Kibbles & Bytes Blog

  • Take A Step Into The Future

    As many of you know, I read a lot of science fiction and one of the things that constantly amazes me is how quickly science fiction turns to science fact. Self-driving cars, drones, tablets, smartphones and smart homes were all the stuff of sci-fi- but now are almost commonplace.

    I remember just 5 years ago at CES when I saw my first drone. There was a guy in the parking lot doing an interview with a reporter with the drone. A few more drones made their way into the show in the next year but this year there were literally hundreds of drone booths. Small Dog Electronics sells drones from the largest manufacturer, DJI and also from GoPro once they actually ship their Karma drone. The DJI Mavic is a compact drone that comes with a camera and the Karma is similar but uses GoPro cameras on a special gimbal. I really haven’t figured out what the market is for drones other than hobbyists and those that want to make movies of their outdoor adventures.

    There were some odd things there, too. Like smart ladies high heels that track fitness but also adjust height and temperature.

    Alexa was everywhere. The Amazon AI devices, Echo, Dot and Tap where the hit of the show. Actually, not the devices themselves, I didn’t see an Amazon booth, but the connectivity. Everyone was announcing connectivity with Alexa including locks, lights, fitness gear and just about anything you can imagine. Forget robots (there were plenty there) but this artificial intelligence was everywhere. Many of the same companies were announcing connectivity with Google Home and Apple’s HomeKit but this was Alexa’s show. Ford and VW showed Alexa in their cars, Whirlpool had Alexa controlling washers and dryers and Samsung had Alexa controlling their automatic vacuum cleaner.

    While I find Apple’s Siri way smarter than Alexa, Apple has missed the boat by not utilizing their technological capacity with Apple and Beats to come up with a killer device to bring Siri to the home. That’s my editorial observation and I’ll bet there are a bunch of engineers working hard in Cupertino on this. Nevertheless, Will and I had a mission and that was to find new products that are HomeKit compatible.

    p{text-align: center;}. !http://blog.smalldog.com/images/4951.jpg!

    We were successful on the 2nd day when we went not to the Las Vegas convention center but over to the Sands Exposition Center where all the smart home, drones, heath and fitness and 3D printers were housed. We had great meetings with a number of vendors such as Honeywell, Kwikset, First Alert, Elgato and Withings. We will be bringing in a number of these products. We were also searching for another HomeKit compatible lock and I have always liked the design of the August locks. While they didn’t have a booth, we noticed that they had a hospitality suite. It was getting late in the day and we decided to make our way to the Venetian and the 30th floor where their suite was located. We walked in unannounced to a suite with one guy in it. We told him what we wanted to do and about our plans for our home automation displays at our stores and he showed us the products. He introduced us to the sales manager next door and we discovered we had been talking with the CEO of August. Long story short, we should have August locks for you really soon.

    Virtual reality was also huge at the show with lots of the booths having VR setups to show their products or to show their VR set-ups. It was funny watching people with VR glasses on playing a game or virtually climbing a wall. It always looked like they were playing whack-a-mole.

    p{text-align: center;}. !http://blog.smalldog.com/images/4952.jpg!

    No CES show is complete without looking at the automotive section and the TVs. We went to the big booths by LG, Samsung and Sony and were again amazed by the OLED TVs, the smart refrigerators, washing machines and other gear. I particularly liked the automated in-home dry cleaning station and the automated laundry folder. At the automotive section we were wowed by the very cool looking Faraday Future car as well as some of the futuristic designs from others.

    I have been to a lot of shows and I always judge the success by whether it changes our business at all. This show will as we gained some great new vendors, had productive meetings with current vendors and took a peak at what they future might be like. I got home and decided to try one of those Samsung vacuums so I told Grace that I got a new robot. She seemed a bit bored and said “yeah, big deal, what does this one do?”

  • Customize Your Toolbar

    Many Mac users don’t realize just how customizable their Macs are, and a part of the Mac interface that’s simultaneously among the most…

  • FROM THE ARCHIVES: Web Inspector in Safari

    While my favorite website always has been, and always will be, “*Warner Brother’s promotional site for the hard-hitting documentary Space Jam*”:http://www.warnerbros.com/archive/spacejam/movie/jam.htm there have been many changes to the features and design of websites since 1996. The underlying programming language is still basically the same though: HTML.

    “*HyperText Markup Language*”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML is a programming language that tells your web browser, such as Safari, how to render the text and images that you see. This very newsletter uses HTML (unless you are one of our plain text readers, though I am guessing that there are fewer and fewer of you every day) that is generated via Textile, a simpler markup language that allows me to write this article more like a normal document. Most websites now also use “*Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)*”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_Style_Sheets to define the look of the page, embedded scripts for interactive elements,
    and embedded media files as well.

    If you would like to take a look under the hood, Safari has an option to view the code that makes up any website. In order to enable this feature, you will need to go to *Safari Preferences > Advanced* and check the box that says *”Show Develop menu in menu bar”*. Now, you can open that menu and press *”Show Web Inspector”*. This will open a box on the bottom of the window that has all of the code that makes up the page. If you click on the target symbol next to the word Inspect, you can mouse around the page and see the specific code that makes up any one element of a page.

    My favorite thing about this is the ability to remove an element of a website by deleting the code that generates it. I am a big crossword fan and generally do the “*Los Angeles Times crossword online.*”:http://games.latimes.com/games/daily-crossword/ I find the animated ads on the side distracting, though, so the first thing I do every time is to inspect the code and remove the ads. I then put it into full screen and it is almost like doing it on paper.

  • Baby Steps Into Home Automation

    Home automation is a big topic right now. The technology has been out for several years, but for many users as well as manufacturers it’s just now starting to really take off. There seems to be an almost endless list of options popping up and they range from simple DIY installations to more complex professional installations. I’ve talked to many users in the last few weeks who want to begin using some home automation products but don’t know where to start so I thought I’d start to share some of the things I’m doing in my own home. I have several products running now, but the first place I started was with simple smart outlets and installing a few apps on my phone.

    Taking advantage of home automation doesn’t have to be complicated and you can do it in baby steps. In my own house I started by adding some smart outlets from Incipio. The “*Incipio CommandKit Smart Outlet with Metering*”:http://www.smalldog.com/product/88015/incipio-commandkit-smart-outlet-with-metering was very simple to set up and took me just 5-10 minutes to pair it to my phone via their free “*app.*”:https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/incipio-commandkit/id1049393966?mt=8 Now from my phone I can control multiple devices within my home via this app and I can see the amount of power those items are using. Because the smart outlets work off your home wifi, you can easily move them around the house and connect them to different products around your house.

    I’ve been astounded with the difference in power consumption with some lights around my house. We all know LED products use less power, but it’s remarkable to see first hand just how much of a difference there is! Thanks to my smart outlets I’ve discovered little things like the tiny lightbulb in my bedroom lamp used almost as much power as my TV, cable box and speakers combined. I quickly changed out that bulb to an LED. Before getting these outlets it never crossed my mind to change bulbs in my smaller lamps.

    Through my phone I can now turn devices on and off, see how much power they are using, and program when specific devices might need to turn on or off. I can also do fun things like like use Siri (you do need to set up HomeKit for this) to turn lights on when you come into a room and don’t want to open the app. As you get more comfortable with basic home automation tools like outlets, you can expand to light bulbs, speaker systems and even start replacing physical wall switches.

    My one piece of advice to someone starting off with home automation is to look at the product lines you are considering to make sure the products you are buying are compatible with HomeKit. Not all home automation products work with HomeKit so you want to pay attention to what you’re buying. Little details like this can really reduce headaches and detract from the value and fun of these devices!

  • _Hello Fellow Technophiles,_

    My older kid has been getting more interested in comics all the time. He brought home one of my all time favorites from the library recently: Scientific Progress Goes “Boink”. This Calvin & Hobbes collection has some real gems in it, but the strip that really caught my eye was from December 30, 1989. Calvin is pondering the upcoming new decade and asks:

    “Where are the flying cars? Where are the moon colonies? Where are the personal robots and the zero gravity boots, huh? You call this a new decade? You call this the future?? HA! Where are the rocket packs? Where are the disintegration rays? Where are the floating cities?”

    Well, it’s been 27 years and we still don’t have flying cars but we do have self-driving ones which is probably way more practical and honestly more amazing. Moon colonies I could do without, but it seems crazy to me that it has been nearly 50 years since the moon landing but we haven’t sent a human to Mars yet. One could make the argument that personal digital assistants like Siri are “personal robots” but she still doesn’t help me do the dishes. I’ll put zero gravity boots, rocket packs, and floating cities into the “cool, but probably not necessary” category and I hope no one is working on a disintegration ray as the world is scary enough as it is.

    For a vision of the near future, see Emily’s article on home automation below. As she notes, this is a new and growing field, and I am excited to see all of the fun and practical new devices that seem futuristic now, but will likely be an everyday part of our lives 27 years from now.

    As always, thanks for reading!

    Mike
    “*michaeld@smalldog.com*”:mailto:michaeld@smalldog.com

  • I will be spending a few days in what has got to be one of the most unique cities in the world, Las Vegas. Lots of meetings and lots of walking around the show floors. My Apple Watch will be telling me that I have achieved my goals early each day.

    My new puppy, Jezebel, is acclimating just fine and she gets along great with Max. I hope she remembers me when I get back!

    I will give you the report from CES in next week’s Kibbles & Bytes from at least my slice of experience. This show is so big that even with the two days I have given myself, I will probably only see about 50% of the show.

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

    Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

    _Don, Emily & Hadley_

  • Photons and Semiconductors

    Several articles ago, I believe I made mention of how generators and alternators work. I think it was in an article about induction motors and electric motors in general. Spinning generators are certainly common and they are by far the most common way we get our household power. Hydro, nuclear, coal, natural gas, geothermal, tidal, wind…basically any type of power generation that involves something moving…they all use generators. In the case of things like nuclear, coal, natural gas, and geothermal, the moving medium is steam created by heating regular water.

    If you understand generators, that’s all there is to most power generation. Of course with nuclear, you might want to understand the nuclear fission process, but that’s separate from the power generation itself. One method of power generation that’s become increasingly common and promoted these days is solar, specifically photovoltaic. It’s important to distinguish photovoltaic power from solar power generally because you can actually use mirrors to concentrate sunlight to generate steam to spin a conventional generator. Photovoltaic generation is solid state, meaning that it has no moving parts anywhere in the process.

    Photovoltaic (or solar) power cells are actually quite complicated, combining structural design, chemistry, electromagnetism, and physics. In simple terms, a solar power cell absorbs photons in semiconducting materials. Electrons in these materials are energized enough so that they can move. The structure and materials of the cell constricts how the electrons can move. Because we want to generate useable power, we want the electrons to all move in the same direction so that they can be pushed through whatever circuitry we’re trying to power. The actual nitty gritty science of the semiconducting materials and structure is ??very?? complicated.

    Solar cells vary widely in their performance and efficiency. This is because not all photons are equal. While a given area of sunlight has in it some amount of energy, only some percentage of the photons will properly interact with the silicon semiconductor. Many of the photons that hit a solar cell will have too much energy and will simply be converted to heat. This is exactly the same kind of heat you feel on your skin if you lay in the sun.

    Metal-semiconductor contacts are imprinted onto both sides of the solar cell to funnel the moving electrons into external wires and on to external loads. After the electrons pass through the external loads, they come back to the solar cell and fill in the gap left by other electrons that have moved. If it’s not clear by now, solar cells can only generate direct current power. In grid-tie solar applications, the DC from the solar array must be inverted to grid-level AC power. This is definitely the biggest difference between photovoltaic power and almost all other forms of electricity generation.

    To some people it may seem counterintuitive, but solar cells work best in bright, cool conditions. If a cell heats too much, its output will be reduced. When a solar panel is rated, they rate it at a nominal 25 degrees celsius. For each degree of temperature increase, every panel will have a known loss of efficiency. To grossly oversimplify it, a cold electron at rest will have a much greater change in energy state when it’s knocked free than a hot electron already in motion. Therefore a hot panel will produce a lower voltage and thus, less power. On cold winter days, my solar panel at home increases its voltage so much that the controller can use the extra voltage to create more charging current. So my panel which is rated for a short-circuit current of 2.78 amps can actually deliver a charging current to my battery of over 4 amps (in ideal conditions).

    I had to simplify this topic considerably because there’s just no way I could go into p/n-type doped silicon and how semiconductors work in a short article. I highly recommend reading up on it though because it is a fascinating combination of electromagnetism and chemistry. Semiconductors have a lot of uses and are very interesting. Maybe I can condense some of it into a future article.

  • Baby Steps Into Home Automation

    Home automation is a big topic right now. The technology has been out for several years now, but for many users as well as manufactures it’s just now starting to really take off. There seems to be an almost endless list of options popping up and they range from simple DIY installations to more complex professional installations. I’ve talked to many users in the last few weeks who want to begin using some home automation products but don’t know where to start so I thought I’d start to share some of the things I’m doing in my own home. I have several products running now, but the first place I started was with simple smart outlets and installing a few apps on my phone.

    Taking advantage of home automation doesn’t have to be complicated and you can do it in baby steps. In my own house I started by adding some smart outlets from Incipio. The “**Incipio CommandKit Smart Outlet with Metering**”:http://www.smalldog.com/product/88015/incipio-commandkit-smart-outlet-with-metering was very simple to set up and took me just 5-10 minutes to pair it to my phone via their free “**app.**”:https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/incipio-commandkit/id1049393966?mt=8 Now from my phone I can control multiple devices within my home via this app and I can see the amount of power those items are using. Because the smart outlets work off your home wifi, you can easily move them around the house and connect them to different products around your house. I’ve been astounded with the difference in power consumption with some lights around my house. We all know LED products use less power, but it’s remarkable to see first hand just how much of a difference there is! Thanks to my smart outlets I’ve discovered little things like the tiny lightbulb in my bedroom lamp used almost as much power as TV, cable box and speakers combined. I quickly changed out that bulb to an LED. Before getting these outlets it never crossed my mind to change bulbs in my smaller lamps.

    Through my phone I can now turn devices on and off, see how much power they are using and program when specific devices might need to turn on or off. I can also do fun things like like use Siri (you do need to set up HomeKit for this) to turn lights on when you come into a room and don’t want to open the app. As you get more comfortable with basic home automation tools like outlets, you can expand to light bulbs, speaker systems and even start replacing physical wall switches. My one piece of advice to someone starting off with home automation is pick a brand of product lines and compatibility, ensuring the products you are buying are compatible with HomeKit. Not all home automation products work with HomeKit so you want to pay attention to what you’re buying. Little details like this can really reduce headaches and detract from the value and fun of these devices!

  • Customize your Toolbar for More Control

    Many Mac users don’t realize just how customizable their Macs are, and a part of the Mac interface that’s simultaneously among the most useful and the most overlooked is the toolbar that appears in every Finder window.

    By default, the toolbar contains buttons for navigating back and forth, changing the view, arranging the files in the window, performing a variety of actions, sharing the selected file, working with tags, and searching. There’s nothing wrong with these controls, and you may even use them regularly.

    But those defaults are just the tip of the iceberg. Choose View > Customize Toolbar and a dialog appears with a slew of additional controls that you can drag to the toolbar, after which they appear in every Finder window. None of these controls are unique–they’re all available from Finder menus and via keyboard shortcuts–but it’s often easier to click a button that’s front and center in a Finder window rather than hunting through menus or trying to remember a key combo.

    p{text-align: center;}. !http://blog.smalldog.com/images/4944.png!

    The most useful toolbar controls include:

    *Arrange:* The choices in this menu let you group files and folders by different criteria, such as file kind, what app owns each file, or the date each file was modified. It’s great when you’re working in a folder with a lot of similar files.

    *Action:* This menu duplicates many of the options in the Finder’s File menu but can be easier to access.
    Space/Flexible Space: Drag Space to the toolbar to separate controls by a fixed amount so you can group related items. Flexible Space works similarly, except it can expand or contract to match the window width.

    *New Folder: *Click it and you get a new folder. Handy, if unsurprising.

    *Delete:* Equally unsurprising is the Delete button, which moves selected files and folders to the Trash when you click it.

    *Search:* Enter some text here to search for it within your files (or choose the “Name matches” item that pops down from the Search field to search for it in just filenames). You can set the default search to be the entire Mac or just the current folder in Finder > Preferences > Advanced.

    *Share:* When you want to share a file with someone else, look here for sharing extensions for AirDrop, Mail, Messages, and more. You can also import files into some apps, like Notes, using the Share menu.

    *Edit/Add Tags:* If you rely on Finder tags to group and find related files, this menu makes it easy to add and edit tags for selected files and folders.

    Don’t miss the Show pop-up menu, which lets you customize your toolbar to show icons with names, just icons, or only text.

    What if you want to get rid of a toolbar button? Just drag it off the toolbar while the Customize Toolbar dialog is open. But that’s not all!

    p{text-align: center;}. !http://blog.smalldog.com/images/4943.png!

    While the Customize Toolbar dialog is open, you can drag buttons around on the toolbar to rearrange them. Even better, you can drag any app, document, or folder into the toolbar (from another Finder window) to add it. It’s a great place to put that spreadsheet you open every day or the utility app you use to upload a weekly report. You can even drop a file on an app in the toolbar to open the document in that app.

    To modify the toolbar quickly without opening the Customize Toolbar dialog, just hold down the Command key. With that key down, you can move items around on the toolbar, drag unnecessary items off, and drag new files on.

    No matter what you do on your Mac, taking a few minutes to customize the toolbar with controls you’ll use and your primary apps and documents will make using the Mac faster and easier every day. Give it a try!