Sonos and Apple Music

Motorcycling down here is sort of boring. I have my bike all tuned up but there is literally only one road and the fastest speed limit in Key West is 30mph. I think we may have to trade in Grace’s Vespa to get a real motorcycle for her so we can take some longer trips down here.

Pitchers and catchers reported for spring training and the Cubs Kyle Schwarber is already breaking windshields in Arizona at the Cubs park. Maybe this year?

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

Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

_Don, Emily, & Hadley_

I talked a bit about the big Consumer Electronics Show last week and it is rapidly fading in the rearview mirror. I have gone to this show every year for the past decade or more. We actually exhibited our Chill Pill speakers and Hammerhead products at one CES but mostly I have come as a “buyer” to look for new products and trends.

The Las Vegas convention center is a gigantic venue and the CES show spills out into the parking lot in front but also into some of the surrounding hotels and resorts. The Sands convention center was the second largest and housed some of the more interesting booths. This was the location for 3D printing, health care, fitness, home automation, robots and drones. There were sophisticated baby monitors, constant reporting thermometers, implanted blood glucose monitors and even a company that sold wireless sensors that monitor your soil’s nutrients and moisture. Home automation was huge with several competing standards vying to challenge Apple’s HomeKit. This year more companies were showing HomeKit compatible products so I think that Apple’s vision of your interconnected home is not far off.

There are lots of ways to move from the Sands over to the LVCC but the best way is the free buses offered by CES. Cabs and the monorail are possible but the buses seem to be the fastest and they are free and comfortable. For me it was a great way to rest my weary feet for a few minutes before going to the other venue to continue walking through the crowds. At the convention center there are three main halls and the international pavilion over at the Westgate (formerly, Hilton). The Center hall is dominated by the big guys with gigantic booths for Samsung, Intel, LG and others. Those booths are usually mobbed so I quickly walked through to check out the TVs and moved on. The North Hall is where the iLounge was born and products for iPad and iPhone dominate that section. The biggest part of the North Hall, however, was the Auto section with concept cars being shown my several manufacturers including Ford, Audi, Mercedes and new electric car upstart Faraday.

In the past several years the iLounge area and the international area were dominated by all sorts of cases for iPhones and iPads. This year there were a few in each section but cases were definitely not the dominate category. Over at the international pavilion there were lots of hover boards but unlike previous years, demos of the scooters were restricted to the booth area. Nevertheless, all sorts of scooters were being shown. I searched for interesting USB-C products and found some hubs that were not quite ready for prime time and a bunch of cables. I did see the USB-C displays that incorporate a hub and that could be the real solution for the office set-up for the USB-C equipped MacBook.

I never seem to be able to coordinate my meetings by hall. It seems that I’ll have one meeting in the North Hall, the next in the South Hall and then another back at the hotel. I rode the buses a lot and got to see the whole show floor that way.

I did find some interesting products that we may add to our offerings, and had some great meetings so it was worthwhile to visit this show that is a window on future technology.

Last week a typo slipped by our proofers. Command+M is not open a new document but that command is Command+N. Sorry about that. To make up for it here are a couple more keyboard combinations you might find handy:

**Command-Option-Esc** – If an app stops responding, you might need to force it to quit. You can do that with a right click on the app icon in the dock, but it’s even easier if you hit this keyboard shortcut. This will bring up the Force Quit dialog, which you can then use to make that non-responsive app quit. You might need to Command-Tab you way out of an active frozen app first, though, or use **Command+Shift+Option+Esc** to quit the currently active app.

**Command-Option-P and R** – Here’s one that might challenge your fingers dexterity. Fortunately, you will hardly ever have to use it but it is used to reset your non-volatile random access memory (NVRAM). Information stored in NVRAM can include speaker volume, screen resolution, start-up disk selection and recent kernel panic information. If you are asked to reset your P-Ram or NVRAM here’s how you do it.

1) Shut down your Mac
2) Turn on your Mac
3) Immediately after you hear the start up sound, hold down the command, option, P and R keys
4) Hold those keys down until you hear the start up sound again and then release them.

_Dear Friends_,

It was a long trip up to Daytona using the “avoid highways, avoid tolls” feature of Google Maps. I was using my Blue Ant Pump Lite Bluetooth earbuds connected to my iPhone in my pocket. I not only got the turn-by-turn directions from Google Maps but also some great tunes from my playlists. I even was able to take a phone call, although I pulled over both for safety reasons and so I could hear better. We travelled through Florida’s farm belt, orange groves (hey, their trees are full of oranges!) and Lake Okeechobee before we headed towards the coast.

It is official, Apple has sent out notices for the special “Let Us Loop You In” event on Monday. It is expected to see some new iPhones and iPads and perhaps other announcements. For those of you with a 4th Generation AppleTV there is a new app called “Apple Events” that you can download for free to watch the event which starts at 10AM Pacific time. The live stream will also be available on Macs and iOS devices through Apple’s event website. iOS 7 or OS X 10.8.5 with Safari 6.0.5 or later is required. We are excited to hear about the latest from Apple!

I am going to talk about Time Machine and Time Capsules a bit in the article below, however, this week as a Kibbles & Bytes exclusive, I am featuring the Apple factory reconditioned 2 and 3 TB Time Capsules. You can save a bunch on these Time Capsules that have a 1-year Apple warranty. Normally, the 2 TB Time Capsule, new is $299.99 and the 3TB Time Capsule is $399.99. With $20 off for Kibbles & Bytes readers, the “**2TB Time Capsule is only $159.99**”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002182/save-20-on-an-apple-factory-refurbished-2tb-time-capsule and the “**3TB is $259.99!**”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002183/save-20-on-an-apple-factory-refurbished-3tb-time-capsule This is a great way for you to have automatic wireless backup and the superior Apple Airport Extreme wireless access point!