Beats X Wireless Earphones

Oh boy! Baseball, basketball and hockey all going on at the same time. I don’t watch much hockey but the Blackhawks are my team so the playoffs are interesting. But how about those Boston Celtics. As Tommy Heinsohn said the other night, “the line at the betting window for the Celtics to win the east was very short” and yet they did it and will face the Bulls in the first round of the NBA playoffs.

And of course, watching baseball is fun because I can do a lot of stuff while watching the game and the Cubs are favored to repeat but have a long season to prove they are worthy.

Jezebel, my Olde English Bulldog is growing up fast and I have been spending a lot of time training her. She is going to be a big dog, she is 5 months old and already 45 pounds so training is important. Fortunately, she is a smart girl and has learned a lot. Walking around the neighborhood I have taught her to sit at crosswalks and not pull on the leash. But when she sees we are going to the dog park here in Key West, all bets are off. She pulls with all her strength no matter how many times I make her stop and sit and just cannot wait to run around in the large park by the ocean. There is a dog beach here, too, and we took her there and while she did seem a bit tentative she was swimming around with her life vest on.

I just cannot imagine life without dogs in it.

Thank you for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

_Don, Emily & Hadley_

I have been a fan of Notes for years! I started out using the Notes program on my mac and used it for everything, and sadly, I mean ??everything?? including usernames and passwords. Thankfully I learned many years ago safer means of account login storage and abandoned my sticky note ways on my Mac.

What I missed most about my sticky notes was a quick and all in one location for things I needed to jot down, hello and welcome notes! Notes has been out for many years and it’s certainly nothing new on iOS or macOS. Notes is an incredibly versatile program and one that I rely on heavily as another tool for keeping me organized and in order. I’ve written in the past about reminders, but I admit, try as I might I just can’t get away from Notes and find its versatility in features to be something that reminders just can’t compete with. There are several features within the notes program that go beyond just taking a simple note, and I want to share some of my favorite features.

**Syncing**

I think the ability to sync my notes across all of my devices is hands down the number one reason I use and just can’t break away from this handy little app. I can write a note on my computer and it automatically sends the note to my iPad and iPhone. With iCloud turned on and note syncing your notes update across all devices that are logged into your iCloud account. There is one catch to the auto syncing that is new in the last year or so. In order for your iOS devices and your Mac to get your notes you do need to make sure that in addition to to iCloud being turned on, all of your devices need to be running the latest OS. Last week I had an issue where my notes were syncing from my iOS devices to my Mac, but not from my Mac to my iOS devices. A quick look at my devices revealed I hadn’t run my most recent software updates.

**Drawing**

Did you know that you can draw within the notes program? Notes allows you to actually write a note in your own handwriting, but also allows you to draw and there is even a handy ruler so you can draw straight lines. There are a variety of colors to choose from to put a pop of color in and you have a choice of a pencil, and two marker options. The details aren’t as responsive or detailed as that of say the iPad Pro. But this little feature allows for handy on-the-go creations. You can easily and quickly sketch out an idea via e-mail, text and even social media. This feature only really works on the iOS, you can do some similar actions on the Mac via Mark Up.

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**Mark Up**

Within notes you can insert a pictures from your photo library (on the Mac you can just drag and drop the image into your note) and then you can mark it up! You can draw over the image, add text, shapes and more. I recently used this feature specifically when I was working to re-model and paint a room in my house. We took pictures of the room and used the mark up feature to finalize what colors and changes we were going to make in the room.

**Locking Notes**

Another cool feature with the notes program is that you can lock the notes. The only information that is viewable in the note is the title. A passcode must be entered on the computer or iOS device in order to see what is in the note. This is a great way to keep things just a little bit more secure on your devices. While you should keep things like passwords and account information securely stored in your keychain, this is another option. Admittedly if you’re given a code or access to something and need the information temporarily, it’s more practical to jot it in Notes and lock it. Likewise if your a busy mom or spouse and you find yourself making notes about a special event or gifts it’s nice to know you can keep wondering eyes away from your information and keep the surprise.

Notes, the little app that does so much!

_Dear Friends,_

Spring is teasing its way into Vermont as friends send me pictures of daffodils making their way through the remaining snow and mud that is not quite as deep on the back roads. It seems like fall down here as some of the trees are shedding their leaves but the temperatures are rising and so is the humidity.

We have made the very difficult decision to close our Rutland, Vermont store. This store in a very small community was unable to sustain the level of sales necessary to support the overhead. We tried hard and while we are leaving Rutland for now, we may come back some time in the future. It was a beautiful store and we enjoyed support from the town, our landlord and other Rutland businesses. We have completed some great renovations in our other three stores including HomeKit demo sections.

Out Key West store has also had some changes and we have had a change in leadership there. Joe Lytton, who was with us from the start has moved up to Georgia to be closer to his family. He led the effort to renovate this store and did a remarkable job. Tommy Allen is our new store manager and Joanne Marius has been promoted to assistant manager.

I was struck at how poorly United Airlines handled their customer service issue last week. From the beginning, Hapy and I have had the philosophy of empowering our employees to make customer service decisions. Often times we would get asked about a situation and rather than making the call we would simply ask the employee, “what would you do?” and let them make the call. We keep our eye on the true life-cycle value of a customer. The profit we make from a single sale pales in comparison to the value of a loyal customer. Some time ago, a woman that came to work for me handed me a book entitled “Customer Satisfaction is Nothing, Customer Loyalty is Everything”. The book sucked but the concept is sage knowledge. Building customers for life is our goal with every interaction.

This week’s Kibbles & Bytes Exclusive is an iPod sale! The iPod is Apple’s almost forgotten hit but many of us love our iPods. I use one on my motorcycle for tunes and I have another in my shop to blast rock and roll as I work on my bikes. This week only for Kibbles & Bytes readers you can take “$5 off any iPod Shuffle”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002651? and “$10 off any iPod nano or iPod touch!”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002650?

From time to time in Kibbles articles I’ve written, I’ve talked about the differences between digital and analog circuits, but it’s almost always in passing and tertiary to something else. I decided this week that it was worth doing a whole article about it. Some of this will probably be a bit of a refresher, but that’s ok. We have to start somewhere.

People generally seem to understand that computers, smart phones, smart watches, even calculators…all that stuff is digital. We commonly refer to those things as digital, but we don’t often explicitly describe what ??makes?? them digital. First of all, the word “digital” isn’t what I would’ve chosen if I was choosing to name that class of circuits. We call them digital because they function entirely based on binary digits (0 and 1). This is fine, but if given the chance, I would’ve called them “discrete” circuits because this is more generic and more descriptive of the actual architecture itself. When I studied computer science in college, we actually had special math classes we had to take, totally separate from the mathematics department. These classes were called “discrete mathematics” and they revolve entirely around the specific types of mathematics relevant in so-called “digital” circuits and the higher level “computers” they make up. This includes things like boolean algebra (easy), graph theory (harder, but interesting and useful), set theory and combinatorics among many others. Discrete mathematics eventually prepared you for things like computational theory. By far the hardest thing I had to learn in those later classes was linear algebra. The one common thread in all of these classes though is that the units were discrete. There were no gradations, fractions, derivatives or integrations that you’d find in almost any other math class.

The reason for the difference is the fundamental difference between digital and analog. Digital circuits can by definition only operate discretely. They are completely blind to anything that occurs within their discrete ranges. This doesn’t mean that digital circuits themselves can’t do analog tasks, or do things involving real numbers, but their operation does not use these things.

Analog circuits on the other hand exist over an entire domain. Analog circuitry can be described by conventional mathematics (primarily algebra and calculus). Much like digital circuits are not ideal at perfectly replicating analog systems, analog systems are poor at functioning in discrete terms. A single digital circuit can be configured to calculate any number of different things and can even be reprogrammed for new tasks. Analog circuits can also “calculate” things, but they do so in a very different, specialized and limited way. I remember asking this question when I took an electrical engineering class. Why create some complex circuit that effectively calculates the integral of some signal when a digital circuit could be programmed to do the same thing? The answer is that digital circuits have a lot of overhead and take time to calculate something (due to clock cycles). The time they take is totally dependent on the efficiency and accuracy of the programming. An analog circuit doing the same thing would be accurate every single time and would do so at the speed of electricity (the speed of light). It would also be simpler in construction.

An example of an analog circuit that’s performing a function would be an amplifier. The amplifier’s job is to take an input signal and boost its amplitude. A digital circuit could be programmed to do this, but to do so at virtual instantaneous speed and accuracy would be a tall order. The analog circuit would also be able to follow the input signal exactly at every single infinite point on its waveform. A digital circuit, because it’s discrete and slave to a clock, would miss all the pieces of the input signal that occur in between its clock ticks.

People don’t often contrast analog and digital circuits this way, but I find it to be very accurate: digital circuits are flexible and generic, analog circuits are simple, fast and specialized. Different situations call for different circuits, which is why decades into the digital age, analog circuits are still incredibly useful. However, as digital electronics become faster, cheaper and more robust, they become able to approximate the specialized analog circuit performance at more and more acceptable levels. You can already see this happening in some applications. In 1971 you could buy a Dodge Challenger with a 6.98L Hemi V8. A powerful and complex engine in its day, it would have relied completely on analog electronics to run, to the extent it even used electronics at all. A carburetor doesn’t need a computer to help it mix fuel and air. Starting in 2011 the same car was available with a 6.4L HEMI V8. This engine uses computer-controlled fuel injection as well as a fleet of sensors measuring everything at every level of operation. The sensor data is fed to a computer that can adjust inputs to the engine allowing it to run cleaner and produce more power. Without the computer, the engine would barely run at all. The computer is actually able to work fast enough to deal with all of the inputs and create an accurate output in a timely fashion.

Hopefully this was an interesting dedicated look at the differences between digital and analog circuits. If you have any suggestions for topics, or questions that you’d like to hear me answer about electronics, electricity or its applications, send me an email!