Kibbles & Bytes Blog

Apple news, tech tips, and more…

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  • Passwords, Open Sesame?

    I cannot begin to tell you how many times I have been helping a customer with a new Mac or a troublesome Mac and the customer cannot remember their password. They start rummaging through sticky notes, old postcards or well-organized notebooks. I was at a customer’s home yesterday and needed to set up her email and iCloud account. I asked for the administrator password for her Mac and she went to a little pile of sticky notes and tried to find the right one and the scene was repeated for each password we needed. I then proceeded to show her Keychain Access and I could see the light bulb hovering above her head as she understood the value of this app from Apple.

    Mac OS X supports what are known as keychains: secure storage lockers for certificates, passwords, or any small bits of information to be kept private. The primary purpose of a keychain is to remember passwords for various applications and accounts such as mail and ftp servers, web sites, or encrypted disk images. The basic idea is that a single password, the keychain password, is used to unlock access to all passwords stored in that keychain.

    I keep Keychain Access in my dock and use it all the time to find passwords, banking information, or secure notes. To find Keychain Access you follow this path: Finder > Applications > Utilities > Keychain Access. I do recommend that once you find it that you drag it to your dock, because once you start using it, you will wonder how you ever lived without it.

    p{text-align: center;}. !http://blog.smalldog.com/images/4969.png!

    With the advent of iCloud and OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Apple made Keychain even more valuable as iCloud Keychain lets you share your Keychain in the iCloud so you can access it from all of your devices. I wish there was an app like Keychain Access on your iOS devices but still, it is awful handy to have your device automatically remember your password for websites, etc.

    When you launch Keychain Access you will see that the window is divided into three panes. The top-left pane lists keychains accessible to you. Below this is the Category pane. Here you can choose to view specific kinds of things stored in the keychain: passwords, secure notes, certificates associated with your account, encryption keys, and certificates used by your Mac. The largest pane, to the right, displays the contents of selected category items–for example, all of the items that have a password associated with them. Except in the case of certificates, you can double-click on one of these items to open a window where you can view the item’s attributes: name, kind, associated account, location (a website or network address), as well as its access control.

    Keychain Access can do a lot of useful things. For example, if you’ve forgotten a password and would like to recover it, Keychain Access is the place to go. To learn the identity of a password, select All Items or Passwords in the Category pane, then find the the item you want the password for and double-click it. In the resulting window, enable the Show Password option. You will be prompted for the password for the login keychain which is either your login password or the administrator password (which will be the same if you are an admin user on your machine). Enter that and click Allow, and the password will be revealed in the Password field.

    I have just scratched the surface of this great utility, perhaps we will go into some more technical detail in our sister eNewsletter, Tech Tails or in a future issue of Kibbles & Bytes. But if you are not using Keychain to its full potential, I suggest dragging it to your dock and checking it out!

  • _Dear Friends,_

    The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists just moved the Doomsday Clock up to the worst since 1953. With the current administration in Washington turning their back on science, it is good to see that scientists are planning their own march to Washington. George Orwell’s 1984 is the current best seller and not only is the president bringing his own cheering squad to press conferences but actually talks about “alternate facts” as if they were anything but lies.

    Grace and I and Jezebel marched in the Women’s March here in Key West with about another 4000 folks. My granddaughter, Gracie, was at the march in Montpelier, VT and my other granddaughter, Khadija was in NYC. Watching the hundreds of thousands of people peacefully demonstrating for equal right and common sense made me feel as good as I have since the election. It is the young people that are our future and our hope and it makes me have a much better view of the future.

    Work tends to keep my mind off what’s going on in Washington and we have been very busy with our push into home automation products. Will, Rob and I have been adding new products and working on the demo rooms in S. Burlington and Key West. We are adding locks from August & Schlage, both of which are HomeKit compatible and will be bringing in the new Kwikset Premis locks for HomeKit compatibility. We will be carrying the Honeywell Lyric thermostats, more products from Lutron, Philips Hue lighting and lots more. We will also be bringing in Netgear’s Arlo wireless cams, while not HomeKit compatible they are a great solution.

    This week’s “**Kibbles & Bytes exclusive**”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002553/kibbles-bytes-exclusive-special? is the Apple Factory Refurbished MacBook in Space Gray. This special version features 8GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD drive. These carry the same 1-year Apple warranty as new products and are eligible for AppleCare. I have exactly 5 of these available and this special price of “**$999.99**”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002553/kibbles-bytes-exclusive-special? is exclusive for Kibbles & Bytes readers and is only valid while supply lasts!

  • What To Do When Your Mac is Frozen

    It’s probably happened to you at least once and it’s worse than the spinning beach ball. It’s the scary black screen with multiple languages alerting you to restart your computer. I’ve seen it countless times on customer machines over the years and once or twice on my own computers. Most users come in with concern and fear on their faces; what just happened to their computer?

    This black screen is often referred to as a kernel panic and I like to describe it as the computers equivalent to your car’s check engine light. It’s a very generic error that can means something has gone horribly wrong or your computer just simply needs to restart. Generally the only way to know if your kernel panic was the result of a serious problem is running diagnostics, typically performed by a technician. I once experienced this with a 15in MacBook Pro of mine. I was sitting in my living room looking up something on the internet and BAM kernel panic. I was stuck with a machine that was completely unresponsive, locked up and displayed a scary black screen. My computer had never before indicated any kind of performance issues and was working perfectly fine until it locked up on me without warning.

    If you should find yourself in the unlucky position of having your Mac lock up on you due to a kernel panic you will need to restart your computer. How you might ask? When your computer is locked up and unresponsive to your keyboard, mouse, trackpad, etc the only way to restart your computer is to hold down the power button for about five seconds. This will force your computer to turn off and it will shut down. I would suggest letting your computer sit for about thirty seconds and then turn the computer back on again. With the new Touch Bar MacBook Pros you will need to press down on the blank touch ID button until you feel and hear a click.

    It’s never advisable to shutdown and restart your computer by just holding down on the power button and you should only do this in situations where you have no other choice. Forcing your computer to shut down by holding the power button can cause corruption and loss of data among other things. However, when your Mac is frozen there is no other option. In many cases this lock up is a one time deal, as was the case with my MacBook Pro. The machine only ever locked up the one time. Like your cars check engine like, the kernel panic can be caused by any number of benign issues from a bad memory chip to a logic board issue. Certainly it’s recommended that if your machine locks up again you should have it looked it, but more than likely it’s just an isolated event.

  • What Happened To My Privacy?

    As a computer technician, I speak with people every day who are concerned about the privacy of their information. Most people are aware that when they use popular websites, their activity is tracked to some extent, but few people fully appreciate the scope of what occurs.

    Google Maps has a feature that can display live traffic information. I regularly use this feature when taking trips, and it is astonishingly accurate, often down to a few feet. The reason it can be so accurate is that it uses location data from all smartphones that use Google services with location tracking enabled. This data is used to calculate the traffic speed on every street at all times, which is then compared to the average recorded speed to create the traffic map.

    In order for this feature to work, smartphones that have Google services enabled send their location to Google at regular intervals. This data is not only used for traffic maps and other similar features, but is also stored by Google. Google also makes your location history visible to you, so you can “*view*”:https://www.google.com/maps/timeline it at any time and compare where Google thinks you have been to where you actually were. You will probably find that it is very accurate!

    Every time you make a Google search, it is also logged. By analyzing their vast numbers of stored searches, Google is able to do things like make the suggested searches more helpful for everyone, tailor them for what they think individual users are more likely to search for, or target advertising content to them. You can view your complete Google search history “*here.*”:https://myactivity.google.com

    You may have noticed that both of these links have “delete my history” options somewhere on the page. Deleting the history will prevent you from seeing it if you visit that page again, but it is generally accepted that Google does not ever delete user data from their backend, only mark it as hidden so the user can no longer see it.

    You may be starting to get a clearer picture of how much of your personal information is no longer private, but it may go much deeper than that. In the last few years, unconfirmed reports have surfaced on the Internet of Google potentially analyzing all input that is received by smartphone microphones that they have background access to. For instance, someone who normally has no interest in sports and has never searched for sports-related terms will watch a football game for the first time and start to see Google advertisements related to football a few hours later. If these reports are accurate, the implications are very serious. The idea that a text transcript of all of the conversations that my smartphone has ever been present for is sitting on a Google server somewhere is horrifying.

    I have been singling out Google because they have been relatively open about what kinds of data they store, but in the tech community it is accepted that virtually every such organization engages in these types of practices to some degree, without even mentioning what the NSA and the other three-letter agencies do.

    You may be wondering how you can prevent these types of information about you from being stored. The unfortunate answer is that realistically, you can’t. You can resolve to never use a computer or phone again and only buy things in cash, but if you are subscribed to an email newsletter about tech concepts, that is probably not an appealing idea. Even if you were to do it, it would not completely protect you from data about you being stored. You may say something that is picked up by the microphone on someone else’s smartphone, and transmitted to who knows where. Your face will probably appear on security camera footage somewhere, and then potentially stored in a database where it is processed by ever-improving facial recognition algorithms.

    The closest thing to being completely isolated from all of this is to live completely off the grid, in a home that you constructed yourself, eating food that you grow or hunt yourself, and never returning to a civilized area. However, this probably would not be a very fulfilling or enjoyable life. And at any rate, if you look hard enough, you will still be able to see a Google Earth satellite passing overhead.

  • _Hello Fellow Technophiles,_

    I’ve got my sunglasses ready, the flights are booked, the car is rented, and I am already daydreaming about sand and surf. By this time on Saturday I will have left the icy north and will be in the Sunshine State: Florida. As many of you know, we have a “*retail location in Key West*”:http://www.smalldog.com/keywest/macs-ipods-iphone-gear-apple-service-in-key-west-florida but I will be a little ways up the coast on Sanibel Island. Per our Key West retail manager Joe, there is a speedboat service from Fort Myers right to Key West, but I think I will try to keep my vacation a pure vacation and make my way to Key West another time.

    On a winter vacation a few years ago, my furnace went out on a day where it was twenty degrees below zero here in Vermont. Fortunately, my family was feeding my cat and discovered this before things got too bad. The cat, thanks to his extra pounds, was just fine and the only pipe that froze was a water line inside my washing machine. This time I will be better connected thanks to my “*Nest thermostat.*”:http://www.smalldog.com/product/88505/the-nest-learning-thermostat-3rd-generation Not only will I be able to check the temperature of the house anytime, I will also be able to turn the heat up from the airport (or even from the airplane if I buy the on-board wifi) so that I will return to a nice and warm house. After a week in Florida, I am guessing this will mean I need to turn it up to 80.

    Thanks for reading!

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

  • How To Enter Emoji On Your Mac

    I remember the first day I got a new computer, ok a new-to-me computer. It was a hand-me-down PC of sorts. I think…

  • We are having our own version of the million women march down here on Duval Street on Saturday and I will be out there with Grace. I am very scared, concerned and unhappy with the election results, the Russians messing with our election and sad to see President Obama leave office.

    It is weird, I used to be a complete news junkie. I would have the news playing in the background, I would rush home to catch the evening news and news sites were dominating my Safari favorites. Now, I would rather post pictures of Grace and Jezebel on Facebook than get depressed about the news. Does that mean I am wicked old?

    I think we will find some time to make our way to the beach and dip into the ocean this weekend, too!

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

    Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

    _Don, Emily & Hadley_

  • Keeping Time

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    There was one component that I skipped in my article last week. It wasn’t actually present on my breadboard, but it is present on both the graphics PCI card and the 10/100 ethernet PCI card on my desk. This component can take many physical shapes, but it’s common to see them as a silvery metal oval with flat sides. This component is called a crystal oscillator and is undoubtedly the most critical component in all complex digital circuitry.

    Digital circuitry is discrete by definition (1s and 0s). The opposite of digital circuitry is analog circuitry (which has been the bulk of what I’ve talked about in my articles). Digital circuitry expects the electricity being used to exist in one of two discrete states, either on or off. What constitutes “on” is arbitrary and will depend on the exact application, though in demos and educational material, it’s commonly 5VDC, but the exact value isn’t important, as long as it’s consistent. An “on” signal will always be 5VDC (within some narrow tolerance) and an “off” signal will be 0VDC (again, within some narrow tolerance).

    Analog circuitry isn’t concerned with being in any particular state, and in fact is expected to range infinitely between two values. The sine wave of standard household AC power is an analog signal. At some point in time, the voltage will be every single value between -120V and +120V. This property is often used to our advantage, in step-up/step-down transformers for example. It isn’t very useful for digital circuits though.

    Because digital circuits are discrete, a good way to think about them is as a series of switches. In circuits, these are often called “gates” and they’re usually composed of transistors in various arrangements. There can be ??millions?? if not ??billions?? of these little gates/switches inside even modestly complex digital circuits. If all those switches are going on and off on their own, digital circuits wouldn’t be able to do anything. It would be like a million-piece orchestra without a conductor.

    A clock signal is used to synchronize and coordinate all of those switches, much like a conductor’s baton keeping pace for an orchestra. Every time the clock “ticks” a series of signals are passed through the digital circuitry, from one stage to the next, over and over and over. For something complex like a CPU (central processing unit) in any modern-day computer, the clock signal needs to be fast (as in billions of ticks per second fast) and accurate.

    You might be thinking, “Hadley, you mentioned a 555 timer/signal chip a few weeks ago, why don’t we just use that?” Some digital circuits do. When I took a computer logic and organization class in college, we built a small computer from scratch on a breadboard and we used a 555 chip as the clock. This is great for learning purposes because the 555 can be made to tick pretty slowly. We were able to actually watch the computers we built tick through work at the sub-instruction level. Chips like the 555 are limited however based on the rise/fall time of the signals they create. Anything over 2MHz for a clock speed would be pushing it.

    To finally bring it back around, this is why we use crystal oscillators like the ones on my PCI cards to generate that clock signal. They can be made to accurately tick billions of times a second if necessary and are cheap, small and simple. In fact, they’ve been in use outside computers for decades. The crystal inside the oscillator is made from quartz. Hence, quartz-crystal wrist watches. The details of how these oscillators actually work delves into piezoelectrics and some other physics I don’t have time for here, but may discuss in a later article.

    The oscillation speed of the crystal oscillator and clock signal in a computer can be thought of as a speed limit. The circuit cannot process data faster than the clock ticks. So the clock cannot tick faster than the slowest component, lest it skip a tick and data gets all mixed up. Some types of memory circuits tend to be slow in operation and so the clock must be set to tick only that fast.

    Hopefully this all makes sense and I was able to illuminate a critical part of every digital circuit we use today!

  • What to do when your Mac is frozen

    It’s probably happened to you at least once and it’s worse than the spinning beach ball. It’s the scary black screen with multiple languages alerting you to restart your computer. I’ve seen it countless times on customer machines over the years and once or twice on my own computers. Most users come in with concern and fear on their faces; what just happened to their computer?

    This black screen is often referred to as a kernel panic and I like to describe it as the computers equivalent to your car’s check engine light. It’s a very generic error that can means something has gone horribly wrong or your computer just simply needs to restart. Generally the only way to know if your kernel panic was the result of a serious problem is running diagnostics, typically performed by a technician. I once experienced this with a 15in MacBook Pro of mine. I was sitting in my living room looking up something on the internet and BAM kernel panic. I was stuck with a machine that was completely unresponsive, locked up and displayed a scary black screen. My computer had never before indicated any kind of performance issues and was working perfectly fine until it locked up on me without warning.

    If you should find yourself in the unlucky position of having your Mac lock up on you due to a kernel panic you will need to restart your computer. How you might ask? When your computer is locked up and unresponsive to your keyboard, mouse, trackpad, etc the only way to restart your computer is to hold down the power button for about five seconds. This will force your computer to turn off and it will shut down. I would suggest letting your computer sit for about thirty seconds and then turn the computer back on again. With the new Touch Bar MacBook Pros you will need to press down on the blank touch ID button until you feel and hear a click.

    It’s never advisable to shutdown and restart your computer by just holding down on the power button and you should only do this in situations where you have no other choice. Forcing your computer to shut down by holding the power button can cause corruption and loss of data among other things. However, when your Mac is frozen there is no other option. In many cases this lock up is a one time deal, as was the case with my MacBook Pro. The machine only ever locked up the one time. Like your cars check engine like, the kernel panic can be caused by any number of benign issues from a bad memory chip to a logic board issue. Certainly it’s recommended that if your machine locks up again you should have it looked it, but more than likely it’s just an isolated event.

  • Reach Out and Touch Bar

    I am just getting used to my new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar and while I cannot say that the Touch Bar has changed the way I work, YET; I do think that it may!

    The things I use the most now are the Siri button and the fingerprint sensor. I am also using it with AirMail and love the big red “Move to Trash” button. If the app you are using is optimized for the Touch Bar you may be able to customize it for the way you work. When I am working on my inbox we have one set of Touch Bar helpers and when I am in the middle of writing an email I have another set of useful buttons.

    p{text-align: center;}. !http://blog.smalldog.com/images/4963.png!

    But where are my function keys? Well, I never use function keys but if you need your function keys it is simply a matter of pressing the “fn” key at the bottom left of the keyboard and your beautiful Touch Bar is transported back in time to function keys.

    When you are in the Finder the Control Strip on the right side of the Touch Bar shows a few familiar buttons like volume, mute, and display brightness, as well as Siri. The Escape (Esc) button appears on the left side of the Touch Bar.

    In Safari you can just touch one of your favorites and safari surfs right over. Once you are there, the Touch Bar will show you open tabs, just touch to open, a back and forward arrow, home button and of course, you can customize it to add things like history, autofill or sidebar.

    In Photos, the Touch Bar speeds your search for just the right photo as you slide your finger across the thumbnails. You can tap to mark a selected photo as a favorite or tap rotate it. After you select a photo, tap to see editing options (crop, filters, adjust, retouch, and red-eye). You can edit your photo using controls that appear on the Touch Bar.

    It is pretty cool in Maps, too, but I don’t know how many people are navigating with their MacBook Pros. You can find yourself by tapping in the Touch Bar to find your location. Tap the search field to type where you want to go. See what’s nearby. The Touch Bar shows buttons with categories of nearby locations, like restaurants, hotels, and gas stations. Get there: When you select a location to visit, you see options for getting directions, calling the business, or viewing its website.

    In most apps you can customize the Touch Bar. Choose View -> Customize Touch Bar. The customization window appears on your display, allowing you to choose your favorite items. When you’re customizing the Touch Bar, its buttons jiggle like on your iPhone, and you see the Done button on the left side.

    Use your cursor to drag items that you want down into the actual Touch Bar. You can also drag items left and right within the Touch Bar to rearrange them, or drag them up and out of the Touch Bar to remove them. Tap Done in the Touch Bar or click Done on the screen when you finish.

    p{text-align: center;}. !http://blog.smalldog.com/images/4965.png!

    Apple hasn’t forgotten about accessibility either. As an example, you can activate Voice Over by pressing the command key and tapping the Touch ID button three times. VoiceOver tells you what’s on your screen, and walks you through actions like selecting a menu option or activating a button using your keyboard or trackpad. It can also tell you what’s on your Touch Bar.

    You can use Touch Bar Zoom to if you enable it in the Accessibility system preference. This allows you to touch and drag with one finger on the Touch Bar to see a zoomed view of the Touch Bar on your display.
    You can change the magnification level by holding down the Command key and use a two-finger pinch gesture or while panning with one finger, quickly tap with a second finger to synthesize a tap where your first finger is. Hold the second finger down and move both fingers together to synthesize a tap down and drag where your first finger is. Hold your finger still in one location to enter direct-touch mode, which allows you to interact directly with the control under your finger.

    I think that the Touch Bar is a pretty amazing innovation that may really make a difference in how I interact with my Mac. I did not think that I would use it much with my external keyboard and display but I am moving my MacBook Pro closer and closer so I can use the Touch Bar to do things like delete mail or surf through my photos.