with hubs, cables and some USB display port displays, too. I think we will see a lot of USB-C stuff coming up!

Less prevalent this year was the huge variety of iPhone and iPad cases. There were huge sections last time but while there were several companies showing cases it was toned way down. In their place, power banks of all sorts were being shown in every imaginable shape and size. The Apple battery case, aka the hump, was universally panned but several companies had slim battery cases for the iPhone.

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I did walk through the TV section but it was not as notable as in past years. The 3D fad has sort of expired and 4K displays are common. I still love the OLED displays, though.

Other areas that were huge were health care and fitness with a lot of wearable fitness devices and health monitors or all sorts from implantable blood glucose devices to blood pressure cuffs, thermometers and scales. The home automation section was larger than previous years and there were some new HomeKit compatible devices. I liked the NoLok offering of bluetooth compatible padlocks and bike locks that work similar to the Kevo system.

It was a quick trip out to Vegas but it was certainly worthwhile. I will follow up next week with a bit more.

Medgar Evers (1925-1963) was an African-American civil rights activist whose murder drew national attention. Born in Mississippi, he served in World War II before going to work for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). After applying to the segregated University of Mississippi Law School in 1954, he became the NAACP field secretary in Mississippi.

As early as 1955, Evers activism made him the most visible civil rights leader in the state of Mississippi. As a result, he and his family were subjected to numerous threats and violent actions over the years, including a firebombing of their house in May 1963. At 12:40 a.m. on June 12, 1963, Evers was shot in the back in the driveway of his home in Jackson. He died less than a hour later at a nearby hospital. The accused killer Byron De La Beckwith initially escaped conviction.

In December 1990, Beckwith was again indicted for the murder of Medgar Evers. After a number of appeals, the Mississippi Supreme Court finally ruled in favor of a third trial in April 1993. Ten months later, testimony began before a racially mixed jury of eight blacks and four whites. In February 1994, nearly 31 years after Evers’ death, Beckwith was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.