Kibbles & Bytes Blog

  • Swollen Batteries

    An issue you may run across, but hopefully do not, in the lifetime of you Mac portable is a swollen battery. The first symptoms are usually your trackpad not clicking or a weird bulge on the bottom of your machine. A swollen battery is not common but it does happen. Now there is usually not one single cause for a swollen battery. Sometimes it is a defect in the battery, or old age, or the wrong charger which can overcharge the battery. Always use the proper charger straight from the manufacturer to charge your MacBook. There are cheaper alternatives out there, but you may end up paying in the end if this charger causes issues for your battery or other parts of your machine.

    “*See the full line of Apple MagSafe chargers here!*”:http://www.smalldog.com/category/Apple/Accessories/Power_and_Chargers

    So what to do if this happens to you?

    First off, exercise caution. The slightest puncture can be dangerous and, again this is VERY rare, but SWOLLEN BATTERIES CAN EXPLODE!!!!! Most Mac models do not have user replaceable batteries, so your best option is to get the computer to your nearest Apple repair facility, such as Small Dog Electronics, to get the battery out of there and safely disposed of before it can do any harm.

    How to help avoid a swollen battery:

    – Again, always use the right charger for your device
    – Don’t leave the device plugged in all the time
    – Keep the device stored in cool dry environment
    – Replace battery when it becomes exhausted (*Option – Click* the battery icon in your top bar to see your battery’s condition)

    Sometimes batteries just fail and there is nothing you can do about it, but with the proper practices you can cut down the chances of it happening to you.

  • Reset Your Mac

    Sometimes your Mac might not power on, or might be having weird issues. There are a couple of “magical” reset button combinations that are generally harmless and pretty easy to do. These techniques are most useful on the MacBooks. For example, the iMac doesn’t have a SMC reset key combination. Instead, you can just unplug the iMac from the power source and plug it back in.

    If these resets don’t solve your problem, the issue is most likely not so easily resolved, but these are really useful tools to have at your disposal in the rare event that you should need them. As a service technician these are the first thing I do when I see a misbehaving machine, and I don’t even think about it anymore.

    The descriptions below are a little detailed, but I’ll try and give you the necessary highlights without all the confusing details.

    First, make sure the machine is powered off. The sleep light on the front right corner that blinks when you first turn the machine on and kind of slowly strobes when it’s sleeping should be off. If you have a MagSafe Adapter plugged in, you should see the color of the light change.

    The SMC reset is a key combination of:

    *Shift + Control + Option + Power Button*

    After the SMC reset you can power on the machine as usual.

    The NVRAM/PRAM reset is a key combination of:

    *Command + Option + P + R*

    This is done before the gray Apple logo appears on the screen, or shortly after the startup chime if you can’t see anything on the screen. You should hear the machine make the startup chime again, keep pressing those keys down until you’ve heard the chime at least three times and then release. After that the machine should start as usual.

    Sometimes those key combinations can resolve the issue, sometimes they don’t do anything. If it doesn’t help, give us a call and we’ll help you decide how to proceed.

    Links to the Apple Support articles below:

    “*Reset the System Management Controller (SMC) on your Mac*”:https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201295

    “*How to Reset NVRAM on your Mac*”:https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204063

  • Safely Ejecting Hardware

    Failing to safely eject hardware from a computer is one of the most common mistakes I see computer users make. Most people do not realize that unplugging a flash drive or an external hard drive without ejecting it first can damage the files stored on it, or even the hardware itself in some cases.

    If a storage device is unplugged from a computer while files are being written to it or read from it, there will most likely be some data corruption. If you were saving a file to the storage device, when it was unplugged, not all of the data had time to be copied there, and so the next time you try to open that file from that device, the file will most likely fail to open, or the data will be garbled or incomprehensible depending on what type of data it is.

    Unplugging a flash drive while files are not being written to it will typically not result in problems, however it can be difficult to tell when files are no longer being written or accessed. Some programs will try to access files on the drive constantly, so unplugging the drive at any time without safely ejecting it first can cause problems. Additionally, unplugging external hard drives without ejecting them can damage the drive. If the read/write head on the drive suddenly loses power, it can strike the data platters and kill data sectors, making the data on them unreadable and the hard drive more likely to fail completely in the future.

    To safely eject a storage device on a Mac, you can either click on the eject icon next to the device’s listing in the Finder sidebar, or drag and drop the device’s icon into the trash, which should turn into an eject icon when a storage device is dragged over it. Keep in mind that only storage devices need to be safely ejected, not keyboards, mice, or other peripheral devices that do not have internal storage.

  • _Hello Fellow Technophiles,_

    As is bound to happen with this many nerds under one roof, Star Trek came up again today in a discussion at work. The debate was whether every time a person goes through the teleporter do they die and what is received on the other end is a clone or does the original consciousness somehow survive the matter being broken down into energy and being reconstituted on the other side? I argue for the former and my “proof” is the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Second Chances.” In this story, due to a teleporter malfunction, Commander Riker is duplicated with one version left behind on an uninhabited planet and one version making it back to his ship. After several years, the Riker that was left behind was found and his personality had diverged quite a bit from the other Riker by this point. I say that if duplication is a possibility, then clearly each teleportation is a clone and a destruction of the original as I can’t see how consciousness can be split.

    I bring this up partly to give you a behind-the-scenes peek at Small Dog, but also to start a discussion on cloning in the computer world. Fortunately, as there aren’t any conscious computers…yet, this part of the discussion can focus on the technical issues rather than the metaphysical ones. There are a number of ways to clone your computer, but my favorite way is using “*Carbon Copy Cloner.*”:http://bombich.com This program has a simple interface, allows for scheduled cloning, and also has a number of more advanced features for the power user. The primary advantage of a clone is the fact that it can be made bootable. So, if you have a clone on an external drive that is directly connected to the Mac, you can use this drive to start up any other Mac that supports the installed OS, which can potentially get you back up and running faster than migrating all of the data from a Time Machine backup. This can also be your own computer, in the case of a failed hard drive, but an otherwise functional computer.

    Of course, like Riker, if the clone is out-of-date, we can get a divergence in the data set. If you make changes to the clone, and then go back to work on your own machine, you need to replace any changed files from the clone back to the original computer, and any changes made to the original computer since the time of the clone will not be on the clone. If you have made different changes to the same file there is no easy way to reconcile the two other than manually changing whichever one is closer to the intended state.

    Next time, I will use a tenuous Star Trek metaphor to compare Time Machine to “actual” time travel. Stay tuned!

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

  • I should probably write a soapbox about this but I am in shock from the two most recent killings of black men by police in Baton Rogue and Minneapolis. I am horrified at the message this sends, not only the blatant racism but also the message to the youth that reinforces the very real notion that police are to be feared. Black lives do matter and this has to stop. Wearing a badge is not a license to kill.

    Looks like a rainy weekend coming up. The garden needs the water but couldn’t that happen like at night or something? I’ll probably spend some time surfing Petfinder.com looking for a new best bud.

    Thank you for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

    Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

    Don, Emily, Hadley & Amy

  • Adding Utility to Live Photos

    When I was in high school I used to make movies with my friends. In one of the movies my friend asked if he could just rant in front of a camera for a few minutes. It’s been a while, so I don’t remember everything he ranted about, but one of the things was definitely Apple. It was more than a little ironic given that we were using an iMac and Final Cut Pro to edit and master the movie.

    Without dating myself, it’s been a while since I was in high school, but my friend and I still keep in touch, and he still complains about Apple a lot. I got quite the earful when I told him I got my first iPhone back in January. He was telling me how much he liked his Samsung Galaxy and all of the ways in which it was a superior device to my iPhone.

    I did laugh quite a bit when he texted me recently to say even he was getting an iPhone now because his company was deploying them. Now I’ve been trying to show him how to do things and occasionally get him riled up by waxing poetic about how great Apple is in an over-the-top, comical way.

    Having friends with a different kinds of smartphones can be a little lame, because of all of the features you can’t take advantage of in Messages and other apps. Heck, even my friend with the iPhone refuses to use iMessage and just forces his phone to send via plain SMS. Google apparently wanted to remedy at least a piece of the incompatibility when it comes to sharing live photos from iOS to other places by creating an app. The app, called Motion Stills, taps into your photos library and lets you convert a live photo to an animated GIF. You can even stitch several live photos together to make one long GIF. These can then be shared with any device that can play animated GIFs (pretty much everything at this point). You can even email them, save them, post them on social media, whatever you want! Heads up though that GIFs can become HUGE really quickly. I used an online GIF optimizer tool to help reduce the size of the images in this article.

    I’ll admit that at first, I thought live photos were kind of gimmicky, and I was sure I’d just end up turning the feature off. I did for a while, but now I like having it as an option. For the most part, all I ever care about is the static picture I took, but I like the depth it adds to see it moving. I recently took a picture of myself on a mountain top, and I like how I can see how windy it was with everything blowing around in the live photo. It’s very cool to see third-party apps like Motion Stills stepping in to add to the utility of live photos. Now I can share them with all of my non-iPhone friends.

  • Flying with Devices

    A lot of people hit the road or the skies during the summer for vacation getaways. With your iPhone, iPad, your kid’s iPad and maybe an Apple Watch, too, how do you handle your digital devices in the air? Since 2013, we’ve been able to use handheld electronic devices such as the iPhone, iPad, and Kindle at pretty much all times during airplane flights, including takeoff and landing. That was a big change from previous FAA policy, which banned the use of personal electronic devices below 10,000 feet, forcing passengers to occupy themselves with books and magazines at the start and end of flights.

    But now flight attendants ask us to put our devices into “airplane mode.” You probably know how to do this on your iOS device, but if not, here’s how. Swipe up from the bottom of the screen to bring up Control Center, and tap the Airplane Mode button at the top left. Or open the Settings app and enable the Airplane Mode switch that’s the very first option. When you land, use the same controls to turn it off again.

    What does airplane mode do? It disables the wireless features of your device to comply with airline regulations. Specifically, it turns off the cellular voice and data features of your iPhone or iPad, and on all iOS devices it turns off both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. However, only the cellular features are important to your airline—you can re-enable both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth at any time. That might be useful if you want to use the airplane’s really expensive Wi-Fi network for internet access or Bluetooth to play music over wireless headphones.

    To turn these wireless features back on, tap the grayed-out Wi-Fi and Bluetooth buttons in Control Center, or flip their switches in Settings > Wi-Fi and Settings > Bluetooth. Don’t bother turning them on unless you’re going to use them, though, since you’ll save a little battery life by leaving them off for the duration of a long flight.

    Why do the airlines care about cellular? It has little to do with airplane safety; the prohibition on their use comes from the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, not the Federal Aviation Administration. The reason is that fast-moving cell phones used high in the air may light up many cell towers at once, which can confuse the mobile phone network.

    The technical solution is akin to what the airlines do to provide Internet access now; a device called a “picocell” would be installed on the airplane to provide connectivity with the phone network, and cell phones on the plane would communicate with it instead of individual cell towers on the ground below. Will it happen, though?

    The FCC has proposed that it would allow cell phone use on properly equipped planes; however, the thought of fellow passengers having phone conversations during flight makes me want to walk instead! Many lawmakers in the United States oppose allowing passengers to make and receive phone calls during flight, citing concerns about cabin safety, a worry echoed by the flight attendants union. Even FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has acknowledged this, saying “I get it. I don’t want the person in the seat next to me yapping at 35,000 feet any more than anyone else.” So, thankfully, I don’t expect that rule to change. Remember the phones that were in seat backs for years on planes? Hapy and I had a company rule that if any employees called from an airplane they would be immediately fired. It CAN wait.

    If you’re allowed to use Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, why do the airlines make me stow my MacBook Air during takeoff and landing? It has nothing to do with the technology—the airlines ban laptops during times when there could be an emergency landing because they could, like carry-on luggage or lowered tray tables, impede evacuation.

  • Dear Friends,

    Art has switched his messages tag line back to “the days are getting shorter and I hope it snows soon.” I have tried to sanction him for this depressing message but he is persistent. Independence Day is over and the Warren 4th of July Parade was action-packed. Prickly Mountain built a gigantic yellow submarine and an even more gigantic octopus. As usual, my position was under the float, this time raising and lowering the octopus head as marine life danced around the float. Right before the parade started, Vermont’s own Bernie Sanders stopped by our float to chat just as he has done for decades. It was great to see Bernie in the parade.

    About half way through the parade route the guys on the outside of the float started shouting – “back-up, back-up”. Now, our floats are pretty much carefully engineered to make it by people power the length of the parade route. We don’t know back-up. Well, there was only minor damage as we got out of the way of the fire truck that had to quickly put out a fire in one of the floats in front of us.

    It looks like a great year for blueberries as my bushes are loaded! Could be some blueberry pies, pancakes and muffins in my future.

    This week’s Kibbles & Bytes exclusive features the Apple Certified Refurbished 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display and powered by the 3.5GHz Intel i5 processor. It has 8GB of RAM and a 1TB fusion drive and the M290X graphics card. This iMac was refurbished by Apple and carries the same 1-year warranty as new iMacs. We are bundling it with AppleCare which extends that 1-year warranty to 3 years and also extends the 90 days of free Apple tech support to 3 years. If you are looking for a desktop Mac this is a great opportunity to get a 5k 27-inch iMac. $150 off for Kibbles & Bytes readers, this iMac with AppleCare can by yours for only $1789.99.