Kibbles & Bytes Blog

I voted before I left Vermont but if you haven’t voted please do so. Your vote really does count and very real offices from President right down to Mosquito Control officers (one promises not to spray kids on the way to school) are up for election. Our democracy is in your hands. Exercise that precious right to vote- you will feel good about it.

Now what am I gonna do? No more late night Cubs games on TV and then we have this stupid custom of turning our clocks back on Sunday. I mean who really wants it to be dark at 4PM? Well, basketball season is underway and Grace and I have a lot of projects and plans to accomplish down here. I tortured my body and ripped up our deck with full intentions of playing amateur carpenter to re-build it. But sore muscles and Grace’s common sense led us to hiring a carpenter to at least build the framing.

I am, obviously, still basking in the glow of the Cubs victory but I do want to thank you for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes. I guess this year, I’ll have to change up my predictions a bit…like Cubs win it again!

Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

_Don, Emily, Hadley & Amy_

After my last article on resonant inductive coupling I received a question about how those interstate toll transponders work. I’ve never had one for my car. Even when I lived in Massachusetts I only really took the Pike from 495 out west and the toll was always exactly the same. So I had to look into how they work, but unfortunately, it’s not very exciting. They are basically RFID tags, but they are active, not passive. Each one comes with a permanently installed lithium battery expected to last between 3-5 years. When your vehicle approaches the toll plaza, transmitters in the plaza send a signal that “wakes up” your transponder, which then responds with a radio signal of its own. So there’s no induction happening, just good old radio communication.

Toll transponders may not be very exciting, but there is a pretty neat method commonly used for detecting cars stopped at traffic lights. You may notice that some intersections have saw mark patterns where you would wait at a red light. Sometimes it’s just a different chunk of pavement. This is the sensor that detects when a vehicle is waiting in order to more optimally control the signal lights. Did you think that it used some kind of a pressure sensor? A lot of people do, but actually, it’s far more clever and effective.

Inside the saw grooves they install a loop of wire called an induction loop. A controller box transmits electricity through the loop or loops at frequencies between 10kHz and 200kHz. Under normal conditions, the loop simply acts like an air-core inductor. We don’t often use air-core inductors because their inductive values tend to be low. Adding a ferromagnetic core (like iron) increases the inductance of inductors because of the higher magnetic permeability of a magnetic core (versus other materials like wood or air). This is exactly the principle behind an inductive loop vehicle detector. When the metal of your car passes over the loop, the inductance of the loop increases (its core is no longer just air). This change in inductance is picked up by the controller which then decides what do to with the signal lights.

You might guess that the change in inductance would depend on the type of vehicle passing over the loop, and you’d be correct. Smaller cars tend to produce larger increases because they are lower to the ground and therefore closer to the coil. The exact pattern of the signal generated by vehicles passing over the loops are also very unique. It’s almost possible to identify makes and models solely based on the different effects they have on the inductance of the loops.

As a bicyclist, those loops are my worst nightmare because they’re often not tuned to be sensitive enough to trigger based on a metal object as small as a bike. As I already said, the material plays a part as well. My bike is mostly aluminum which has a magnetic permeability roughly 1000x less than steel. Actually, the magnetic permeability of aluminum is almost the same as wood or air. For this reason, many traffic signals these days use optical motion detection cameras placed atop the signal poles. This technology is obviously more complex and wasn’t easily available until recently. Inductive loops are a very mature technology and are relatively failsafe. However, embedding the loop in the road means that if the road is resurfaced, the entire loop will need to come out and be reinstalled.

I was actually very surprised at how complicated the theory behind the operation of these sensors is. There is all kinds of documentation from transportation departments, and road construction firms online about how they work including lots of complicated math that I’ve left out here. As a possible topic for next time, did you notice how this is essentially a sensor to detect metal? Metal detectors work on a very similar principle but are more sensitive and able to do more than just detect YES/NO. As always, if you have any topic you’d like me to explore, send me an email.

Do you ever find that small print like serial numbers, instructions or any other smaller print on items is hard to read? iOS 10 can turn your iPhone or iPad into a magnifying glass! You’ll first want to go into Settings > General > Accessibility > Magnifier and turn on Magnifier.

Press the Home Button three times quickly to bring up the Magnifier and then point the camera at what you want to see. The view is zoomed automatically, but you can change the zoom level with the slider, tap the flash icon to turn on the LED light ( if one if available on your device ), enable a filter to change the color or contrast, or lock the focus by tapping the lock icon. You can also freeze the image by tapping the big round Take Photo button. This is great for grabbing a picture of a tiny serial number!

MacOS 10.12 Sierra on your Mac and iOS 10 on your iPhone or iPad combine with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and your AppleID to bring you Universal Clipboard. How many times have you copied something on your Mac, like a phone number and wish you could paste it into your iPhone? I’ve emailed myself stuff, put it in my iCloud account and other work-arounds but now with Sierra and iOS 10 it is all automatic. But a lot of people were having difficulty getting it to work, including me when I was doing beta testing. Here’s some tips to get Universal Clipboard working on your devices.

Install macOS 10.12 Sierra on your Macs and iOS 10 on your iOS devices and you’ll get a cool new feature: Universal Clipboard. As you’d expect from the name, Universal Clipboard transfers anything you copy to all your devices so you can paste anywhere. Copy some text on your iMac and a few seconds later you can paste it on your MacBook Air, your iPhone, or your iPad. Or copy an incoming phone number in the Phone app and paste into an email message on your iMac. Universal Clipboard even works with graphics and videos.

Neither Sierra nor iOS 10 provides any interface for Universal Clipboard at all. You can’t turn it off or configure it in any way. In other words, it should just work. But what if it doesn’t?

It turns out that six things must be true for Universal Clipboard to work. Miss any of these and Universal Clipboard will fail to copy the clipboard contents from device to device without warning. The requirements are as follows:

1. Any Macs involved must have been introduced in 2012 or later, or, in the case of the Mac Pro, 2013 or later. Choose “About This Mac” to check your Mac’s age. Since Sierra runs on most Macs introduced since late 2009, Universal Clipboard won’t work on some older but otherwise Sierra-capable Macs.

1. All Macs must be running macOS 10.12 Sierra or later, and all iOS devices must be running iOS 10 or later.

1. All the devices must be on the same Wi-Fi network. This requirement can be tricky since devices might join different Wi-Fi networks if several are available. On a Mac, look in the Wi-Fi menu bar menu, and on an iOS device, check Settings > Wi-Fi.

1. Each device must have Bluetooth enabled and be within Bluetooth range of the other devices. That’s usually about 30 feet, but it’s safest to assume that both devices need to be in the same room. On a Mac, check in System Preferences > Bluetooth. On an iOS device, open Settings > Bluetooth.

1. All the devices must be signed in to the same iCloud account, and that account must be the primary iCloud account on each device. To see which account is signed in, on a Mac, look in System Preferences > iCloud. On an iOS device, check Settings > iCloud. This one is the one that is usually the culprit as we troubleshoot Universal Clipboard. It MUST be the same Apple ID/iCloud account.

#Handoff must be enabled. On Macs, turn it on in System Preferences > General. On iOS devices, the necessary switch is in Settings > General > Handoff.

If you still have trouble after verifying that your setup meets the six requirements above, make sure that your Wi-Fi connection is working well on each device, and that each device can connect to the Internet. If either of those isn’t true, Universal Clipboard may not transfer the clipboard contents.

When it’s working, Universal Clipboard takes just a few seconds to move the contents of the clipboard from device to device, and the transferred item remains available for pasting for about two minutes. It’s a subtle, but welcome addition to the Apple experience.

_Dear Friends,_

Holy Cow! The Cubbies did it. The Cubs are World Champions. It was perhaps the best game 7 in a World Series ever. Grace and I are hoarse this morning from jumping up and down and screaming. We have been Cubs fans, as you know, for our entire lives and go to at least one game a year. Grace will always buy a scorecard and keep score the old-fashioned way and cheer on the Cubbies. It was 108 years in the making but the victory is sweet. My first Cubs game may have been before I was born as my mom was also a big Cubs fan and would go to Wrigley on Tuesdays for Ladies’ Day. We lived in Wrigleyville so it was an easy walk and when I grew up a bit Wrigley became a sort of daycare center for my brother and I. Congratulations to the Chicago Cubs for a great victory and one dead curse.

I could go on and on about the Cubs but I guess we will get down to business. We have started to get the new MacBook Pros into our stores, especially those without the Touch Bar. I can’t wait to see the new models with the Touch Bar. We have been discussing how to display the large selection of laptops that Apple offers now. Suffice it to say it is a great line-up. I am probably going to move from my 13″ MacBook Air to the new Touch Bar 13″ unit.

It has been 108 years since the Cubs won the World Series so this week’s “**Kibbles & Bytes exclusive is $108 off**”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002457? of the Apple Factory Refurbished MacBook. This is a configure-to-order version of the MacBook with the larger 512GB SSD storage option, 8GB of RAM and the 1.3 GHz processor. It carries the same 1-year Apple warranty as new MacBooks and can be covered by AppleCare. In fact, if you buy this MacBook (while supplies last – 5 gray and 2 gold currently in stock) we will give you $71 off AppleCare representing the 71 years since the Cubs were even in the World Series. So, to summarize “**Apple MacBook regularly $1385.99 is only $1277.99**”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002457? and you can “**add AppleCare**”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002458/the-cubs-win-75-off-applecare-for-macbook-macbook-air-macbook-pro-12in? which is normally $249.99 for only “**$178.99.**”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002458/the-cubs-win-75-off-applecare-for-macbook-macbook-air-macbook-pro-12in?