Kibbles & Bytes Blog

Jezebel seems to be growing up into a great little(big) bulldog. I have been using treats to train her and she has learned to sit, stay, come, lay down and give me five. I am working on roll over now. I have taken her into the swimming pool a couple times and I don’t think she particularly likes it even with her life vest on. I think I will have to take her over to the dog beach to see if she will just run in – maybe the pool is a bit intimidating.

I’m a bachelor for 2 weeks and will be glad to have the pups to keep me company. I’ll probably be a bit stir-crazy by the time Grace gets home.

Thanks for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

_Don, Emily & Hadley_

If your inbox is anything like mine you understand the frustrations in keeping it clutter free. I actually have multiple e-mail accounts that I use or monitor, further adding to some of my frustrations. There are all kinds of apps, techniques and advice on how to better manage the many messages that flood your inbox every day. Honestly, dealing with too much e-mail is a lot like dieting. Almost any approach will work, at least for a while. The hard part is finding what fits best with your work style or just staying committed to whatever practice you’ve decided to embrace. Built into the Apple operating systems or iOS are a fairly large set of techniques and features to help you organize your inbox.

In the last several months I feel like I’ve rediscovered just how useful and invaluable even my iPhone is with its mail features. When I’m out of the office or visiting some of our retail locations I almost exclusively use my iPhone and between the organizations features of Mail and iCloud drive there’s very little I can’t do. Swiping is a critical action on the iPhone (or iPad) to uncover all kinds of features within mail and now with El Capitan and Sierra many of these swipe features also work on your Mac with a magic trackpad or mouse.

Most users know if you swipe your finger to the left or right you can quickly manage your messages in mail and quickly archive or delete your message. A quick swipe in either direction will by default archive or delete your message immediately our of your inbox. But there is more to the swipe than just a simple delete.

In iOS, when you swipe a short distance to the right and an unread message (from left to right), Mail displays a read button. You can either tap it or keep swiping to the right to mark the message as read. If the message has already been read, that button changes to unread. This swipe is great for those who like marking message as unread to keep them around for later processing.

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Swipe left (from right to left) a short distance, and you get three buttons. Archive, Flag, and more. Tap archive to store the message in an archive mailbox which is good for getting it our of your inbox without deleting it. Flag will mark the message with a flag so you can find it quickly in your mail’s flagged box. I love this feature! I probably utilize the flag features in my mailboxes several times a day and would be lost without it! You can swipe all the way to the left to archive the message with one motions. Some mailboxes will display delete when you swipe rather than archive. Not to worry though, it’s just going to your trash rather than an archive folder and you still can access the e-mail if you delete it by accident. I recommend going into your mail preferences and make sure you have delay in how soon your trash really dumps your mail permanently. For my work e-mails I have my settings set to never actually empty my trash. You never know when you’ll need an e-mail from 10 years ago and for me, it’s happened!

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If you tap more, you get a bunch of additional options, depending on the message, that can include: reply, reply all, forward, show related messages, mark (so you can flag), file and more. File is probably my favorite feature and I think it’s better than the file feature in Mac mail. I file almost all my e-mails in folders based on their content rather than deleting them. Staff write what we call weekly reports each week and daily I get cash out reports from the retail stores. When I pull these kinds of e-mails up on my phone and use the folder option, iOS automatically suggests what folder it thinks it should go into and most times it correctly defaults to the folder I want. It makes handling bulk yet standard daily e-mails a breeze to file with iOS. So far I haven’t see this feature work on Mac mail.

If you try these features on your Mac (make sure your using the magic track pad or magic mouse) you will see many of these options I’ve talked about available, but know that not all of them may be there. In my opinion the features are better in iOS (who would have thought I’d be saying this!) When iOS first came out and then a few years later when it hit the first iPad we all had a laundry list of things we wish these mobile devices could do.

Bessie B. Stringfield, a.k.a. “BB,” was the first black woman to make eight long-distance solo tours across the U.S. on a motorcycle. In the 1930s, BB Stringfield rode her hot rod through areas known for racial violence and prejudice. She earned the nickname “The Negro Motorcycle Queen.”

On her tours, Bessie Stringfield traveled through Brazil, Haiti and parts of Europe. Her next destination was determined by tossing a penny on a map. As she rode through Jim Crow country, BB would sometimes sleep on her motorcycle with a blanket if there were no safe places for her to stay during her trip.

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, BB Stringfield came to America as a child and was given up for adoption. At age 16, she was given a motorcycle by her Irish adoptive mother, whose name she was not allowed to repeat. After she was gifted her first 1928 Indian Scout bike, BB Stringfield would later purchase another 27 motorcycles throughout her life.

Throughout her travels, BB performed motorcycle stunts for local carnivals. The press loved her balancing stunt while her Harley was in motion.

Bessie used her motorcycle talent to work as the only female civilian motorcycle dispatch rider in World War II. She quickly carried documents between military bases and sharpened her riding skills by riding over makeshift bridges. Once her tour was complete, she moved to Miami and founded the Iron Horse Motorcycle Club. In Miami, Stringfield secretly entered riding contests as a man, and after winning, removed her helmet to reveal her gender. As a result, she was often denied the prize money.

In her personal life, BB Stringlfied married and divorced six times. She lost three children over the years. Her final husband, Arthur Stringfield, asked that Bessie keep his last name because it made him famous.

Bessie Stringfield, the Negro Motorcycle Queen, died in 1993 at age 82 from an enlarged heart. Her memory was left with the remainder of her six ex-husbands. In 2002 she was inducted into the AMA Motorcycle Hall of Fame.

I remember the time when if I wanted to play audio on a stereo or connect my Mac to a TV, I needed a special cable and always ended up balancing my Mac on the skinny TV table. The details varied over time and with different devices, but one thing remained constant: cables were always a pain!

To eliminate the need for fussy cables, Apple developed a wireless transmission technology called AirPlay. With AirPlay, you can send audio and video from one device to another, making it possible, for instance, to play music from your iPhone on a standalone speaker or put a webcast video from Safari on your Mac onto the big screen in your living room. You can even use AirPlay to mirror your iPad or Mac screen on a large-screen TV.

With AirPlay, it always takes two to tango: a device that sends the audio or video, and another device that receives it. When it comes to receiving audio and video via AirPlay, you have four options:

* An Apple TV (second-generation or newer) can receive both audio and video and play it on a TV

* An AirPort Express base station can receive audio and pass it on to a stereo through the connection on the AirPort Express

* More and more manufacturers are now selling standalone AirPlay-enabled speakers that can play audio

* The Airfoil Satellite app from Rogue Amoeba turns a Mac, Windows PC, or iOS device into an audio receiver. Airfoil Satellite for Mac or Windows is free with the purchase of Airfoil, which adds AirPlay support to more apps.

How you send audio and video varies by device and what you’re trying to accomplish:

* In iOS 10, when you’re playing audio or video that you want to send via AirPlay, swipe up from the bottom of the screen to reveal Control Center, swipe left to show the Media pane, and then tap the destination device in the list.

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* On a Mac, to send audio or video from iTunes via AirPlay, click the AirPlay icon to the right of the volume slider in the toolbar, and choose a destination. When you’re playing audio, you can click the + to send audio to multiple destinations at the same time.

* You can also send certain videos from Safari or QuickTime Player to an Apple TV. Click the AirPlay icon in the playback controls and then choose your Apple TV.

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* On a Mac, you can send all the audio (from all apps!) to an AirPort Express or AirPlay speaker by clicking (or Option-clicking in older versions of OS X) the Sound icon in the menu bar and choosing the destination device. You can also choose a destination device in the Output view of the Sound system preference pane.

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* To send audio from any Mac app to an AirPlay speaker without sending your entire system audio there, use Rogue Amoeba’s Airfoil.

AirPlay’s other neat trick is that you can use it with an Apple TV to mirror your Mac or iOS device screen (where the same image appears on both screens) or use an AirPlay-connected Apple TV as a separate display to extend your Mac’s desktop. This is a good way to play video on an Apple TV if you need to use an app other than iTunes, Safari, or QuickTime Player. Here’s what you do:

* In iOS, swipe up from the bottom of the screen to reveal Control Center, and in the leftmost pane, tap the AirPlay Mirroring button and choose your Apple TV.

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* On a Mac, click the AirPlay icon in the menu bar and choose your Apple TV from the list. Once you’ve selected it, click that menu again to choose whether you mirror your Mac screen to the Apple TV or use the Apple TV as a separate display.

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The most common problem with AirPlay is that you must have both devices are on the same Wi-Fi network and that all software has been updated to the latest version. If that isn’t sufficient, restart each device, along with your network router.

AirPlay isn’t perfect, but Apple has been improving it in every new release of iOS and macOS, so if you would like to extend your iPhone’s musical reach or play video from your Mac on your HDTV, give it a try!