ByDon

Dear Friends,

This week I got called for jury duty here in Key West. I thought it was funny how so many of the prospective jurors knew each other or knew the defendant or the law enforcement officers. A small community of locals and a lot of tourists on this little island. It was a two-day trial and, while the jury was deadlocked for a while, we eventually acquitted the defendant. Now, I cannot be called again for a year but I am glad to have completed my civic duty. The right to a fair trial with a presumption of innocence is a cornerstone of our democracy and in little courtrooms all over the country that principle is being exercised, respected and supported.

The lighted boat parade is this weekend and while we certainly will not have a white Christmas, there are some colorful palm trees all decorated with lights all over the island. We did get way down to 60 degrees and I had to wear long pants, well, I had to wear long pants for jury duty. Some of the locals broke out their down coats, though.

This week’s Kibbles & Bytes exclusive features another Apple factory refurbished 13-inch MacBook Pro. I expect these refurbs to arrive this week and apologize for the delay for those that took advantage of last week’s special. This week we are offering the 2.3GHz i5 dual core processor with 8GB of ram and a 256GB SSD drive. This unit does not have the touch bar, is space gray, and has a 1-year Apple warranty. This week we are bundling with AppleCare + which extends that warranty to 3-years. You can get this bundle for only $1429.99!

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    It took a really long time but Philips Hue lighting has finally fixed one of the most annoying issues with their smart home lighting. If you suffer a power outage, the default for Hue lights has been to return to the full ON stage when power is restored. That means, for example, at my house on Prickly Mountain where I have many Hue lights, that if we get one of our frequent power outages or blips, when the power is restored every light in the house comes on with full brightness. That tends to be a rude awakening.

    This is the reason that I unplug my Hue controller when I rent out my house in the winter to skiers. They could be very confused if there is a power outage!

    You must upgrade your iOS Hue app to version 3.11.0 and then you will need to go to each individual light in the new “Power-on Behavior” setting where you can choose either “Philips Hue Default” (which turns the light on with full brightness) or “power loss recovery” (which reverts to the last used color and brightness ). Setting it to power loss recovery will leave the light off when power is restored.

    Unfortunately, there is no way to set all of your lights at once to power loss recovery so you must go into each individual light and set it the way you want. I am going to set mine to all be in their last state. For safety reasons I could see why some people might want one or two to come on automatically after a power outage.

    I have noticed that some Hue lights are not supported, at least at this time. I cannot make too much sense why some are supported and some are not but perhaps there will be further updates. Nevertheless, this is a big improvement.

  • Recover Drive Space by Deleting Old iOS Backups

    If you’ve been good about backing up your iOS devices to iTunes on your Mac or to iCloud, give yourself a gold star! Both backup destinations are fine, but there’s one potential downside to iTunes backups: they can consume a lot of space on your Mac’s drive. In iTunes, go to iTunes> Preferences > Devices, where you’ll see all the iOS device backups that iTunes has stored. If there are multiple older backups or any for devices you no longer own, you can get rid of them. Control-click the offending backup, and choose Delete. Or, if you want to check how large a backup is first, instead choose Show In Finder, and then in the Finder, choose File > Get Info. When you’re ready, move the selected backup folder to the Trash.

  • Kibbles & Bytes 1127 Intro

    Grace and I have a few more days alone and then we have a bunch of visitors coming for the holidays and through the first part of the new year. Key West is making plans to improve its bike paths and bicycle access with the goal of making the city the most bicycle friendly in the USA. It is such a small and very flat island that biking is the best way to get around. Parking is so tough that bikes are essential even with a resident sticker.

    How about those Boston Celtics, though? After suffering a miserable start, they seem to have suddenly gotten their act together and wiped off 7 straight.

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

    Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

    Don & Emily