Apple Updates Mac Studio with M4 Max and M3 Ultra Chips

_Dear Friends,_

I am off to Daytona for the 75th Bike Week. We went out to the 75th anniversary of the Sturgis Bike Week so it is only appropriate for us to hit the one sort of in our neighborhood, too. We will be riding on our 2003 Victory motorcycles and trying to avoid any big roads.

Sugaring season in Vermont is well underway and this time of the year in Vermont always reminds me when we used to sugar the old-fashioned way. Now it is mostly pipelines and big sugaring operations but back when we lived in North Wolcott, Vermont I had a big work horse. The horse was kind of untrained but hitching her to the sled with the big heavy sap gathering tank made her behave. We would tap the trees by hand, hang buckets and as the sap began to flow we would tramp through the deep snow to empty the buckets into the tank. One horsepower was a lot of power as the horse would make her way through the sugar maples and the tank got full. We would take it to our makeshift sugaring arch and boil the sap into yummy syrup. Some of the best times! I still prefer the “grade b” syrup over fancy grade.

This week’s Kibbles & Bytes exclusive brings back the “**Chill Pill six-pack special.**”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002006/ These little portable speakers have been around for a long time and I need to reduce our inventory. So, you can get 2 Black, 2 Red and 2 White Chill Pill speakers for only $29 this week. They make great gifts and are great for camping or just hanging out in the yard. Normally, they are $9.99 each but this week 6 for “**$29!**”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002006/

Last week we talked about how to activate and use dictation to write emails and documents but there is a lot more that you can do. I keep thinking about Scotty from Star Trek when he went back in time and was “**confronted with a Mac Plus**”:https://youtu.be/LkqiDu1BQXY?t=1m8s. He picked up the mouse as natural as can be and said “computer…”. That time is coming and Dictation Commands are already built into your operating system.

Once you have dictation activated you can activate dictation commands by going to the Accessibility system preference.

* Choose Accessibility from System Preferences.

* Choose Dictation from the list on the left side of the Accessibility pane.

* Click the Dictation Commands button. You can see a list of available commands in the Dictation Commands sheet.

* A starting set of commands are enabled by default. Additional speakable items like “Open document” and “Click item” are available by enabling advanced commands using these next steps:

* Select (check) the option to “Enable advanced commands” in the Dictation Commands sheet that appears.

* Click Done.

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After you have enabled advanced commands, you can also create your own commands by clicking the Add Command (+) button. This lets you link a spoken phrase to an app, a menu item, a keyboard shortcut, or an Automator workflow.

You have enabled Dictation Commands and now you can speak any of the items in this list to perform the related action. Press the Fn key twice, then say a command to make it happen, such as “Search Spotlight for the Cubs score” or “select sentence” or “new document”. Give it a try and pretty soon you will be just like Scotty and the Mac Plus.

As a shortcut, you can speak the command “Show commands” to see a list of the commands you can say.