Kibbles & Bytes Blog

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  • Apple Wants Your TV

    Well, actually Apple wants you to buy-in to their vision of TV for the future.  So many of us are cutting the cord…

  • Kibbles & Bytes 1127 Intro

    Grace and I have a few more days alone and then we have a bunch of visitors coming for the holidays and through the first part of the new year. Key West is making plans to improve its bike paths and bicycle access with the goal of making the city the most bicycle friendly in the USA. It is such a small and very flat island that biking is the best way to get around. Parking is so tough that bikes are essential even with a resident sticker.

    How about those Boston Celtics, though? After suffering a miserable start, they seem to have suddenly gotten their act together and wiped off 7 straight.

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

    Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

    Don & Emily

  • Recover Drive Space by Deleting Old iOS Backups

    If you’ve been good about backing up your iOS devices to iTunes on your Mac or to iCloud, give yourself a gold star! Both backup destinations are fine, but there’s one potential downside to iTunes backups: they can consume a lot of space on your Mac’s drive. In iTunes, go to iTunes> Preferences > Devices, where you’ll see all the iOS device backups that iTunes has stored. If there are multiple older backups or any for devices you no longer own, you can get rid of them. Control-click the offending backup, and choose Delete. Or, if you want to check how large a backup is first, instead choose Show In Finder, and then in the Finder, choose File > Get Info. When you’re ready, move the selected backup folder to the Trash.

  • Hue Finally Learns How to Deal with Power Outages

    It took a really long time but Philips Hue lighting has finally fixed one of the most annoying issues with their smart home lighting. If you suffer a power outage, the default for Hue lights has been to return to the full ON stage when power is restored. That means, for example, at my house on Prickly Mountain where I have many Hue lights, that if we get one of our frequent power outages or blips, when the power is restored every light in the house comes on with full brightness. That tends to be a rude awakening.

    This is the reason that I unplug my Hue controller when I rent out my house in the winter to skiers. They could be very confused if there is a power outage!

    You must upgrade your iOS Hue app to version 3.11.0 and then you will need to go to each individual light in the new “Power-on Behavior” setting where you can choose either “Philips Hue Default” (which turns the light on with full brightness) or “power loss recovery” (which reverts to the last used color and brightness ). Setting it to power loss recovery will leave the light off when power is restored.

    Unfortunately, there is no way to set all of your lights at once to power loss recovery so you must go into each individual light and set it the way you want. I am going to set mine to all be in their last state. For safety reasons I could see why some people might want one or two to come on automatically after a power outage.

    I have noticed that some Hue lights are not supported, at least at this time. I cannot make too much sense why some are supported and some are not but perhaps there will be further updates. Nevertheless, this is a big improvement.

  • How's Your Ticker?

    Apple announced that the series 4 Apple Watch would feature a new health feature which was the ability to generate an electrocardiogram (ECG) which is a medical test that detects heart problems by measuring the electrical activity generated by the heart as it contracts. This was finally released in the latest Watch OS update. Strangely, those, like me, that were running the beta versions of the Watch OS, had to wait a few more days before we got the feature.

    I found it very simple to set up and to take an ECG an, in conjunction with Apple’s Health app on your iPhone, you can store the data or share it easily with a medical professional. I shared mine with my nurse practitioner, who is basically a wise guy, and she said I should do it again when I am walking up a steep hill. That might have to wait for Vermont since there ain’t no hills here in Key West!

    But seriously, there have already been stories of people discovering that they have a serious medical condition with their heart rhythm by using the Apple Watch. Apple’s commitment to providing tools for health goes beyond just closing your exercise rings and with this ECG function it goes to diagnosis. I can’t wait for them to figure out how to measure blood sugar, too.

    First step in getting this function is to rush out and buy an Apple Watch series 4 from Small Dog Electronics. Okay, you don’t have to rush, but we do have some in stock if you are interested. Next, you must be sure to have the latest Watch OS which is 5.1.2 and the latest iPhone OS which is 12.1.1.

    Once you have updated your watch and your iPhone, launch the new ECG app on your watch. The first time you run the ECG app it will tell you to set up the ECG function within the Health app on your iPhone. That threw me at first since I could see no place to set it up in the Health app. But, after I restarted my iPhone, it was right there and simple to set up.

    From there, doing an ECG is wicked easy: launch the ECG app, place your finger on the crown of the watch, and wait while it counts down 30 seconds.. For 30 seconds, the electrical activity of your heart will draw a red trace across the watch’s screen. That’s it. You can do it anytime that you have 30 seconds to spare.

    When you set up ECG in your Health app on your iPhone it will ask you if you want notifications of possible Atrial Fibrillation. Now, I know that too many notifications is a real hassle, but a notification that your heart is acting up is probably one that you want to turn on. Atrial fibrillation occurs when the heart beats in an irregular heart rhythm where the upper chambers of the heart beat out of sync with the lower chambers. Afib can cause blood to clot in the heart which can lead to heart attack, stroke or other complications.

    You can view the ECG in the Health app on your iPhone, and it has a button to export a PDF for your medical professional. This is just one of the ways that Apple is using its technology to help you manage your health.

  • Dear Friends, This week I got called for jury duty here in Key West. I thought it was funny how so many of…

  • Get Stacked

    There are two people in this world, those who keep their desktops organized and those who do not. Over the years I’ve learned these two kinds of users are about a 50/50 split and some do fall somewhere in between. By default, sending files directly to your desktop is often an easier option to grab files quickly. However, the number of files sitting on your desktop can quickly add up and take over, eliminating the ease of quickly accessing certain files you might need on a regular basis. The solution has arrived: Stacks. Stacks is a great way to appear completely neat and tidy when perhaps, your desktop is just the opposite.

    Apple has used the term “Stack” before, and still does, in relation to how the icons of folders in the dock display, either as normal folders or as a stack of icons with the first on top. Mojave’s new Stacks feature brings that visual approach to the Desktop, organizing icon clutter into neat stacks that you can expand and collapse with a click, working with the revealed icons just as you’ve always done.

    In the Finder, the best way to invoke Stacks is by Control-clicking the Desktop and choosing Use Stacks from the contextual menu. If you first click the Desktop, you can also find the commands for Stacks in the View menu: Use Stacks and Group Stacks By. Lastly, if you open the View Options window by Control-clicking the Desktop and choosing Show View Options, you can work with Stacks by choosing from the Stacks By pop-up menu.

    When you invoke Stacks, the Finder promptly collects all like icons-even new files, as you create them – together into one of more stacks of icons. Click once on a stack to reveal its contents below. Click again to collapse the revealed icons back into the stack. If you open multiple stacks at once, each subsequent stacks takes over a spot at the top of the screen and expands down. If you don’t show disks on your Desktop, you can get a nice columnar view of what’s on your Desktop.

    How does Stacks figure out which files are alike? You determine that by Control-clicking the Desktop and choosing from the Group Stacks By menu. You can create three basic types of Stacks:

    • Kind: These stacks are named for the type of file they contain, such as Documents, PDF Documents, Movies, Images, Screenshots, etc.
    • Date: With date based collections, each stack’s name and contents depend on what date ranges make sense, such as Today, Previous 7 Days, Previous 30 Days, October, 2017 and so on. The date groupings can key off the date added, last opened, last modified, or created.
    • Finder tags: Tag-based stacks are useful only if you regularly assign tags to all your files.

    For myself, grouping stacks by kind work the best, but I can see how for some date could work best. It’s really all in your own preferences and you can change things as needed.

    How can you control the order of the files within a stack? That’s trickier. Control-click the Desktop, choose Show View Options, and in the View Options windows, choose from the Sort By pop-up menu. I’m partial to Name and Last Modified, but as mentioned earlier, it is what works best for you.

    The only minor downside to Stacks, is that it eliminates any spatial memorization you have relied on to find icons on your Desktop. If you are like me, you do rely on this. I would often get frustrated with this method as well, especially if I had too many similar items stored on my desktop. Stacks really does help! Now I just click on the kind of file I am looking for, like a PDF, and then it expands neatly on my desktop. While I did try to keep my icons before in a specific order to memorize, this arrangement was imperfect much of the time as I added and removed icons.

    Stacks might not be perfect, but I have found it to be a valuable feature to Mojave. If nothing else, it gives the impression that I am neat and organized!