Kibbles & Bytes Blog

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KB Dog

  • Get Organized!

    I have tried a lot of apps over the years for keeping ideas organized, assigning tasks or just keeping track of my goals. The problem I’ve found with many of the organizational applications is that I don’t find them easy to access. If you’re not on your phone or at your computer, often these applications can’t be utilized easily or have widely varied interfaces depending on which device your using.

    “**Trello**”:https://trello.com/ has become my new favorite go-to app for keeping ideas and tasks organized. Trello is a free app with the ability to also pay for upgraded features for minimal fees. Why do I love Trello so much? It’s simple, I can easily use it on my computer, my iPhone or my iPad. There is an app for all three of my devices, and each version works seamlessly with the others. Working with several staff members in different departments here at Small Dog can make keeping track of tasks and to-do lists a bit of a challenge, but this simple application has really helped to streamline things.

    I easily and quickly create what they call “boards”, each board then allows you to create individual categories to which you can then add individual tasks. Within my lists I can upload photos, files, web links, assign due dates and add notes. Once I have created a board, I can also easily share that board with co-workers or whomever I choose to share them with. Anyone I have shared a board with can also be granted access to update and add to the boards, add notes or more files.

    A feature many of us have come to really rely on are the updates that you get from Trello notifying you that someone has made a change. I have found just one complaint thus far about the application. There appears to be no feature to mark a task as completed while still leaving it on your board. You can easily archive tasks and even entire boards, but I prefer to still be able to see those tasks while clearly seeming them marked as completed. However, all in all, I find this to be an invaluable app and one that I utilize all of the time. I have tried and do use google docs and google drive, and I’ve installed those on my devices as well, but for me nothing beats the ease and convenience of Trello.

  • Memory Lane

    I was cleaning up my desk in the office earlier this week and realized that the speakers I was using were actually from the very first serious computer I ever owned. It was a generic beige box my parents got for me used at a repair shop in a college town. No doubt some student’s old machine. The original CRT monitor it came with didn’t work, but my mom found a replacement. It had Windows 98, a very finicky CD-ROM drive, a 3.5GB hard drive and a god-only-knows CPU.

    It was the computer on which I learned to program. I was mostly self-taught at the time. This was back in 2002. I don’t remember how exactly the machine died. Looking back on it, and having more experience with computer repair now, it was probably the power supply. I remember it no longer working after a storm. A surge was unlikely, but old power supplies like that do tend to fail.

    So here I was, feeling all nostalgic for this old machine when I remembered that actually, I still had the original hard drive kicking around in a drawer in my apartment. Would it still work? What was on it? I don’t think I’ve ever thrown out a hard drive. I always keep them. As long as they’re not failed, I keep them.

    What does a 10+ year old hard drive look like? Surprisingly similar to modern 3.5-inch drives. Same form factor at least, and a sticker indicating it’s nearly 3000 times smaller in capacity. The bigger question was would it spin up and would my 2014 Macbook Air be able to read from it? Amazingly after cobbling together my one parallel ATA connector and plugging the USB end into my Air, the drive spun up. It was very noisey, both the spinning and the head, but it was spinning. After a while, the drive finally mounted and I was able to browse around it. Color me impressed. I’m not sure what the original file system was. It was probably FAT32, but I don’t actually know for sure. OSX El Capitan had no problem reading it though.

    It was mostly a fun nostalgia trip. I didn’t have much on that computer. There were some early programs I had written, but I have almost no idea how to get them off and running again. To better preserve the data, I copied the entire contents of the drive to my Air. Maybe someday I’ll decide to tackle building a Windows 98 virtual machine to really kick nostalgia into overdrive. Though I already have a PowerBook 180c I’m trying to get running.

  • Hey Siri, What Can You Do?

    So, I am a little embarrassed to admit it but I bought an Amazon Echo to check out how Alexa compares with Siri. I’m a gadget guy so we will see if we find it useful and if not, I am sure I can find it a home on eBay. I use Siri more and more these days. My most common uses are asking her to settle trivia disputes with Grace or setting the timer for 5 minutes. But there is a lot more that Siri can do!

    Make Relationships with Siri
    When you speak Siri commands, you can refer to people by relationship, rather than name. So, if you want to call your father, you can say “call my father” instead of saying “call Bruce Leibowitz.” But to do this, you need to introduce Siri to your family. First, make sure you have a “card” in the Contacts app for yourself, and then go into Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars, scroll down to find and tap My Info, and select your card. Next, make sure you have a contact card for your father, and then tell Siri, “Bruce Leibowitz is my father.” Or, if Siri doesn’t hear you correctly, open Contacts, edit your card (not your father’s!), scroll down, tap “add related name,” tap the default relationship to pick “father,” tap the info “i” icon, select your father’s card, and tap Done.

    You can even use Siri to remember other types of relationships. Artie used to bring manure from his uncle’s farm for my garden and ended up with the nickname, “the spreader”. If I tell Siri “Art Hendrickson is my spreader” I can now just say “text my spreader…” and Siri knows who I am talking about. This works for nicknames but also for lawyers, accountants, doctors or any nickname you want to tell Siri about.

    Take a Picture
    Instead of fumbling to launch the Camera app on your iPhone you can just say “take a picture” and Siri will automatically open the Camera app and you can snap away.

    Siri Converts
    Need to know how many millimeters are in 4 inches? Just ask Siri and you will find that there are 101.6 mm in 4 inches. This works for currency exchange rates, too. Ask Siri how many Euros are equal to $100US you will find that 87.73 Euros is the exchange rate today. Siri has some other strong calculation features too. You can ask Siri how many calories there are in that fish sandwich or to calculate a 20% tip on your restaurant bill. You can ask her to solve math problems involving fractions and other math functions that will be faster than opening the calculator app and punching in the numbers.

    Settling Up
    Okay you can use Siri to look up baseball stats or other information to settle a dispute but what if you are at loggerheads and just want to get a random answer and don’t have a coin to flip. You can ask Siri to “roll the dice”, “flip a coin” or pick a random number.

    Name that Tune
    Siri is integrated with Shazam to help you figure out what song is playing. Just ask her “what song is playing?” and she will listen and let you know and probably try to sell you the song, too!

    Find that Photo
    Siri can search your photo library for you. I know how frustrating it is if your are like me and have literally thousands of photos. You can say something like “find that photo from Daytona Beach from last March” and Siri will launch Photos and take you right to any photos taken at that place and time.

    Siri Takes You Out
    Siri can make your restaurant reservations for you, too! Tell Siri “make a restaurant reservation for four at 7PM” and she will respond with available restaurants nearby and if you have the Open Table app installed can make the reservation for you or give you the phone number to call.

    Are We There Yet?
    If you are using your iPhone for navigation you can just say “ETA” and Siri will let you know how much longer you are gonna be on the road.

    Leave Me Alone
    Siri can do a lot for you but sometimes you just want alone time. You can tell Siri to turn on “do not disturb” and you will not be bothered. Or tell her to “turn on airplane mode” and she will turn off Wi-Fi and cellular signals.

  • _Dear Friends,_

    Baseball season is almost upon us as spring training wraps up and the real games begin next week. The hopes for the Chicago Cubs have never been higher with a great line-up and pitching. Could this be our year? To help matters along, Apple and MLB announced this week that they have struck a multi-year deal to supply 12.9 inch iPad Pros with special STM team-logoed cases and a custom app called MLB Dugout. This app will help managers see performance statistics, check videos from games and analyze how pitchers and hitters are likely to perform against each other.

    Baseball has become a game of statistics and until this deal laptops, iPads and iPhones were banned from dugouts. That ban is gone as iPad Pros will replace the notebooks and photographs in big binders. Each team’s data will be downloaded to the iPads before the games. I can see this really speeding up the research about how to play a certain batter or what kind of stuff a pitcher has. Cubs manager, Joe Maddon, is not so sure “This might sound nuts to you, bit it might slow down the process. If there’s that moment that permits time to look up something, it might be OK, but I think thats where the piece of paper has it all over the computer–in that moment.” Well, Joe you are a hell of a manager but I’ll put the iPad Pro up against your binder any day! Fortunately, MLB didn’t ban paper so Joe is all set.

    I have talked many times about being a socially responsible business but this week we saw the power for good that businesses can use. While not yet successful in overturning the North Carolina law that legalizes discrimination against LGBT people, business pressure stopped a similar law in Georgia and the list of businesses lining up for repeal in NC is impressive. It was business that turned the tide when civil unions were first introduced in Vermont and it can be business again that dope-slaps some sense into these backwards legislatures, too.

    This week’s Kibbles & Bytes exclusive features the iPad mini 4 in Space Gray. This 64GB model features Wi-Fi and Cellular and comes with the AppleCare+ protection plan that increases the hardware warranty from 1 to 2 years, technical support from 90-days to 2-years and provides for accidental damage coverage. This is the latest iPad mini that features the Retina display. With 64GB of ram and cellular capability you will never be out of touch. Normally, this bundle is $730 but this week exclusively for Kibbles & Bytes readers you get the “**iPad mini 4 64GB Wi-Fi and Cellular with AppleCare+ for $50 off**”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002186 at “**$679.99!**”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002186/

  • Amy Farnsworth

    Family: Chris (husband) & I Pets: Rusti (Australian Shepard) Hobbies/Interests: Cooking, Sewing, Family, Outdoor Activities Favorite Books: Legend by Marie Lu, The Selection…

  • “!http://blog.smalldog.com/images/4684.png!”:http://www.smalldog.com/springfever/spring-fever

  • SSD Data Management

    As technology makes huge strides in producing more stable hardware one thing has become crystal clear, solid state hard drives (SSD) are the way of the future. Apple has only one notebook with a traditional spinning hard drive and it’s likely just a matter of time before they discontinue the MacBook Pro 13in Mid 2012.

    The current generation of MacBook provides some great features based on the fact that they have SSDs. Stable data storage is the biggest. Also, the lack of a spinning hard drive allows Apple to produce lighter Macs with less moving parts. The only downside of the SSD is relatively small storage size for the price.

    Learning how to manage your internal drive is key when most model’s starting storage is 128 GB. When you purchase a new machine you can write off about 20 GB for the OS and pre-installed applications. This leaves you roughly 108 GB free and that is if you haven’t transferred data from an old machine. People tend to fill the remainder of their drives with media (videos, picture, and music).
    If you are transferring data from an old machine, I highly recommend going through your files and getting rid of unused files. Many people have stuff cluttering up their drives and don’t even know it. Duplicate photos, PDFs, old papers, old iOS device backups, and unused applications can fill up your computer unnecessarily.

    Another space hog is application installers. I have seen customers have 5 GB of an Adobe Flash Player installers. You can easily find installers by going to the Downloads folder in Finder. Once you are there, sort by file type and scroll through till you find the .dmg files. After you review the installers to make sure you have installed the ones you wanted, you can delete them.

    Most people stream their movies and music which also cuts down on the need for internal storage. Yet there are still many people who like to use their media offline. To save on space I highly recommend keeping an external drive. With an external drive you can move your iTunes and Photos libraries off your internal drive. But be sure to back these up as you never want your important data in only one location

    With an external hard drive and basic data management you can make a 128 GB drive feel a lot bigger!

  • SSD in an iMac

    A solid state hard drive (SSD) is what you want in your computer when it comes to speed and reliability. Whether in your laptop or iMac, you WILL notice a speed increase by changing out your old rotating hard drive (HD) for an SSD. But the main difference between doing this job in a laptop versus an iMac is physical compatibility. All laptops that come with a traditional HD come with a 2.5″ hard drive, whereas most iMacs come with a 3.5″ hard drive. This means swapping out an SSD in a laptop is as simple as removing the old hard drive and installing the SSD in its place. Because of the 3.5″ hard drive in an iMac there are a few things you need in order to complete this install. I will not go over the install process in detail, but simply what you need to get the job done:

    # Solid State Hard Drive
    # 3.5″ to 2.5″ Hard Drive Adapter bay
    # Thermal sensor (if it’s a 2011 iMac) or a fan control app (if pre-2011)

    Because the iMac is so big it needs more fans to cool everything. The HD has its own fan and its speed is controlled by reading the temperature of the HD by plugging into it. Well SSDs do not have this port to plug into, meaning the HD fan can’t read temperature causing the fan to speed up. If it’s a 2011, purchasing a simple thermal sensor will fix this issue. If it is pre-2011, you can use a Mac fan control app and set the HD fan speed to 2500 RPM, which will not cause it to overheat yet be low enough not to be an annoyance. But you may get lucky on a pre-2011 iMac because some of them have a hard drive temperature sensor that simply sticks onto the outside of the SSD, which will read the temperature and work fine. If you are installing an SSD in a 2012 or newer, the thermal sensor will work fine.

    It is also important to note that you must remove the original bracket from the 3.5″ HD and attach it to the 3.5″ to 2.5″ adapter bracket in order for the SSD to fit into the iMac. With all these items you can easily install an SSD in any iMac. If you do decide to do this yourself, just take your time and follow detailed instructions. Of course, your friendly Apple-certified techs at Small Dog can do this for you, too!

  • Recovering Deleted Files

    On many computers, the operating system and user data is stored inside a component called the hard drive. You may remember my contribution to “*Tech Tails #946*”:http://blog.smalldog.com/techtails/tt946/ in which I went into some detail on the inner workings of hard drives. This week, I will cover some different methods of deleting and recovering files from hard drives.

    Data is stored on hard drives in the form of magnetic signals of varying intensity. A weak magnetic charge can be interpreted by the computer as a “0”, and a strong charge as a “1”. With enough of these simple signals, a computer can store a song, a video, or just about any type of information imaginable.

    When a user deletes a file from a computer the standard way, by moving it to the trash and emptying the trash, it does not actually remove the magnetic signals from the hard drive. Parts of the file are altered in a way that instructs the computer to ignore it and treat it as blank space. The actual data of the file is not erased until it is overwritten with a new file. This is done because it is much faster than actually erasing the data every time a file is deleted from the computer.

    In versions of OS X previous to 10.11, a “Secure Empty Trash” option existed. This would overwrite all of the data in the trash with empty data. This feature was removed in OS X 10.11, because Apple could not guarantee that the user of the computer had not made other copies of the file on the same computer, which would not be erased. Apple recommends enabling Filevault if you are concerned about the security of the data on your computer. You can learn more about Filevault in my contribution to “*Tech Tails #942.*”:http://blog.smalldog.com/techtails/tt942/

    *Be cautioned:* If you enable Filevault and then forget the password to your computer, your data will be *permanently unrecoverable.*

  • _Hello Fellow Technophiles,_

    One of our most frequent topics in our newsletters and conversations with customers regards backups. I will say it again here in case you haven’t heard it before: Make sure to back up! Your Mac includes a tool called Time Machine that can be used to automatically back up your machine to an external hard drive. Your iOS device can automatically back up to iCloud or can be manually backed up to a computer via iTunes. There are numerous other third-party solutions that can be used to back up your data such as emailing the document to yourself, other cloud storage providers (like Google Drive or Dropbox), cloning software such as Carbon Copy Cloner, etc.

    But we as a people have failed to back up our most important asset: humanity itself. Now you may be saying to yourself “There are almost 8 *billion* human beings…isn’t that enough copies?” While that is a redundancy that is probably overdoing it for the limited resources that we have (although I am not sure I can really complain about there being too many people as I am pictured on the right with my two little backup copies), that only covers us for local disasters. What if an asteroid was to take out the entire planet? We need an offsite backup to take care of that.

    Fortunately, we have a pretty good option right next door: Mars. While not currently naturally inhabitable by human beings, it does have many of things that we need including an abundant supply of water. With technology that exists today, we could get to and live on Mars. In the long run, there is the option to terraform Mars as well, which has the potential to make Mars even more hospitable for us.

    While I do not have the influence that JFK had in announcing the plan to get to the Moon and back, I am nevertheless setting a goal for humanity here in this week’s Tech Tails: Colonize Mars as soon as possible. I hope that you, our faithful readers, can help me in making this dream a reality.

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