Dropbox Passwords Ending: Switch to 1Password Now

A little over a week ago things became official: Apple Music is now available to those who use “**Sonos.**”:http://www.smalldog.com/category/?mmfg%5B0%5D=Sonos For some of us this wasn’t a huge announcement. I have been using the beta version now for several months and have been enjoying my Apple Music playlists as well as my own personal play lists on my iPhone. I have been a huge fan of Sonos for about two years and not being able to listen to Apple Music was my one complaint about the system, but not anymore!

Apple Music isn’t the only great thing about Sonos either, did you know that you can also control your Sonos system from your computer? I admit, I didn’t realize this at first. With a huge focus on how easy the system is to set up and control from your iPad or iPhone, this is one feature that’s often overlooked. With a simple “App download”:http://www.sonos.com/controller-app on your computer, you can open up your entire (in most cases) music library for listening through your Sonos system. Another great feature of the Sonos App is the ability to set a sleep timer. If your someone who enjoys falling asleep to music, but prefers it doesn’t stay on all night this is a huge feature even if it is a bit hidden. The more info icon within the Sonos App hides a lot of features, including the sleep timer.

_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/

You have a password for the online banking, one for your Apple ID, one to log into your retirement amount. Your password for your bank has to have have at least one numeric number, but can’t start with a number and it can’t have any more than two of the same characters found in your username. Your retirement account must include at least 3 numbers and one special character but they can’t be consecutive.

Does this sound familiar? In the perfect world we would only need one password, but unfortunately for security purposes and as hackers get better at what they do password strength has become critical and part of our everyday lives. The hassle with this is that most sites have their own sets of rules for password strength leaving many of us to peck away at our keyboards or devices in a sometimes endless game of “remember how you manipulated your favorite password 16 different ways and can’t remember if your banking site used the password with the capitalization or the one with the ampersand”.

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For a very long time I will admit my method of keeping track of my usernames and passwords was the stickies program on my Mac, much to the dismay of our IT manager! While stickies are easily accessed they are not secure and I do not recommend this method. Where you should keep them is in your keychain. You can access your keychain through applications and then utilities. Once you are in your keychain you can manually add preferred sites, accounts and passwords you wish to store. Another huge benefit is secure notes. Secure notes allow you store additional confidential information. Keychain is safe and secure because in order to view any of the passwords stored there you need to enter your administrator password. Within keychain you can make sure to safely and securely keep your passwords, and when you forget if you needed that capitalization or ampersand in your password you can simply open keychain and enter into the search field the website for which you need to confirm the password.

Now what if you don’t have a mac? The loss of passwords, and most often your Apple ID password is a huge concern with users of iOS devices only. Luckily there is an easy solution for that, iCloud and “iCloud keychain.”:https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204085 Simply go to settings, iCloud and then select keychain. Your iOS device will begin to store your logins and websites. Additionally you can add specific websites and passwords manually to your phone or iPad under **safari** and then selecting **passwords**. This is also where you would look if you can’t remember login information.

Recording safely your logins and passwords is an often overlooked step, especially when users of iOS devices accidentally have the device damaged or lost. Saving your passwords safely and using iCloud keychain can avert your being logged out of accounts.

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.