I am taking a drive to southern Vermont on Sunday to deliver some winter tires I am selling since I won’t be needing those. I’ll try to find the roads that the leaf peepers can’t find or it might take me a lot longer than usual. We’ll probably have to stop at our favorite burger joint on the way in S. Royalton, Worthy Burger.

With just a couple weeks before we head south, we have a ton of chores to do. I think I’ll be busy this weekend but if the remnants of Matthew avoid Vermont I will have to get out for a ride, too.

Thank you for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

_Don, Emily, Hadley & Amy_

I got my first experience with 3D Touch or Force Touch as it was known then on my Apple Watch. I noticed that Grace was able to answer calls on her watch like Dick Tracey but for some reason I could not. So, I called Apple support and learned the difference between a tap and a press. Apple took this one step further with when Apple first unveiled 3D Touch in iOS 9 with the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, giving users of those iPhones a new way of interacting with apps, but 3D Touch never really caught on. Now, with the release of the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, and broader support in iOS 10, 3D Touch is worth learning if you have one of the supported iPhones.

3D Touch works in two ways: “peek and pop” and “quick actions.” Apps use peek and pop to let you glance (peek) at an item by pressing down on it (not just a touch, but a press into the screen), and then jump to that item (pop) by pressing harder still. In Safari, for instance, you can preview a link by pressing it, and then either release to dismiss the preview or continue to load it in its own tab by pressing harder. Or move your finger up on the screen without letting go or pressing harder to get controls for opening the link, adding to your reading list, or copying the URL. This trick applies to links in other apps like Mail, Messages, and Notes, too.

You can also use peek and pop with email message summaries in Mail, headlines in News, thumbnails in Photos, people in Find My Friends, dates and events in Calendar, and even the previously taken photo box in Camera. Support for peek and pop in third-party apps isn’t as widespread as it is in Apple’s apps, but it’s still worth trying whenever you want to preview something.

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More interesting are quick actions, which present a menu of common actions when you press down on an app’s icon on the Home screen, or on various controls and other items throughout iOS. Home screen quick actions are great, since they let you kickstart an app into doing something with just a hard press on its icon. If the app has a widget, a 3D Touch press shows that as well.

For instance, using 3D Touch on the Phone app shows its widget, which gives you buttons to call people in your Favorites list, along with actions to view the most recent call, search for a contact, create a new contact, or view the most recent voicemail. The Clock app lets you start a timer or the stopwatch, or create an alarm. Messages quick actions can create a new message or open a recent conversation. Use 3D Touch on Safari’s icon and you can create a new tab or see your bookmarks or reading list. You can even press on a folder to rename it quickly.

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Quick actions and widgets are much more commonplace among third-party apps than peek and pop support, so be sure to try 3D Touch on all your favorite apps. If all you see is a Share item, the app has no quick actions or widget, but many apps provide both static actions that are always the same and dynamic actions that reflect your past usage.

iOS 10 brings 3D Touch to Control Center too. Press the Flashlight button to adjust the brightness of the light, the Timer button for some pre-canned times, the Calculator button to copy the last calculation result, or the Camera button to take a photo, slo-mo, video, or selfie.

On the Lock screen, press a Messages notification to expand it and reply directly from the notification. More notifications will become interactive in the future too. And in Notification Center, you can press a notification to expand it, or use 3D Touch on the X button for any day to reveal a Clear All Notifications option.

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It’s too bad that there’s no way to know in advance if an app supports quick actions or peek and pop, but as the number of iPhone users who can use 3D Touch increases, developers will incorporate 3D Touch capabilities into their apps more and more. So give it a try!

Was last week’s electricity safety article enough of a break? Hopefully it was because I think my topic this week might break even me. The study of electricity falls under the immensely broad scientific category of physics. When we talk about it though, we usually refer to it as electromagnetism which is itself part of the “**four fundamental forces**”:http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/forces/funfor.html. These include the “strong” force (also called the nuclear force), the “weak electric” force (think subatomic particles), the gravitation force (what’s holding you to the earth right now), and finally the electromagnetic forces, which are of interest to us here. So far I’ve focused almost exclusively on the “electro” part of that topic but not so much on the “magnetism” part.

Electricity and magnetism are like two buddy cops in the best buddy cop movie ever. You might have noticed that I haven’t really discussed exactly how electricity is generated yet aside from a few hints about it, and that’s because it depends entirely on concepts within magnetism. I’m sure we all know about magnets. They’re just as relatable as electricity in many ways. There are magnets holding my car keys to my refrigerator as I write this. Magnets have a north pole and a south pole. Opposite poles attract and like poles repel. Nope, nothing about electricity yet.

So where do magnets come in? Well, surrounding every magnet there is a magnetic field. You might remember this being demonstrated in school with iron filings grouping themselves in a very specific pattern around a magnet. The filings group themselves along the magnetic field lines. When talking about these field lines in the context of interacting with them on any given plane, they will often be called lines of flux or magnetic flux. This is the key. These lines are what you need to generate electricity.

Imagine I have a simple rectangular bar magnet suspended on its center. I take a copper wire connected to am ammeter (a device for measuring current) and I pass the wire straight past the end of the magnet (north pole or south pole, it doesn’t matter). The ammeter needle will briefly wiggle indicating that a current was present. The current in this test is very small, and it only occurs for a brief moment, but it is there. How did this happen? When a conductor cuts through a line of magnetic flux, the electrons in the atoms of the conductor are compelled to move. How exactly are the electrons compelled to move? At that level, you’ll have to read up on it yourself as it’s totally beyond a short article here, but it is covered under the field of “**quantum electrodynamics**”:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_electrodynamics. Have you ever heard of Richard Feynman? Quantum electrodynamics was his playground (one of many actually).

Ok, so if we abstract away how exactly the electrons are compelled to move and just accept that they do, we arrive at the conclusion that cutting through lines of magnetic flux with a conductor creates a current. In my example, we used one magnet and a single copper wire. To generate more current, you need to cut through more lines of flux. You can do this by adding more magnets (to increase the flux), more conductors, or both, which is what we generally do. This whole theory of cutting lines of magnetic flux is the operating principle behind every generator (direct current) and alternator (alternating current).

In a basic alternator (yes, just like the one in your car) there is a circular casing that holds coils of conducting wire. Why coils? Again, more wires, more lines of flux cut. Coils also help to concentrate the lines of magnetic flux. Basically the purpose of every single design element is to ensure that the most lines of magnetic flux are cut for a given area. The fixed outer area with the coils is called the stator. The inner area that rotates is called the rotor, and in our example here, it simply contains spinning magnets. Each time a pole of the spinning magnet passes one of the many coils in the stator, a current is generated. By having enough coils covering all radial angles, the alternator will be generating a current during pretty much it’s entire rotational cycle, though the current will be alternating. Typical alternators don’t use permanent magnets on their rotors. They actually use electromagnets, but the theory of operation is exactly the same.

Once again, I’m out of space to continue about all of this here. The reason I went into this topic was so that in subsequent weeks I’ll have a foundation to talk about electromagnets, multiphase power, induction motors, and some other high-level interesting stuff that just won’t make sense if you don’t have an understanding of the fundamental interactions between electricity and magnetism.