Kibbles & Bytes Blog

  • Fall foliage is heading to full peak over the next week or so. I am sure we will get out this weekend on the bikes to see if we can find some roads that are not full of peepers. It is my favorite time of the year with all the colors, apples ready to pick and the geese heading south.

    We will be busy today doing inventory as we head into a new fiscal year and I want to take this moment to thank you for your business and customer loyalty. Small Dog Electronics is nothing without you and we do know that ultimately it is you, our loyal customers, that pay our wages. Thank you so much!

    And thank you for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

    Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

    _Don, Emily, Hadley & Amy_

  • Lastly

    A few pictures demonstrating the new portrait mode and the picture quality of the iPhone 7 Plus.

  • Some Great Training Videos

    Lutron is a brand new product line for Small Dog, and for some of our staff, could be a new introduction into Home Automation. Please take the time to review the videos linked below as they are some of the best training materials we have at this time. Our rep will be visiting the South Burlington store, but for other locations we might have to be more creative on training.

    Replacing a single pole switch

    How to Replace a 3-way Switch

  • A New Phone System Is Coming!

    First things first, I’d like to apologize for the poor quality of the phones over the past several months. Even when Morgan was still here, we were working on this and trying to resolve it with the tools we had. Unfortunately, it became unworkable and we had to seek out an alternative solution.

    Enter HBPX (Hosted PBX). We will be migrating the entire company to a new phone system in the next week. The actual cut date (when the old system will cease working and the new system will come online) is scheduled for Thursday, October 6th in the evening after 7pm when Burlington closes. Leading up to that, you will start to see new physical phones on your desks soon, if you don’t already have them. You probably saw us doing wiring over the past few weeks, as these phones are on a separate switch and network. They connect directly to the internet without passing through any of our routers.

    IT will continue to be your primary contact for support of the phones, though we may have to pass off certain issues to the telecom that is hosting the system.

    Training on how to use the new phones will be happening over the next few weeks, but I want to assure everyone that these phones are very easy to use, and if you’re mostly dialing, receiving, and logging in and out of queues, training will be very simple. I’ll likely be creating wikis for that over the next several days and will share that information with everyone as soon as it becomes available.

    Once again, I want to thank everyone for their patience with the current phone issues. I know it’s made customer service very difficult. Please extend that patience and understanding while we transition to the new system.

    -Hadley

  • Lutron!

    Lutron Basics

    Lutron started and still is a leader in home automation. They are leaders in lighting, and in turn shade control. They sell everything from simple light switches to complete home automation systems that can control the temperature of your hot tub or turn every light in your home to 10% intensity. The Casesta line we’ll be carrying is their consumer line and is considered in many cases a DIY automation product.

    This is a great place for us to start. We’ll have a selection of light switches, lamp dimmers and two smart hubs which allow customer to control everything. The entire line is home-kit enabled and with the iOS 10 update means our customers can control their lights with their iPhone, Apple Watch or Siri. Even though these products are consumer DIY, we hope to make a strong push for our consultants to do home installs of these products. There are several products in the line up, I ask hat you all checkout the video on the Lurton site and browse the Caseda line and their products.

    Hubs

    Lutron has two HUBS, the Smart Bridge and Smart Bridge Pro. First these are both Home Kit enabled, so no matter what product they purchase they’ll have the ability to control it on their phone. The difference between “REGULAR” and “PRO” is it’s ability to work with other products in home automation. This means if a customer already is using products like Savant, Logitech, Control 4, etc… they want the Pro. This line is also only available through Lutron distributors meaning there is no competition online. Customers don’t need a hub, they can purchase switches and pico remotes but if they want to control from iOS they have to use a hub.

    Check out the features of Pro

    Switches

    The Casesta switches are sold in several styles, in-wall, lamp, and pico remote. In-wall is available in either a dimmable switch, on off switch or my favorite, dimmer with favorite. Lamp Control allows for two lamps to be plugged-in and controlled by either an iOS devices or the Pico Remote. Pico remotes are great, they can be used on a pedestal, mounted to the wall to appear as another in-wall switch, or simply left around to be picked up and moved around as you please.

    See the full line of switches and remotes

    Package Deals

    We will have three bundles available for our customers, two “regular” and one “PRO” these are a great place to start for our customers. Like Sonos, we have several repeat customers who start with one or two Sonos units, and come back for more and more! We want this same thing to happen with Lutron. Start them off with the ability to control their living room and kitchen, and they’ll be back to have us setup their bedroom, or better yet, their entire home!

    Leads

    Our hope is to grow this business by ensuring our staff and customers know about the integration these products offer. This will come by speaking to customers in-store about their needs, and our consultants recommending other products when they are in customers home. A great example is, the pico Sonos remote. A simple lutron pico remote that allows customers to control a Sonos zone with Play/Pause, Volume, Next and Favorites. This is just the start, as we go forward we’ll offer customers with solutions from Savant, iPort, Triathlon shades, Sonance as well as Nest and the products they offer.

    Training

    We have access to a Rep based out of the New Hampshire, Joshua N. Strzempko, feel free to reach out with questions you may have. Rob and Will are your best contacts within the company always feel free to reach out and ask us anything. We’ll be in-store and hope to create a home automation center in South Burlington. I have included some installation videos below which cover the two most basic setups our customers will have.

    Our Lutron Rep:
    Joshua N. Strzempko
    Outside Sales 
    Yusen Associates 
    Cell: (413) 426 6985
    jstrzempko@yusen.com

  • Using Calendar to Manage Your Life

    I don’t know how many of you know this, but before I started Small Dog Electronics I had a “real” job working as the General Manager of a software company that produced address book software and calendar software. Day-to-Day Calendar was the calendar product that came out before I left the company. So, I know a little about calendars and what goes into making a great calendar product.

    I like Apple’s Calendar and I use it extensively. These days I can set calendar appointments directly from email messages or ask Siri to set a date for me. My calendar is always available to me; that same calendar is on my Mac, my iPad, my iPhone and on my wrist on my Apple Watch. Further, with iCloud it is available anywhere I have internet connectivity.

    You do have to make a commitment to using calendar, especially if you are a busy person. It won’t do to have just some of your appointments and reminders on the calendar. The best way to use calendar is to make an effort to put them ALL on there.

    I have a lot of regular meetings that happen weekly so those time slots are booked as repeating events. I also know that on Thursday I have to write Kibbles & Bytes, so I block that time slot off so I don’t accidentally find myself without time to write.

    Let’s go into some of the details of how to use calendar. We all have devices that will not be that useful unless you have the same calendar on all of them. That is the big benefit of iCloud Calendar. So, my first recommendation is to make sure all of your devices are logged into the SAME iCloud account. If you have multiple iCloud accounts you are not going get full benefit from Calendar. Surf to iCloud preferences on each device and make sure you are signed into iCloud with the same Apple ID. Then make sure Calendars is checked in iCloud preferences on each device and you are ready for a unified experience.

    Now you can start adding meetings, events, appointments and activities as well as set up event alerts, reminders and notifications. When you add an event you will be presented with a number of options including when the event starts and stops, whether it is a repeating event, where the event takes place, how long it will take to drive to the event, when you should be reminded, etc.

    p{text-align: center;}. !http://blog.smalldog.com/images/4820.png!

    If you add the location, like the name of a major league ballpark, Calendar will fill in the address and show you a map, the weather and when you should leave to get there on time. You can invite meeting attendees and Calendar will send them the invite which can be easily added to that person’s calendar.

    You can share your calendar, too! That is especially handy for significant others, kids, co-workers and anyone that needs to know when you are free. iCloud makes that easy. You can also subscribe to public calendars like an academic calendar, the Boston Celtics schedule or hundreds of others that you can find “here”:http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/calendars/.

    Siri makes calendar even easier. Now that Siri is on the Mac it is easy to say “hey Siri, set up a meeting with Emily for Tuesday at 2” and bingo it is added to my calendar and an invite is sent to her. Or you can ask Siri when your next meeting is or just to tell you your schedule when you wake up in the morning.

    Apple Calendar plays well with others, too! You can set up Calendar to work with Apple’s iCloud, Google Calendar, Microsoft’s Outlook, and even CalDav calendars from your own or your company’s servers. Because iOS has a unified calendar database, whatever you add or change in Apple Calendar will also be reflected in any third-party calendars you have and vice-versa.

    This is just an overview of the many features of a very powerful Calendar. I think as you get to know Calendar you will, as I do, find it an indispensable part of your digital lifestyle. I do remember the days of paper organizers, I carried one around for a very long time and I just do not know how I could manage without Calendar, now.

  • The Small Dog Insider!

    Welcome to another edition of the Small Dog internal newsletter system, now known as the Small Dog Insider. As promised this will be our primary and main means of providing company wide information and training.

    I want to take a moment to thank everyone who help with another successful day of inventory counting. I’m writing this e-mail late afternoon on Friday the 30th, I think that all locations have completed their counts. When I first started for Small Dog I worked in the warehouse as a shipper and we ended our year on a calendar year. This meant myself, Art, Hapy and other team members counted inventory AFTER the store ( it was only the Waitsfield location back then ) closed for the day on New Years Eve. We began counting inventory at dinner time and didn’t finished until very late at night. I’m not gonna lie, I do not miss those days at all!

    In this first edition of the Small Dog Insider I will share information about our latest product line to hit our stores and an update from Hadley and Eric on our phone system.

    Thank you for reading,

    Emily

  • iPhone 7 Plus Camera Review

    I was fortunate enough to get my hands on and receive the new iPhone 7 Plus on release day. I skipped the iPhone 6s when it came around so when the 7 was announced I jumped at the chance to upgrade and I haven’t regretted it once. Despite the suggestions from my co-workers I’ve yet to drop my phone into a glass of water…perhaps that review will come in a future issue. For now, I’ll still be playing it a bit safe!

    Like many of you, I’ve read some of the reviews out there and some reviewers are less than impressed with the camera. Coming from an iPhone 6, and after a few blunders with my first few photos, I can say it’s clear that there are significant improvements in the quality of the photos. I am not a professional photographer by any means but I enjoy taking photos and take a lot of them. For the first few photos that I took with the phone it appeared that the phone was struggling to focus on the object I was trying to take a photo of. For about a minute the camera was blurring and coming into focus, then blurring again. Once the camera focused, there hasn’t been a single hiccup with my photos but briefly I did wondered if I’d gotten a defective phone.

    My first round of photos were taken around dusk so the lighting was low and flat. The pictures came out much better than I expected, and the optical zoom worked much better than I would have thought. I was taking pictures of my campfire and was pleasantly surprised with the details the camera picked up from the fire. Later on that night I took pictures well after dark and quickly learned the flash was not the best option to use even though it was completely dark. The photos all came out very washed and the colors were completely off; turning off the flash dramatically changed the quality of the photos. My iPhone 6 never took a good picture at night but the iPhone 7 plus in comparison takes amazing photos! I took a picture of my dog Piper and the only light was from the campfire and a small outdoor light. I was very impressed!

    Night time photos are always something that I’ve struggled with, so I also made sure to take my phone along with me on our trip to the local fair and there I was frankly blown away at the quality of the photos. I took photos all day long, in dimly lit buildings, outside in the bright sun and in cattle barns. Each photo taken that day came out amazing and the details that the camera picked up were way better than I ever expected.

    Lastly I finally tried out live photos, which I’ll be honest I never really understood the value of that when the 6s came out. Frankly I still don’t, but it sure is cool! I’m thinking that live photos could be a great opportunity for some very creative memes and some good laughs for my kids. Ultimately, despite what some reviews are reporting, my testing and responses from co-workers on the photos I took over the weekend, the camera in the iPhone 7 plus stands up to the expectations.

  • iOS 10 is Waiting for You!

    iOS 10, the latest version of Apple’s operating system for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, is out! Apple fixed an issue that impacted some of the early adopters downloading the update so it is now safe to upgrade. You will be glad that you did! As you know, I have been running the beta of iOS 10 for some time. I did discover a bug early on in the process that impacted the Apple Hearing Accessibility function but I was amazed at how responsive Apple was and the problem was solved in the next beta.

    Most evident among iOS 10’s modifications is the new behavior of the Lock screen. Previously, you could slide the screen to unlock (and enter your passcode) or merely rest a finger on the Touch ID sensor. But as the Touch ID sensor became faster, it became too easy to unlock before you had a chance to read notifications appearing on the Lock screen. In iOS 10, you must press the Home button to unlock, after which the Touch ID sensor activates or iOS asks you for your passcode. To make it faster and easier to get to the information and tools you want, you can now slide right on the Lock screen to display Notification Center widgets or left to access the camera.

    But what if you liked the way iOS 9 handled unlocking your iPhone? Well, fortunately, you can change it back in the accessibility settings. Go to Settings —>General—>Accessibility. Scroll down to Home Button and enable “Rest Finger to Open” and you are all set with the old way!

    In a long-awaited enhancement, Apple has opened Siri up to developers so you’ll be able to use Siri to control at least some third-party apps. In iOS 10, Siri will initially support six types of activities: audio/video calling, messaging, sending and receiving payments, searching for photos, managing workouts, and booking car-sharing rides.

    Apple says that Messages is iOS’s most used app, so it’s not surprising that Messages gains numerous new features in order to compete with apps from Facebook, Google, Snapchat, and others. For those who enjoy emoji but have trouble entering them, the QuickType bar in the Messages keyboard suggests them as you type, and if you switch to the Emoji keyboard in Messages, it highlights words (like airplane or hamburger) that it can convert to the corresponding emoji 😎 ⛅. You can send handwritten notes scrawled with your finger, a stylus, or an Apple Pencil. Messages also gains the Apple Watch’s unique Digital Touch features, which let you send a sketch, a fireball, a kiss, and more with particular tap combination—you can even overlay these animations on a photo or video. For even more pizzazz, bubble and screen effects jazz up your messages or the entire screen when the recipient views them. Finally, the new tapback feature lets you respond quickly to messages with icons without typing.

    We all have trouble revisiting photos we’ve taken in the past, so Photos in iOS 10 (and Sierra) introduces Memories, which automatically builds slideshows of existing photos. It assembles collections of photos from the same day in previous years, trips you’ve taken, and more. You can “favorite” a memory if you want to keep it around, or delete it if it doesn’t contain photos you want to see again. Photos also gains facial recognition capabilities and a People album that you can use to pull out pictures of friends and family members, but even more impressive are its object and scenery recognition capabilities that enable you to search for photos that contain, for instance, cats, oak trees, or desert landscapes. Plus, a new Places album lets you browse your collection by location—alas, you can’t add a location to a photo in iOS.

    Although those are the major new features in iOS 10, the update abounds with additional improvements. Take Safari. You can now use Apple Pay within Safari to pay for purchases on Web sites, Safari prevents videos with sound from auto-playing, and Split Screen can show two Safari tabs side-by-side.

    Siri takes selfies! Simply ask Siri to take a selfie and she will activate the front-facing camera and you are ready to go.

    Ever had a couple dozen Safari windows open and spent the time to close each one? Want to clear everything currently open in your browser in a hurry? Tap and hold on the Pages button in Safari, and you’ll get an option to close all your tabs at once. (Note that this won’t clear your history—you’ll have to go into the Bookmarks section for that.)

    You can do this for all those notifications clogging your screen, too! Trash five days worth of MLB notifications by force pressing (or long pressing) on the X on your notifications screen to bring up an alert to clear all notifications.

    Change the brightness on your Flashlight app. Force press on the Flashlight icon in Control Center to access three new options: Low Light, Medium Light, or Bright Light.

    Need a magnifying glass for that Sherlock Holmes work you are doing? The new Magnifier setting in Accessibility turns your iPhone camera into a giant magnifying glass with a super-zoom, flashlight, brightness and contrast filter, and more.

    Want to sing along? Lyrics are new to Music in iOS 10, while Up Next has moved into a more prominent spot, but both can be hard to discover naturally. With the miniplayer fully open, just swipe up to view (or hide) lyrics, along with your upcoming song queue.

    Elsewhere, Maps now automatically records where you park your car, helps you avoid tolls and highways, and lets you add stops along a route. Control Center gets a redesign and multiple panes to simplify media control. In Notes, multiple people can work on the same note at once. And finally, a new Home app provides a centralized spot to configure and control all sorts of home automation sensors and switches that are compatible with Apple’s HomeKit specification.

    As always, iOS 10 will be a free upgrade, but it won’t work on every device. You’ll need an iPhone 5, fourth-generation iPad, second-generation iPad mini, or sixth-generation iPod touch—or anything newer than those models, including any iPad Air or iPad Pro. If your device can run iOS 10, we recommend upgrading when you have a little time to become familiar with the new features, since many of them are welcome improvements.

  • Grace is heading down to Key West for a few days so I’ll be hanging with my best buds, Pirate and Max. I’ll bet we watch a couple Cubs games as they approach 100 wins and the post-season. It has been my life-long dream to see the Cubs in the World Series and this might just be the year. My mom used to use Wrigley Field as a sorta daycare center for my brother and I on “Ladies Day” so we got to know the Cubs very early on.

    Now, I sport a Cubs tattoo. Grace and I have made the journey to Wrigley just about every year to catch a game. So, I am wondering if any Kibbles & Bytes readers have any Cubs connections. If the Cubbies do make it to the big stage and the World Series, I would love to take Grace. Any season ticket holders out there that want to give up their seats? I’ll be happy to pay, barter, beg or whatever!

    I hope you have an awesome first weekend of the fall. Thank you for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

    Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

    _Don, Emily, Hadley & Amy_

  • Show Me a Sine

    In my last segment in Kibbles and Bytes I did my best to cram in as much introductory information as I could about alternating current. I talked about the difference between AC and DC and why we use AC at the electricity grid level. For the most part though I didn’t get into some of the finer details about AC, other than that it’s current that alternates and this makes it very easy to transform the voltage of AC power.

    One of the most difficult things to wrap your head around when it comes to AC is the fact that at any given time, the voltage is different. If you charted AC voltage on a graph with time on the x-axis, you’d see a sine wave.

    p{text-align: center;}. !http://blog.smalldog.com/images/4814.gif!

    All waves have some general properties such as amplitude, frequency and phase. Amplitude and frequency you’re probably familiar with already from radio, and in the case of AC they mean the same thing. In the US, the frequency of AC power is 60Hz. This means that it cycles up and down 60 times every second. In other countries around the world the frequency is 50Hz. Actually, only North America, large parts of South America, Saudi Arabia, the southern part of Japan, North and South Korea and Taiwan use 60Hz. Generally speaking, the frequency of the AC power won’t negatively affect electronics as long as the voltage is the same. Most of the areas that use 50Hz also use voltages in the 220-240 range though. Sometimes the 60Hz frequency is used to drive clocks in electronics, though with digital circuitry, this is less common today. So if you had a piece of equipment with a clock that was driven by 60Hz AC, using 50Hz AC would prevent the clock from being accurate.

    Amplitude of AC is where things become a little less straightforward. In North America, standard household power is 120VAC. You might think this means that the AC signal oscillates between +120VAC and -120VAC, but this is not the case. Actually, a 120VAC signal will oscillate between +169.7VAC and -169.7VAC. Why do we call it 120VAC power then? Well, think about the AC wave. At any given time its value is different. When describing the power, what value should you use? 169.7? Why not 40, or even 0? As you can see, choosing any voltage on the AC waveform would be arbitrary and not representative of the power being delivered. 120VAC is the RMS (“**root mean square**”:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_mean_square) of the AC signal. The math behind this starts to get complicated, but at least in the context of electricity, the RMS of the AC signal is a representation of the average power delivered by that signal. In other words, the amount of power delivered by a 120VAC signal is equivalent to 120V of direct current.

    Do you wish that was the end of the story? It’s not. When we talk about power delivered in this case, we have to talk about power delivered into a purely resistive load. This is because once again, AC is a sine wave. Now we arrive at the third property of a wave: its phase. The phase can be described as when the signal passes through 0 to go from negative to positive or positive to negative. In AC power, phase is very important because certain types of loads (capacitive or inductive) can shift the phase of components of the signal. Normally we would think about an AC signal as two things in one: voltage and current. The voltage goes up and the current goes up with it proportionally ??in phase??. This is not always the case however. Using inductive or capacitive loading, you can cause the phase of parts of the signal to shift so that, for example, the voltage leads the current by half a cycle.

    Let’s try to round this out. In AC circuits, the concept of direct resistance doesn’t really apply the same way that it does in DC circuits. This is, again, because the voltage in AC is constantly changing. A changing current will create a changing magnetic field, and based on the properties of Lenz’s Law, a magnetic field will be proportional to the electrical current that created it, but it will be in direct opposition to it. In a way, it’s analogous to Newton’s third law of motion. These generated magnetic fields can provide a resistance to changing current via certain devices like inductors. This causes the current component of the signal to advance its phase ahead of the voltage component in the case of inductive loads and behind the voltage component in the case of capacitive loads. This “resistance” in AC circuits is called impedance and the combination of inductive and capacitive factors in a circuit forms the imaginary concept of reactance.

    Don’t feel bad if all of this seems very confusing. When I took some electrical engineering classes in college (not my major, I took them for fun), they were the only classes I really struggled with. I’ve actually learned more and understood things better by watching “**videos on YouTube**”:https://www.youtube.com/user/jeriellsworth/ and reading “**books**”:http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0764542001.html. I also learned a lot in designing and assembling my photovoltaic power station. I think anybody can learn this stuff, and it’s very rewarding when you do.