Kibbles & Bytes Blog

  • Apple Watch: Don’s First Impressions

    Okay, I have been wearing my new Apple Watch for about a week and I have to admit that I was pretty skeptical that I would like wearing a watch after 50-years of not wearing a watch. I do pride myself on being able to figure out the time without a timepiece. Well, so far I am really enjoying learning about the Apple Watch and seeing how it integrates into my lifestyle.

    Apple is doing something pretty cool with the Apple Watch. They are offering free set-up sessions with one of their “specialists” to go over the features and functions of the watch. I have my appointment set for Sunday morning but Grace had hers already and thought it was very valuable. They are taking customer satisfaction to a new level with these sessions.

    Okay, so onto some first impressions:

    *Battery life:*

    Double okay! Not only does the Apple Watch battery easily last all day with frequent usage but it also has an impact upon the battery life of my iPhone. That is because the “glances” I would take on my iPhone all through the day are now easily done with a flip of my wrist, so I am not taking my iPhone out of my pocket much.

    *Cool Things it Does:*

    * Let’s see, paying for my Starbucks drink on the road to Maine was cool; I just launched Passport on the Apple Watch and held it up the the Starbucks terminal and my Venti Iced Black Eye was paid for to the amazement of the people in line.

    * Using the Remote App to control my Apple TV is also very cool. No more searching for that remote; I can put it in the drawer.

    * Smarter texting was something I discovered yesterday. I have gotten texts before on the Apple Watch and there were some canned responses that you can customize or you can reply via dictation and send the reply as an audio or text file. ll that was not too surprising but when my health care provider texted me a question on a medication dosage – i.e. “1.5mg or 0.75mg?” I was surprised to see that my Apple Watch realized I was being given a choice and the canned responses now included 1.5mg and 0.75mg as clickable responses.

    *Watch Apps:*

    I am liking the Score app which gives me updates on the Cubs games. While the Activity app is a little annoying when it taps my wrist and tells me to stand up, I am finding that I am motivated to meet my daily goals for standing, moving, and exercising. I used the Maps app and soon got used to the taps to alert me to turns. I don’t think I will use that on my motorcycle but I can clearly see the use while navigating on foot in a city. Grace and I tried out the camera remote function while on our trip but never could quite get the iPhone in a stable place so helpful people always offered to take our picture.

    I think I’m gonna keep it!

  • _Dear Friends,_

    Maybe this will be my year for apples. My three apple trees at home and the one outside my office were covered with blossoms this spring and now are growing little apples. Who knows…my 40-year struggle to grow apples might finally end! We had a wonderful Memorial Day weekend and caught three parades starting with the one over the hill in Williamstown, VT on Saturday. I hope your holiday weekend was awesome too and that you are ready for the summertime!  

    There are lots of rumors coming out over the upcoming World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) starting on June 8th with the confirmed keynote set for 10 AM Pacific time. We don’t do rumors here in Kibbles & Bytes but we are excited to get a glimpse of the future as Apple talks about their plans and gets developers stoked to create for them.  

    This week’s Kibbles & Bytes exclusive features the Apple Certified Refurbished 13-inch MacBook Air with the ultimate protection plan! You get the MacBook Air with 1.3GHz i5 processor, 4GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD drive. This carries Apple’s 1-year warranty just like the new machines. We are adding AppleCare protection to this MacBook Air, which will not only extend that hardware warranty from 1 to 3 years but also extends the 90 days of free technical support to 3 years. Because we know you will be carrying this laptop around a lot we also adding Safeware protection, too. Safeware provides 3 years of accidental damage coverage, subject to a $250 deductible.   

    That should make for a pretty good deal but in honor of the upcoming summer we are going to add in a free pair of Chill Pill speakers and this purchase qualifies for our Dads and Grads promotion so you would also get a $50 Small Dog Gift card! The regular price for this bundle is $1319 but exclusively for Kibbles & Bytes readers this week (while supplies last) you can snag this bundle for only $1165! “*Click Here*”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900001864 to order yours.

  • Mobile Banking

    I use my gizmos for all sorts of stuff, but anything to do with money and technology in the same sentence has always made me a little uncomfortable. It’s been a long journey that took me several years, but it’s finally at the point where I can do most of my financial heavy lifting from my iPhone or my Mac without hesitation. There are a few developmental steps that I had to progress through before I was ready for this though.

    The first was trusting the system. I had a very common distrust of doing finances on my computer, like all it would take is just a foolish click or typing in the wrong number and horrible things would happen, or I would get hacked. My belief at the time was that if I didn’t do my banking on my machine then I wouldn’t be capable of being a victim. When I talked with my bank about my fears they let me know that there are protections against some mishaps and greatly eased my fears. They did make it very clear that I should protect my account numbers and login information with the same level of caution I would guard my Social Security number with. Most banks require a really good password (really tricky to even make one that meets their requirements the first few times- this many uppercase, that many lowercase, oh so many characters, some symbols, some numbers, and maybe even more, like punctuation). Having long and complicated passwords is a pain, but it’s important and necessary. Another thing that many banks have embraced is two-step verification, where you need a password, as well as a secondary verification method. Most implementations of this send your phone a text message, or opt to have a robot call you and give you the secret code that’s always changing. This greatly enhances security; my thoughts are that it’s a pain to me when I know my password and have my phone, if someone malicious is trying to guess my password and succeeds, they’ll also need my phone for that second part of the two-step verification.

    I almost always have my iPhone with me and one of the most useful money management apps I’ve used thus far is “*Mint.*”:https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mint-money-manager-budget/id300238550?mt=8&at=11lb7k What I found attractive about this app is that I can put in multiple accounts and credit cards and see how much money has come in, what’s gone out and where it’s gone. Mint has all sorts of neat and useful features, like pretty graphs. There’s a lot of tweaking you can do, like any purchases I make at gas stations are generally automatically set to fuel, but I can re-categorize the purchase to snacks or whatever might be more appropriate. I can even make a note about a specific purchase. Mint was the first finance app I was really comfortable having on my phone because they made a point that it’s just for viewing my purchases, and I can’t actually move money around.

    Many credit cards offer alerts for purchases. I have it set that when charges of a certain nature happen on a credit card I get an email or text message. If I have my phone with me, I generally get notified before I walk out the door of wherever I made the purchase. There are a couple of other apps that are companions to a physical debit card I carry. One is the “*Simple app.*”:https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/simple-better-banking/id479317486?mt=8&at=11lb7k I get push notifications directly from this app. “*Google Wallet*”:https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/google-wallet/id575923525?mt=8&at=11lb7k does this as well. It’s really impressive how fast these notifications come through.

    My bank and credit cards all have their own apps as well. I remember getting hit with like a three dollar “mobile banking fee” for moving some money around in my bank’s app, I’m sure it was in black in white somewhere in that large block of text that I just tapped “I agree” to so that I could start using the app. On the plus side, I have no recollection of ever being billed for just checking my transactions or balance from any app or using a service like Mint.

    I enjoy online banking for it’s convenience and the mobile apps are a potentially useful extension that has definitely made my life easier.

  • Summertime Fun with your Mac

    It’s that time of year again…summertime! In many cases this means traveling to various places and seeing various people. As excitement builds, most people often forget they may use their mobile hotspot to stay connected to the internet when needed. You must check with your cellular carrier to verify you have hotspot set up on your account and then you’re ready to enjoy the usage of your MacBook or iPad while on vacation.

    That being the case, most mobile hotspots have only an allotted amount of data you can use. You really want to make sure you get the most efficient use out of your device when it is connected to your hotspot. Through trial and error I found there are quite a few apps that help you restrict data usage on your OS X devices while traveling. I personally reccomend “*TripMode*”:http://www.tripmode.ch however, at this time it’s not in the App Store. Nonetheless, you can download this app directly from their website. This app is a pretty amazing app to help restrict data usage while using a mobile hotspot, yet still giving you the freedom to enjoy all the spots you love visiting, and helping you control your data usage and avoid a large bill from your wireless provider.

    *TripMode* allows you to quickly and easily block specific apps the second you connect to a hotspot. When you connect to a hotspot, *TripMode* automatically starts restricting access to the internet from any apps you have open. You can customize which ones get access and which don’t. You can also monitor how much data they use, which is handy if you have a data cap on your hotspot. The best part about this app is that there’s a free seven-day trial available on the developer’s site that I’ve included above. If you love this app as I do then the small investment of buying the app for ($7.99) will save you a lot of money in the future. Who doesn’t love saving money?

  • OS X Notifications for Gmail

    It’s a little weird to think about how long the “modern” incarnation of the internet has been around. I remember back in 2004 I was just a sophomore in high school. My friend excitedly told me that he had a handful of invitations to something called “Gmail.” It’s hard to imagine nowadays, but good webmail wasn’t a common thing back then. I remember how excited I was that it came with one whole gigabyte of storage! And it was always increasing! How could Google do that?!

    Well that was over 10 years ago now. Gmail has changed a lot since then, but it’s still a very good webmail client. I still use the original account I created back in 2004. When I got my Macbook Air, though, I figured, might as well set up Mail and use that for email. Don’t get me wrong, Mail is a very capable program, and I love the way it integrates with OS X Yosemite. I was essentially “raised” on webmail clients though, which have always had a different feel from standalone desktop mail clients, so Mail feels arcane to me in many ways.

    I decided to stop using Mail and switch back to using Gmail in Safari. Obviously that works really well, but there are certain things Mail could do that Gmail in Safari didn’t. I could get over all of them except for one: notifications. When new mail comes in, I want to know about it. OS X has a great notifications system and it seems a shame to not take advantage of it. The Mail app is obviously tied into OS X so it can push out notifications for new mail, but here’s something you may not know: Webkit, the layout and HTML rendering engine used by Safari, Google Chrome and many other browsers supports something called “webkitNotifications.” These are really cool. Basically, they are a way for pages within the browser to request permission of the operating system to push operating system notifications. These notifications are no different from the ones sent by Mail, or Messages, or any other OS X application.

    Can you see where I’m going with this? Yes, you can enable these notifications for Gmail within Safari on OS X Mountain Lion and up. It requires a bit of tinkering to make it work in Safari, but it’s pretty easy to do. Google Chrome will pretty much do it by default, and I think Safari doesn’t do it out of the box because Google wants to push you into using their browser.

    Here’s how to get notifications running.

    # First, you need to enable the Develop Menu. You can do this by going to *Safari > Preferences > Advanced* and checking the “Show Develop menu in menu bar.”
    # Next, visit “*mail.google.com*”:http://mail.google.com and log into your account.
    # With your Gmail account open, click the Develop Menu item and select “Show Web Inspector.”
    # The Inspector console will now show on the bottom of the screen. If it’s not in console mode, just click the Console button on the top of the Inspector window.
    # At the bottom of the console, there should be a little “>” symbol. This is where you can enter JavaScript and other commands to execute on the page. You want to paste the following JavaScript code into that box and press enter: window.webkitNotifications.requestPermission(function(){alert(window.webkitNotifications.checkPermission());})
    # An alert box will pop up showing “0” which means that mail.google.com now has permission to send notifications to the operating system. Voila!

    As long as you have Safari open (even in the background) with a Gmail tab or window running, you will receive notifications about new mail! As a bonus, just like all OS X notifications, you can change the style, behavior, etc. by opening *System Preferences > Notifications* and tweaking the settings for Safari.

    This simple modification makes Gmail so much more usable within OS X. Now I can be on top of my new mail as soon as it comes in.

  • _Greetings Friends,_

    I hope everyone had a happy and safe Memorial Day weekend! I spent the long weekend breaking in the camping gear with my family as we officially kicked off our summer camping season. It was a little bit chilly, but we still made the best of it! It is nice to spend a weekend relaxing and just enjoying time together. We even managed to survive an entire weekend without cell phones or internet! With all the technology around us, and working with it on a daily basis, I admit it’s a great feeling to disconnect and recharge for a few days. 

    This past week I encountered a few machines which were suffering from data corruption. Data corruption can be a very tedious and frustrating process to sort through, in some cases it can actually mean loss of files. Data corruption can not always be avoided, but there are some simple steps you can take when using your machine to try and reduce the likely hood of data corruption. One is to try to avoid force powering down your machine; whenever possible always follow proper shut down and sleep procedures. Avoid force quitting programs as well as just unplugging external drives unless it’s absolutely necessary; force quitting your programs and unplugging drives without properly un-mounting them can lead to data corruption. If you have a program that is crashing on a regular basis, this can be a sign that potentially data corruption had occurred. If you are noticing crashes within your programs, try repairing permission on your disk through disk utility. Installing a solid state hard drive can running regular Time Machine backups is another simple step and precaution one can take to try and minimize any potential corruption to your data. Solid state drives are much more stable than traditional drives. Lastly, keeping your Time Machine backups current could be a real life saver in the event your data does get corrupted. Time Machine allows users to restore from specific back ups. This was a lifesaver for me once with a Windows partition on my machine that ended up with a virus. Thanks to Time Machine I was able to restore data prior to the virus infecting my machine! 

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

  • One of my favorite parts of our traditional Memorial Day ride to Maine is the trip back on Monday, Memorial Day. We meander the back roads of Maine and New Hampshire and usually run into a variety of Memorial Day parades. Some we just pull over, take off our helmets and watch and sometimes we actually join in with other motorcyclists in the parade.

    I hope you have a great Memorial Day weekend and thank you for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

    Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

    _Don, Dean, Bronson & Mike_

  • Have you heard the Sonos yet?

    Sonos utilizes a unique HiFi mesh networking technology to connect one or more speakers together wirelessly. Not only is Sonos convenient to use, but it sounds awesome! We’ve seen a lot of new Bluetooth and AirPlay speakers recently, but Sonos utilizes a different wireless technology.

    The **Sonos App** connects to your wireless router and creates a new wireless network for all of your Sonos speakers. Whether you have one speaker in the living room or ten speakers spread throughout the house, they can all unite to play the same music at the same time. Building your Sonos setup is easy; syncing your speakers to the App for the first time is as easy as pressing a button, and then they’re connected forever. This is a great solution for customers who don’t want the hassle of running wires all over their house.

    Sonos has a wide variety of wireless speakers and home theater components available to customize your perfect audio system. The **PLAY:1** is their smallest speaker, designed for portability while still providing crystal clear sound. The **PLAY:3** is the perfect size for the living room or backyard and can even be mounted. Lastly, the **PLAY:5** brings an impressively large sound that’s powerful enough to fill a large room; it’s also the only Sonos speaker with an audio line-in for connecting a wired device easily.

    Come into one of our retail stores to get a live demo of what I would consider to be the best speaker on the market today, the *Sonos*.

  • Hickory, Dickory, Dock!

    !http://blog.smalldog.com/images/4418.png!

    It is surprising to me how many people do not really know how to use Mac OS X dock feature. The Dock is a handy place to put all those frequently used apps so you can easily access them. More than that it is also a place you can stash documents and folders that you need to get at fast.   

    One thing to remember from the start is that items in the Dock are not really there. They are aliases of the original item stored in other locations. So, do not worry if you accidentally move something out of the Dock as the original is still there waiting for you to put it back.

    The Dock keeps apps on the right side and you will see a small divider line that will be where folders, documents and minimized windows are located. You can re-organize items by clicking and dragging them. The Trash is always on the far right and the Finder is always on the far left.

    To add an item to the Dock simply drag it to the Dock. To remove an item from the Dock, drag its icon an inch or more off the Dock (I like to move it at least ½ way up the page) and then let go and it vanishes in a poof of smoke.

    Whenever you open an app it will temporarily be in the Dock. If you want it to stay there you can right click (control click) on the icon in the Dock and you will see a set of options such as “Keep in Dock” or “Remove from Dock”. You can also set that app to start up on log-in from that options screen.

    Using the Dock System Preference you can set the size of the Dock or set magnification to highlight the apps as you scroll over them. I don’t like that much so I keep it turned off. You can also position the Dock on the left, right or bottom of your screen. I much prefer the bottom. There are a number of other options including an option to automatically hide and show the Dock.

    I love the Dock and all of my most used apps reside there for quick launching. It is also handy because you can see at a glance which apps are open and if you are preserving processing power or battery power you can quickly close those that you are not using.

    Got any Dock tricks to pass along?