Kibbles & Bytes Blog

  • I hope everyone had a great 4th of July weekend! I spent the long weekend camping with my family, complete with lots of great times with friends around the campfire and out on the water. As much as I love technology and make it a point to always have the newest products from Apple, it is nice to spend time away from it all. Most of the time where my family and I camp there is no internet, much less any cell phone reception. I admit that I get a bit of a thrill out of letting the battery drain on my phone and not bothering to even plug it in again until Sunday evenings when we return home. Technology is all around us, but it’s nice at times to forget about it all and spend a few days just taking in the world around us.

    Technology is a powerful tool and often times we forget about the power that it can have as we become so accustomed to just clicking and typing away at our machines. In our service department and retail store we continue to see a rise in customer machines with invasive programs such as MacKeeper installed on their machines without their realizing how this invasive program ended up on their machines. Over the years as avid Apple users we have had little to worry about when it comes to these kinds of problems, and for the most part there is still not a lot of worry. Simply double checking before you download a file is often all that you need to do!

    Thank you for reading!

    Emily
    “emily@smalldog.com”:mailto:emily@smalldog.com

  • Grace is heading out to Louisville to celebrate her mom’s 100th birthday so I’ll be hanging out with the dogs this weekend. It is hard to believe that the 4th of July is only a week or so away. As usual, exactly on the summer solstice, Artie changed his chat status to “the days are getting shorter and I hope it snows soon…” I started the chorus of blues from everyone except for the hardcore skiers on our team.

    Thank you for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

    Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

    _Don, Dean, Bronson, and Scott_

  • Gearing Up for Summer

    As the days get longer and the summer sun gets hotter, winter seems only to be a distant memory. Even as a passionate snowboarder and overall winter enthusiast, I am not counting down the days to its return like some of my co-workers are. The thing that I love most about the arrival of warmer weather is the amount of motivation it gives me to be active. As a long-distance runner trying to get back into the swing of things, I wanted to gear up quickly so that I could take advantage of the mild early-summer temps. With a few suggestions and tips from some of my outdoor-enthused co-workers, I was hitting the running trail in no time. 

    The first thing on my list was a good pair of running shoes. I will admit for as much as I loved running I haven’t really kept up with it since high school and certainly not enough to get a new pair of $80 shoes, which was why I was still rocking the shoes from ’09. I guess that’s it, right? You don’t need much to go run, just yourself and a good pair of running shoes. I quickly realized after my first run that something was missing. I needed something else to push me to get over that first hill. The answer was music, and this is where Small Dog came in. I never really ran with music because I never found a great way to carry my music with me. I tried numerous armbands and even tried to carry my music in my pocket with me. As phones have slimmed down so have the armbands and I was able to find the perfect one right here at Small Dog for my iPhone 5s. I went with the Belkin Sport-Fit Plus Armband and have been very happy with it so far. The thing that stands out for me is that the stretchy neoprene material it is made out of keeps it lightweight and the clear screen protector keeps my phone safe but also functional on my run. For my music I am using Spotify Premium. If you have read any of my Kibbles articles in the past you know that I am a big fan. With the new Tempo feature that matches your music with your running pace, Apple will have to try pretty hard to convert me to their newly-introduced streaming service, Apple Music.

    With the Belkin Armband on my arm and Spotify Premium pumping my beats, I was ready to go. More motivated than ever, I felt that I was running a farther distance in a shorter amount of time but I wasn’t exactly certain that this was true. In an effort to track my run, someone suggested I try the popular running/cycling app, Strava. Since downloading it, I have been able to track my distance traveled, calories burned, elevation gained and more. You can also go Premium to access more content but I find that the basic version has more than enough to suit my needs. Strava alone has helped me to stay motivated and has given me the reason to constantly push myself while on my runs. 

    Though I am not sure what other hobbies I may pick up along the way this summer, I am certain that there will always be awesome accessories and apps out there to maximize my fun.

    To help you stay active this summer we are including a great special in todays Kibbles. Buy Outdoor Tech Orcas and get a FREE armband for iPhone 5, 6 or 6 Plus!

  • Accessibility – Hearing

    Apple under Tim Cook’s leadership has taken a keen interest in accessibility and health. One of Apple’s initiatives that often goes unnoticed is in hearing. I guess years of loud rock & roll, motorcycling and as Hapy said this morning, my lumberjack times running a chainsaw without hearing protection, has taken its toll and I have found that I have some moderate to severe hearing loss. I found myself saying “what” a lot and had myself checked out and will be getting hearing aids next week. Hearing is really how your brain interprets the sounds that come into your ears and when you are missing some of those sounds your brain struggles to make that conversion. Hearing devices help to reconnect those sounds to your brain. When you get to be my age there is always some hearing loss but today’s technology and Apple can help mitigate that inconvenience.

    Based upon a Bluetooth technology designed by Apple, some advanced hearing aids provide great sound quality, offer new features and are easy to set up and use. There are many hearing aids on the market that use Bluetooth but most of them require a separate device to interface between the hearing aid and Bluetooth, so you end up with a device hanging from your neck. With advanced products from primarily two companies, ReSound and Starkey, that middle device is eliminated and there is a direct connection from your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch or even the Apple Watch to your hearing aids.

    Garage Sale

    In the accessibility section of your iOS device is the hearing aid section (Settings–>General–>Accessibility–>Hearing). Here, in addition to being able to pair your hearing aids easily you can adjust volume to those and activate the special Hearing Aid Mode that improves sound with some hearing aids. The hearing aid companies go even further with apps that let you control bass and treble, monitor battery life and provide setups for particular environments such as restaurants, outdoors, traffic, etc.

    They even have a built-in GPS so you can set them to automatically know where you are and set the sound accordingly. This also enables the “find my hearing aid” function.

    There is more to this amazing technology, too. Not only does it provide hearing aid but it also allows streaming of Bluetooth content right to your hearing aids. So you can use it to stream iTunes music, phone calls, turn-by-turn navigation, FaceTime chats, etc. Apple apparently has not perfected the technology that would allow the use of the microphones built-in to the hearing aid so you do have to speak into your phone but you can hear through the hearing aid. The microphone on the iPhone is pretty good though so you could just have it on the desk and have hands-free talking.

    Live Listen is another feature to have better conversations in loud places. You can place your iOS device in front of the person you are talking to and use the microphone to pick up and stream the conversation via Bluetooth right to the hearing aid.

    Okay, I do not yet have any first hand experience with this but give me a couple weeks and I will give you a report on my first experiences with this technology. I did a lot of research and learned way too much about the hearing aid business. I ended up buying my hearing aids from Costco for both price and convenience. Also, it did not hurt that they offer the Resound Linx branded under their Kirkland brand for about four times less cost. It sucks getting old but I am very impressed that Apple has made at least the hearing part a little easier. Apple seems very committed to making technology to improve your life and I think this is a prime example.

  • _Dear Friends,_

    Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility is celebrating their 25th year this year. This organization of businesses that ascribe to the triple bottom line of People, Planet and Profit is the largest socially responsible business organization in the country. That is not even on a per capita basis and for a small state like Vermont it is pretty remarkable. I am proud to serve on their board and have served as chair in the past. Some of the largest and most influential companies in our state such as Ben & Jerry’s, Green Mountain Keurig, Green Mountain Power and Seventh Generation join hundreds of small and medium businesses in networking, educating and public policy. Perhaps it is just the small town nature of our state but VBSR has been influential in a number of important pieces of legislation including health care reform, environmental policy, marriage equality, renewable energy and development issues. Perhaps the best part of VBSR is just the opportunity to rub shoulders and talk with some of the most innovative business leaders.

    I am not a big Taylor Swift fan but I appreciate her public stand for musicians that led to Apple changing how their 90-day free trial of the new Apple Music service will be rolled out. I think that in the heat of negotiating contracts for providing streaming music, Apple figured since they were giving out a free trial that they should not have to pay the artists. Well, once Taylor Swift tweeted her opposition while praising Apple, Apple did the right thing and announced they would be paying all the artists even during the free trial period. Attaboys and attagirls all around!

    The second round of developer versions of iOS 9 and Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan came out this week and as is usually the case I noticed immediate improvements in performance and stability. In particular, the iPhone battery life seems to be vastly improved. My favorite feature, this week, of the upcoming El Capitan operating system is in Safari.  I do not like visiting a web site only to have some video start up automatically and start blaring audio content on my Mac. Now, when Safari senses auto content from a web page it indicates it by putting a little speaker icon which you can easily click on to mute the sound. The public beta for El Capitan and iOS 9 is coming up in a couple of weeks and I think you will like them!

    This week’s Kibbles & Bytes exclusive features a used MacBook. Many people like to have a spare Mac around, whether it is for visitors or simply one that can be used for quick searches or projects. We have acquired several MacBooks that might be just right. These are the white unibody MacBooks that were introduced in May of 2010 and were one of Apple’s most successful laptops. These come with a 2.4GHz processor, 4GB of RAM and a 250GB hard drive. We give them a 90-day warranty and they come with OS X Mavericks installed. Small Dog Electronics provides the 90-day warranty on these used MacBooks. Kibbles & Bytes readers can buy them “*Here*”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900001877 in the stock configuration for $20 off at $379 OR Will has put together a great bundle by upgrading the 250GB drive to a 256GB Solid State Drive and bumping the memory up to 8GB.  This configuration gives you the reliability of a brand new SSD drive and gives you enough ram to load up Yosemite. This bundle is normally $630 but Kibbles & Bytes readers can grab one for only $549.99! “*Click Here*”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900001876 to claim your bundle.

  • Back-up for what?

    Now I know as Mac user you run into the mentality that Macs “don’t get viruses” or “Macs rarely have issues”. Both of those statements are false. As a technician, I have seen viruses, adware and other forms of malware. I have also seen hard drives fail time and time again. This is not to discourage people from buying Macs. I’ve seen more malevolent malware and catastrophic failure when I was a PC tech, but these unfortunate events do happen in the Mac world. This is why backups are important, even on Macs. Luckily for Mac users, doing backups is so much easier thanks to Time Machine.

    Introduced back in the Leopard days, Time Machine is Apple’s backup software and it is pretty darn good at doing its job of keeping your family photos, music, and even software from being completely lost in the void of corrupted bits and bytes.

    With Time Machine you can store backups on your Mac’s hard drive, but I would recommend using a external hard drive. “What? I just spent a lot of money on this computer and now I have to buy something else?” That’s sometimes what I hear in response to my recommendation, but with data recovery costs ranging from $250 to thousands of dollars, $80 and twenty minutes of your time is far cheaper and simpler.

    Check out the “Wikipedia article on Time Machine”:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Machine_(OS_X).

  • iOS History

    Apple makes some really awesome products, and I use a lot of them every day, but hands down the most valuable gizmo that Apple makes that I use every day is running iOS. iOS used to be called iPhone OS back in 2009 before iOS 4, when it was just the iPhones and iPod touches that ran Apple’s touch screen mobile device operating system.

    An iPod touch was my first real Apple product. It gave me a ton of flexibility and freedom at an affordable cost that didn’t require me to sign a contract with a cellular company. I still have that iPod touch and it’s still cranking along to this day. One of the things I’m most impressed about with Apple is the major software updates we get every year. When I purchased the device I got everything I was hoping for and more, but there were some shortcomings. If I wanted to switch from one app to another, I had to press the home button, return to the home screen, find the icon for the app I wanted to switch to, tap on that icon to launch the app, wait for the app to load, and navigate back to where I needed to be within that app. If I wanted to switch back to the last app, wash-rinse-repeat. When I was doing that regularly it would become tedious. There were some other things I couldn’t do in the old iPhone OS 3 of 2009. Skype was one of my favorite apps because it allowed me to call friends on the telephone, not tie up the home landline, talk for hours on the cheap, and not use any of my expensive pay-as-you-go mobile minutes. If I was talking on Skype though, I couldn’t do anything else on my iPod touch or the call would disconnect. If I was waiting for a call, the app needed to be open and I couldn’t be doing anything else on the device. If I wanted to listen to music through Pandora, I couldn’t do anything else; leaving the app would stop the music. I could listen to music through Apple’s music app (called the iPod app, complete with a picture of the iPod classic in the app icon) while doing other things, but that required me to sync the music through iTunes. For some of us that just feels like a bit of a process.

    Apple announced iOS 4, changing the name from iPhone OS, to be more inline with the range of devices it would be running on: the iPhone, iPod touch, and the new (this was back in 2010) iPad. There were many features, and to date, what a lot of enthusiasts regard as some of the most significant hardware updates. What I remember with no difficulty is the announcement of the iPad, where the biggest frustration of the iPhone and iPod touch, (as well as their biggest asset) of their size was addressed. With a much larger device, expanding the user interface from a 3.5″ screen to a 9.7″ screen, a more comfortable user experience resulted. I could spend hours in an app before feeling claustrophobic and limited by the size of the screen. The retina display on the iPhone was a huge deal. The clarity was beyond anything else available in a digital handheld device. FaceTime was also announced (Apple’s video chat). That reminds me how far into the future I live. All this was great, but the biggest thing missing was multi tasking. Those frustrations I described above where I had to leave an app, go back to the home screen, were going to be far behind me. All I had to do was double tap the home button and the screen would slide up to reveal a drawer with all the recently opened apps in there. I could tap any one of them and be sent to that app, generally right back to where I was. I could leave Skype running in the background if I was on a call and still play around with other apps, like checking facts or movie show times in Safari, or taking a note in the notes app. I could have pandora playing in the background while I poked around on Facebook, or any other app that I might want to use. It was a big deal. It was like Christmas. I can’t even remember anything I got in the 2010 holiday season, but I remember iOS 4 and multitasking.

    Every year there’s been huge updates that have made me even more impressed with these devices Apple makes. This has been a brief walk down memory lane for me and I have so much more to say, but we’ll continue on all that later.

  • 3 More Tips and Tricks for iOS

    iOS 8 has many levels of complexity and I have enjoyed exploring it over the last year. As part of my series of tips and tricks for iOS, I have three more for you:

    1. Ever have difficulty reading the small text on your iPhone? Well don’t worry, all you need to do is go to Display & Brightness in Settings. From there, tap on Text Size and adjust to your liking. This will make reading those work emails on the go a lot easier.

    2. Do you like listen to music to fall asleep, but don’t want your device on all night? From the Clock app you can set a timer to stop your music from playing all night.

    3. Ever hear a song and need to know what it is? All you need to do is hold the home button and ask, “Siri, what is this song?”

  • Understanding Your Internet Connection

    Having a good Internet connection is vital to being able to use your Mac for its intended purpose. Most people know how to connect to their home WiFi, but a lot of times that is as far as they can go. In this article I will explain what the various WiFi symbols mean. Please see the picture below.

    Garage Sale

    * The top right image means you’re connected to a WiFi network and have network access. The bars will appear black, and the more you have lit up, the better the connection is.
    * The top left symbol indicates that you may be connected to a network, but not the Internet, or that the network requires a password to activate.
    * The bottom left symbol indicates that WiFi is turned off. This symbol also appears when you are using a wired ethernet connection instead of WiFi.
    * The bottom right symbol means that there is no airport hardware detected. This is usually not good and a visit to Small Dog may be in order.

    All these symbols mean something different so understanding each of them is important. The top right and bottom left symbols are what you want to see for a healthy network. If you want to select a different WiFi network instead of the one you are currently on, just click on the WiFi symbol, select the network you want, and–if it has a lock–enter the password. If there is no lock next to it, simply selecting it will connect you. It is important to always have a password protected WiFi network to avoid any unwanted users connecting without your permission.

  • Summer is here

    Summer has officially started and I must say it’s been a wet one so far! I am starting to feel like it’s been raining more days than it’s been sunny here in Vermont. While it has done wonders for the grass and other green foliage, it seems to be creating a bit of an issue with my lawn. The poor soil is so water logged I am starting to slush my way to the horse barn in the mornings! I have two great big oak trees in my yard which several years back began to loose their luster and many branches died off. We became concerned about the tree and called in our local arborist to offer advice on the condition of our trees, he determined that our lawn was too wet in many places and that the kind of trees we had preferred less moisture. We improved our ditches and drainage around the property and now 4 or 5 years later we are seeing amazing regrowth in the trees, crossing my fingers this wet summer doesn’t set my trees back again.

    Too much moisture isn’t good for my yard and it’s certainly not good for electronics either. Liquid damage is probably the second most common repair in our service department next to failed hard drives (though with SSD drives becoming the new standard, this is happening less and less) and is one of the most frustrating for customers. Often times liquid finds it’s way into computers without the user realizing it, there is little that we can do to offer ways to prevent this, but what we can offer is a great accidental damage insurance policy from “**Safeware**”:http://www.smalldog.com/product/85003/safeware-mac-warranty-w-applecare-3yr for **$99** when you buy a new or factory refurbished computer with Applecare. Safeware gives you the peace of mind should your computer have liquid accidentally spilled on it, you can get your computer repaired easily and economically.

    Thank you for reading!
    Emily
    “emily@smalldog.com”:mailto:emily@smalldog.com

  • Looks like it will be sunny for our day trip over to Laconia, NH on Saturday. Now that the Golden State Warriors have won the NBA title and the Chicago Blackhawks (dynasty!) have won the Stanley Cup it is back to Cubs and binge watching when we are not riding or enjoying the Vermont summer.

    Thank you for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

    Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

    _Don, Dean, Scott & Bronson_