Keeping Tabs on Friends & Family

If the sadness and shock of the terrorist attacks in Paris were not enough, I was in shock this week as Islamaphobia and fear overwhelmed politicians and citizens. Some politicians were tripping over themselves to stoke the flames of fear by turning on the Syrian refugees. I don’t know about you but if I lived in Syria and there was a war in my neighborhood with madmen from both sides going berserk, I’d be a refugee, too. Oh, by the way, did you know that Steve Jobs father was a Syrian refugee?

This was seemingly fueled by what turns out to be a very sketchy report that one of the terrorists posed as a refugee. That has since been discredited but the conclusion jumping was already in full swing. Some politicians tried even to separate their distain for refugees by religion but there is no religion that makes terrorism its creed and there have been terrorist from many religions. It is when hypocritical fanatics of any religion feel that they can impose their will upon others that conflicts arise.

Way back when the USA was young, our friends in France sent us a gift. The Statue of Liberty proudly stands by our shores with the inscription that defines who we are as a nation:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses, yearning to be free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

When we succumb to the fear the terrorists win. When we change who we are, the terrorists have won. When we let prejudice trump common sense, the terrorists have won. We must lead by example and the example of shunning refugees is the wrong one. In the height of the worst terror since WWII, President Hollande of France recommitted to taking Syrian refugees saying “We have to reinforce our borders while remaining true to our values.”

We cannot change who we are – unless you are a native American, you are a descendant of refugees and immigrants. This anti-immigrant, anti-Islam, anti-refugee wave of fear is unAmerican and is born of ignorance and hate.

How do you feel about this trend towards exclusion of refugees and immigrants? Share your opinion at our blog – blog.smalldog.com

End Soapbox

Erich Sullivan – South Burlington Service Writer

The new Apple TV is what really has my attention, I’m already sold on the $200.00 64GB version.
I don’t know what has me most sold, Siri? The App Store and what that will mean? I know that anything we’re thinking today will be dramatically upset with what will come from it. A simple unified search that lets me know if it’s in showtime, HBO, netflix or Hulu or in iTunes is going to be unreal. No more painfully typing in on that arcade style grid keyboard several times to find out no one has it. More time watching TV, less time struggling with an interface and search limitations.

The App Store intends to turn the Apple TV into a casual gaming console, and the new remote gives it a change of being a decent experience.The new remote is exciting, the lightning connector for charging has me pondering things. They could have made it charge through micro USB, or run off batteries, or inductively charge on the top of the Apple TV box, but they went with lighting. It comes with the Lightning Cable to charge your remote, or your other Apple devices with a lightning port.

Another interesting decision was the USB type C on the back of the new Apple TV for restores. Very forward thinking, and just another display that Apple is really pushing for USB type C to be the next ubiquitous connector.

I have said many more things about the new Apple TV, but in short, I’m already sold.

Morgan – Waitsfield IT

I wasn’t all that thrilled about the  Watch additions (I’m still on the fence as to how useful I’d find the watch to be), but the iPad Pro announcement was cool. I know a lot of customers have been eagerly awaiting a larger iPad and—as a heavy iPad user myself—I know how useful they can be for work & play, so with iOS 9’s side-by-side apps support, it’ll be great. It’ll be especially useful for artists with the  Pencil (which itself is a great improvement since stylus support is pretty poor on the iPad) and may turn out to be a strong competitor to the expensive Wacom Cintiq line of drawing tablets with built-in displays. And, can I say one thing about the four speakers on the iPad Pro… FINALLY!

The new  TV looks great & fun, but doesn’t seem entirely groundbreaking, just exactly what the next step of its evolution needed to be. That’s not to say I don’t want one, it definitely looks like a great product, just that it’s what I’d expect a new  TV to be. The remote looks very useful and fun for games, and I think that supporting iPhones & iPod touches as additional controllers is an absolutely brilliant idea.

As usual, the iPhone 6S & 6S+ look like excellent upgrades to an already great phone. Bringing Force Touch to the iPhone will be a nice addition and I can’t help but geeking out about how they implemented it (Apple is really becoming quite ingenious on their technical solutions to difficult problems which actually make a bigger difference than most people think). And, they just keep making an excellent camera even better (the Live Photos are neat, esp. if they really don’t increase the photo size by much).

Jim Overman – Waitsfield Phone Sales

Siri On The Apple TV!

There are many new exciting features to the Apple TV which make me think that it is time for an upgrade, but my favorite has to be the addition of Siri. In fact, the whole remote is pretty darn cool. It features a new glass touch surface remote that allows for easy maneuvering around the screen, just like an an iPhone or iPad. Back to Siri though, Siri is now able to do universal searches across iTunes, Netflix, Hulu and more for you favorite actor, director or genre. My very favorite part though is that if you ask Siri ‘What did they say?’, the Apple TV will automatically scroll back fifteen seconds and turn on closed captioning. I am particulary excited because when I watch Doctor Who I am doing this manually myself at least six or seven times per episode. No joke. It will be nice to just be able to ‘ask and receive’ as they say. The new Apple TV will actually come with two sizes of built-in storage, there will be a 32GB model for $149.99 and a 64GB for $199.99. Apple plans to start shipping in late October. I would say it is going to be on my holiday wish list but I am not sure I can I hold out that long!

Joe Lytton – Key West Store Manager

Just as we expected, Apple announced the next versions of its best-selling smartphones, the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus at its annual launch event in San Francisco. Also as we expected, the iPhone 6S looks identical to last year’s 4.7-inch iPhone 6S, reserving its most important changes for the hardware interior.
True, there is a new color now, called rose gold (it basically looks like a blush pink, same as the new Apple Watch color option that the company announced). But as far as looks go, this extra shade is the extent of the the changes you’ll be able to visually detect between this year’s and last year’s phones.

Apple says that its phone may look the same as last year’s model, but its iPhone 6S duo has achieved more inner strength. This time it uses a different grade of aluminum for its chassis, one that’s also used in the aerospace industry. They call it Series 7,000, and it’s the same aluminum alloy Apple puts into its Apple Watch Sport.
A new type of chemically strengthened glass also tops the iPhone 6S, though the company hasn’t confirmed if this is cover material from Corning’s Gorilla Glass line or not.

Apple has included a variation of Force Touch, which you find in different capacities on the Apple Watch and on some Mac trackpads. Called 3D Touch here, the iPhone 6S phones will adopt the same pressure-sensitive capability that calls up secondary menus and actions when you press and hold the screen. Press down and you can pull up context-sensitive menus, switch apps, or examine photos. But it’s a subtle riff on what already exists on iPhones: tapping and holding. Another use is to access shortcuts from the home screen for your most frequent actions, say messaging a friend. And if you’re in your email inbox, applying fingertip pressure to an element in the message will surface more information, like maybe the flight number on an emailed travel itinerary, for instance. (Apple called this concept “peeking in” during the live demo.) Pressing harder on an app will likewise generate more options, like viewing all the photos of a contact’s Instagram photo stream. In the context of a game, pressing harder could zoom you in to get closer to the action.

A 12-megapixel camera is a huge jump for Apple, which has been holding onto its 8-megapixel sensors in its iPhone for years. Autofocus will pick up the pace, according to Apple, and color accuracy is a point of pride.

The 5-megapixel front-facing camera now brings the iPhone 6S on par with a lot of today’s competing handsets. Of course, it includes the company’s proprietary voice chat feature, FaceTime video. Here’s something wildly different, though. Instead of including a dedicated flash for the front-facing camera, which only a few phones do, Apple is using the home screen to light up instead. This is meant to increase the brightness of those selfies even in low-light situations.

A new feature you’ll see in the camera, Live Photos is a default mode that turns stills into a video or GIF, basically, images that move. It’s an automatic thing; all you have to do is take the picture like normal. When we took some shots, it seamlessly added Live Photo motion and sound. The Live Photo motion came out more like stop-motion or time lapse, however, than true video. It’s also important to note that one Live Photo is about twice the file size as a regular photo. Couple that with the 4K video capabilities (more on that later), and you’ll definitely need more storage space to accommodate.

Apple also announced 4K video recording, at 3,840×2,160-pixel resolution. You’ll be able to take 8-megapixel camera photos while recording at this ultrahigh resolution. (The immediate benefit of shooting 4K video would be watching them later on a 4K TV.) Just like last year’s phones, the iPhone 6S Plus is the only model here with optical image stabilization, which helps correct blur from shaking hands.

Under the hood, we have an upgraded, proprietary A9 processor that continues Apple’s theme of mystery when it comes to exactly what’s going on in there. Though it’s impossible to appreciate during our quick demo, what we do know is that this is Apple’s third-generation 64-bit chip. Apple claims that the A9 is 70 percent faster than last year’s A8 when it comes to the usual computing tasks (like opening an app, for example), and 90 percent faster at graphical tasks, like gaming.

Apple says it’ll have the fastest forms of LTE Advanced, if that’s supported where you live, and will also include support for the latest, greatest Wi-Fi networks.

The two new iPhones will run on iOS 9, mining all of those software enhancements, like a smarter Siri and up to three hours longer battery life, plus a new Low Power Mode. The updated operating system, which is currently in public beta, will arrive for phones on September 16.

International Data Corporation (IDC), a technology market research firm with over 1,000 analysts in 50 countries, has released its quarterly report on global…

2014 marks the 30th anniversary of the most important technological development of all time: Tetris. There are probably many of you out there that will insist that the Macintosh computer was the most important tech release of 1984, and I will grant that it is a close second, but I am still standing behind the classic tile-matching puzzle video game.

For those of you who don’t know, Tetris is a very simple game in which any of seven different blocks, which are every possible combination of four smaller square blocks that have adjoining sides, fall from above and your job is to move them side-to-side and/or rotate them in order to complete horizontal lines which disappear when completed. The ultimate move is to leave only one vertical line incomplete and drop the “line” piece in to complete four horizontal lines at once. This is a Tetris and you will be rewarded with big points, flashing graphics, sound effects, and the satisfaction of a job well done.

Tetris was originally developed by Alexey Pajitnov in the Soviet Union, and was the first video game exported from the USSR to the US. Its popularity skyrocketed when a version was released for the Nintendo GameBoy in 1989, and versions have since been released for just about every console, operating system, personal electronic device, and has even been played by using the windows in a large building as the blocks.

While the 8-bit NES version will always be my favorite, I have been playing a new version on my iPhone: “*Tetris Blitz by Electronic Arts.*”:https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tetris-blitz/id632827808?mt=8&at=11lb7k This version takes the classic gameplay and condenses it into a two-minute speed round in which the goal is to score maximum points. They have added a number of power-up blocks which trigger different actions, such as lasers that burn up several lines for you or masses of blocks that drop all at once. You can play in single player mode, head-to-head against strangers or your Facebook friends, as well as in special tournaments which often have different rules or game mechanics for added variety. This app is free, but employs what has come to be known as the freemium model, which means that there are a fair number of in-app ads and in-app purchases that are available. If you can learn to ignore these, this app is a fun addition to the Tetris family and only -wastes- uses two minutes at a time.

The best part? Tetris is good for you! According to research, playing half-an-hour a day for three months boosts general cognitive functions such as critical thinking, reasoning, language and processing and increases cerebral cortex thickness. It has also been shown to be a potential therapy for preventing PTSD as well as a way to help quit smoking. “*See here for more information.*”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris#Effect_of_Tetris_on_the_brain

“*Download Tetris Blitz for iOS FREE here!*”:https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tetris-blitz/id632827808?mt=8&at=11lb7k

…OK, so that’s a little hokey. I’m of the belief that a few resolutions are a good thing, but that they shouldn’t be…

I love Lion. So far it is my favorite iteration of Mac OS X, but it does have some annoying features. In my internet wanderings yesterday I came across an article with instructions on how to get rid of the rubber-band effect which occurs when you scroll to the very bottom or top of a page. This effect will make the page scroll a little bit past the end point then bounce back. It’s a nice little bit of eye-candy, but not really necessary.

You can easily turn this effect off by entering a simple Terminal command (which I’ll list below) and then press “enter”. As always, do this at your own risk. Mucking about in Terminal can cause irreparable harm to your OS if you do something you shouldn’t. Make sure you have a good backup before you make any changes like this to your system. Here’s the text you need to enter:

defaults write -g NSScrollViewRubberbanding -int 0

You can revert to the original setting by entering the following and then press enter:

defaults delete -g NSScrollViewRubberbanding

You’ll need to relaunch any applications that display the rubber-banding in order for this to take effect. Unfortunately, it will not affect Safari. Should I find a way to get rid of the rubber-band in Safari, I’ll update this article.

You can read the original article here.