Kibbles & Bytes Blog

The Green Mountains will be looking pretty white by this weekend as Vermont gets blessed with single-digit temperatures and a nor’easter this weekend. The skiers will be happy as the mountains are all opening early this year. I hope they get a lot of snow while I sit down here by my pool.

Thanksgiving is coming up and we all have a lot to be thankful for. I will miss my family as Grace and I celebrate by ourselves. It reminds us of when we were very young and just learning about living away from our parents. We will have fun for sure. But Happy Thanksgiving from all of us at Small Dog Electronics from our family to yours.

Thank you for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

Don & Emily

Apple has built-in accessibility features in all of their products which make it possible for nearly everyone to enjoy and use Apple products. Whether you are disabled or not some of these features can be extremely useful in everyday life. Following are some great tips when using the iPhone. (Note: I made up these titles.)

Flash Gordon

Okay, you millennials won’t know who Flash Gordon was but he was a 1950s sci-fi character and TV show that was simply awesome! Which doesn’t really have much to do with this tip but I couldn’t resist conjuring up Flash. When I was in Tampa Bay one of the Apple folks who makes a lot of presentations was saying that she set her accessibility to LED Flash for Alerts so that her iPhone wasn’t constantly beeping and vibrating. This setting is in General—>Accessibility—>Hearing. There you can toggle the LED to flash for alerts and set to flash even if your mute switch is set to off.

Sherlock Holmes

Elementary… Need to take a closer look? Need reading glasses but you are too vain? Well, under Vision accessibility you can toggle Magnifier. Go to General —>Accessibility—>Vision and you can toggle Magnifier. It will also automatically adjust the brightness so it is easier to see. I use this when I have to read really small labels to get the serial number or other information. If you press on the image you are seeing you will be presented with toggles for zooming in and flash. This accessibility feature is easily accessed by triple-clicking the side button on your iPhone.

Maxwell Smart

Well, it is not quite the cone of silence, but if you are talking on your iPhone in a crowded location or on a busy street, the ambient noise can be distracting. Toggling Phone Noise Cancellation will reduce ambient noise when you are holding your iPhone up to your ear. You toggle this at General—>Accessibility—>Hearing. Please note that you cannot have MFI hearing active and Noise Cancellation at the same time so I can’t use this because I wear MFI hearing aids.

Mr Magoo

Zoom can be a handy feature even if you are not Mr Magoo. Basically, Zoom will magnify the entire screen and it also has a number of features you can toggle. You can activate it at any time by double-tapping with three fingers and then you navigate by moving those same three fingers around the screen. You can activate Smart Typing so that the Window is zoomed with the text but the keyboard is not. You can activate the Zoom Controller which gives you quick zoom features. There is also a slider that will allow you to control the amount of zooming you do.

Ernestine

Lily Tomlin made Ernestine the phone operator (millennials are asking, what is a phone operator?) famous. I’m old enough to remember party lines where you shared a line with a few neighbors. Well, your iPhone can also route your calls if you activate Call Audio Routing. If you are always sporting Apple AirPods you might want to set this to BlueTooth headset or automatic. You can set it to the speaker, too. There is also a toggle to Auto-Answer your calls. Ernestine would be jealous.

James Bond

This is not an accessibility tip but your bonus tip today is about security. Let’s just say you are in a foreign land (or the USA) and are being chased. You don’t want your pursuers to gain access to the plans for that rocket ship but if they catch you all they have to do is hold up your iPhone X to your face and boom! Your iPhone is unlocked. So, when you think the gig is up, quickly hold the side button and one of the volume keys to get to the Emergency SOS screen which will block Face ID and require that your passcode is entered before your iPhone is unlocked.

Hope these little tips amused you and can also help you out,

Dear Friends,

I took a quick trip up to Tech Data in Clearwater, FL for some meetings this week and it was good to meet some folks I have only talked with on the phone. The recount is underway here in Florida and I think we will be watching some Kibbles & Bytes reader’s pups while they volunteer to help with that. The lesson I get from the recounts and voter suppression issues in Georgia is if we want to protect our democracy we need to protect and enhance our right to vote that so many of our men and women fought to preserve. There should be no long lines, no taking all day to cast your vote, and it just should be so much easier. I say make election day a holiday, enhance voting by mail, or do whatever we can to encourage everyone to vote!

Did you know that Apple is not alone in using renewable energy to power their facilities? Apple is at 100% and Small Dog lags there, but we do supply 100% of our Vermont operations from the solar farm in our backyard in Waitsfield. We measure our success at Small Dog Electronics with the triple but equal bottom lines of People, Planet and Profit.

This week’s Kibbles & Bytes exclusive features the new Mac Mini. The Mac Mini finally got its long-awaited upgrade and this Mac, which resides in many server farms, slot machines and other places where size is important, is now an even more versatile powerhouse. This bundle includes the Mac Mini with a 3.6GHz quad-core Intel Core i3 processor, 8GB of ram and a 128GB SSD drive. We are bundling it with an Apple Apple Magic keyboard, Apple Magic mouse 2 and a V7 28-inch 4k display! We are also including AppleCare + for this Mac Mini! This bundle will give you a great desktop Mac at a very attractive price. It is normally $1550 for this bundle but this week for Kibbles & Bytes readers you can get this for $100 off at $1319.99!