Kibbles & Bytes Blog

Apple news, tech tips, and more…

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  • Backup Deja Vu

    Nobody likes a broken record (well, maybe some people do), but if there’s one thing we can’t repeat enough in the tech world, is that you need to keep backups. Good backups. The best way to appreciate the value of backups is to spend some time working at a help desk. When I worked at the help desk in college, the only thing more guaranteed than full computer labs during finals was people asking to help recover files. Sometimes I could get the files back, but sometimes they were gone for good. The best way to prevent that scenario is with a good backup system.

    There are ??lots?? of options for backing up, and depending on your needs, some options are better than others. During my final year in college, I became so paranoid about losing critical files I backed up to manual .tar.gz archives on a file server every single night. Fortunately, I never had to dig into those archives, but it gave me peace of mind to know everything was safe. Actually, Apple’s Time Machine backup system came out while I was in college, but I was solidly in penguin-land (Linux) by then, so that wasn’t an option.

    Nowadays, I use Time Machine on my MacBook Pro at work. It backs up to a 1TB external drive over firewire. While I’ve only had to use it a few times, and not for anything mission critical, it’s certainly been really great and helpful. At home though, I hadn’t been following my own advice, and was living dangerously without a backup system for a while. Fortunately, nothing ever happened, but I’ve since mended my ways and now use two primary backup systems/methods.

    At home, my primary desktop is linux, so I can’t use Time Machine, but I do have a Mac mini I use as a file/web server. This is where my backups usually go. For a while, I used a linux-based backup tool. It was very simple, and I think it was probably based on rsync. It had its share of problems, and I don’t think it ever liked that I forced it to backup over my network to the Mac mini. So when I got tired of its problems recently, I started looking at other solutions and was immediately drawn to “*Code42’s CrashPlan*”:https://www.code42.com/crashplan/. This is an amazing backup solution that gives you more options than you can shake a stick at!

    First, for free, you can download their client for linux, Windows or OS X. Once you’ve installed it on all the computers you want to back up, it just works. You can tell it to backup one computer to another, or to a folder (like on an external hard drive), or even to a trusted friend’s computer over the internet. I was amazed at how easily this worked, and how easy it was to install.

    Once it was installed on my linux desktop, and my mini, they just started talking to each other. No configuration, no nothing. The first backup takes a while, but after that, incremental backups will be much smaller. And if you need more backup space (petabytes?), you can pay as little as $4 a month and backup to CrashPlan’s encrypted cloud. No gimmicks. They seriously let you back up as much as you want for the same price. Obviously the data has to go over the internet, so backing up petabytes there might not be such a good idea, but you can seed your cloud backup by mailing them a drive with all of your data for about $125.

    My second backup scheme at home is something I don’t think people consider too often, and that’s archiving. There’s a lot of old data I have that I don’t need on a daily, or even monthly basis, but I want to keep it. There’s a huge debate online about the best archival methods. Many people even advocate for good ol’ magnetic tape, but I choose to backup to extremely high quality “*Taiyo Yuden*”:http://www.t-yuden.com/ DVD+Rs. As far as I know, you can’t buy these DVD+Rs in stores (at least not commonly in the U.S.). They’re pretty expensive, and for best results, you should make sure you’re buying them directly from Japan to ensure you get the real thing.

    I’ve had too many cheap DVD+Rs fail on me after a month or two, so for archive-and-forget-it schemes, I highly recommend spending the extra money. Once I archive my data to redundant archive disks, I make sure to keep them in a safe place and about 1-2 times a year, I pull them out and run an integrity check. I have had to dip into my archive disks once or twice, and I was extremely happy to have them.

    Hopefully I didn’t sound like too much of a backup broken record here. The point is backups are critical, and if you do a little research, there are solutions out there for pretty much everyone and every situation. If I can backup my linux desktop to my Mac mini, anyone should be able to find a solution that fits their needs.

  • How Old is Old?

    How old __is__ old? That is a great question in the context of technology and its life span. It can seem like as soon as you make that new purchase, it becomes yesterday’s news. This is definitely the case when it comes to module electronics. Cell phones are constantly being redesigned every day to incorporate the next big trend or technology that manufacturers think the public will go crazy over. There have been iPhone updates nearly every year and several Android and Windows phones out every quarter — each with a different range of technologies, new features and target markets.

    Computers are getting more and more complicated, and smaller and smaller as the technology develops and more powerful processing units can be packed into littler packages. For instance, look at the previous Mac Pro model and the current one; the new version is a __fraction__ of the size and has way more processing power and capabilities.

    So how can you anticipate when something will become outdated?

    Technology technically becomes outdated when the hardware and software manufacturers no longer support your model of electronics. Whether it’s been discontinued or dropped as a product line, generally that means that you can no longer get help to repair or service your product. Then, it’s no longer a useful piece of technology if you’re out of luck if something goes wrong.

    In the Service department, we often see computers that would be classified as “old” at 5+ years, meaning we can no longer get parts from Apple or service the software that originally came with the unit. Apple has a five year cut-off point; when a model hits five years old, it becomes “vintage.” Parts are no longer manufactured for vintage models and replacement parts are on an “as available” basis. When a model hits six to seven years old, it is classified as “obsolete” and no parts are available — any that are left over are recycled.

    Now, what to do with your old machine if you have outdated technology that’s not working for you anymore?

    I have an old G4 that is still kicking, but its processor is too slow upgrade to a supported Mac OS. Its usefulness has definitely passed, as I can barely surf the internet with it anymore — it’s often the case that internet browsers and coding technology change quickly, so if I can’t upgrade my OS, there’s not much I can do. The oldest supported Mac OS is 10.6 (Snow Leopard), so if you are running anything older than that, you’ll find you can’t update some of your software like iTunes.

    Have a shiny new iPhone? Until you upgrade to something that can handle at least 10.6 or a Windows platform for the latest version of iTunes, you won’t be able to sync it with your computer. Apple and most Apple Authorized Service Providers won’t be able to service anything vintage or obsolete because they can only get authentic parts from Apple, which in turn, may not manufacture or distribute them depending on your status.

    The bottom line is, if your machine or device is at least five years old, you should start thinking about upgrading to something that is able to be repaired if it breaks.

    __Editor’s Note: For more computer ownership best practices, and signs you may need to upgrade,__ “*this is a fun read.*”:http://www.squawkfox.com/2013/02/21/upgrade-computer/ -KH

  • MAC TREAT #244: Assistive Touch for Broken Buttons

    A few of my friends have had issues with the top button on their iPhones not working anymore. This makes it tough to lock your iOS device and can really drain your battery depending on your auto-lock time setting. If your warranty has expired or you don’t have AppleCare+, there is a little trick you can do to fix this until you get a new phone.

    In the iPhone’s (or various iOS device) Accessibility settings there’s an option to turn on a feature called *Assistive Touch.* This normally helps people to use their iPhone if they have difficulty touching the screen or if they require an adaptive accessory. But, it can also come in handy if your top button is broken.

    To turn this feature on:

    # Open up your iPhone *Settings*
    # Under *General* choose *Accessibility*
    # Scroll all the way to the bottom of the *Accessibility* menu and find the *Assistive Touch* option and turn *On*

    You’ll see a transparent icon appear on your screen. This will remain on every screen and give you options to choose Siri, Device, Favorites and Home. You can move it around the screen by touching and dragging depending on where you’d like it to be.

    The option to lock your screen is under *Device.* In that menu, you’ll be able to turn your volume up or down, unmute, rotate the screen and lock the screen. This could also be helpful for some who might have broken volume or mute buttons as well.

    Voila! You might have thought you were out of luck until your next upgrade, but this easy solution has proved very helpful for many. Enjoy!

  • _Dear Friends,_

    We got that big dump of snow on Valentine’s Day with just about three feet up at my house on Prickly Mountain. Unlike our friends down south, everyone seems to be smiling whenever we get the big snow. The snow plow drivers have work, the ski areas and restaurants are busy, and the skiers are definitely grinning, too. Emily and I drove to our store in Manchester, NH on Tuesday and it seems that they don’t pull out the plows there until the snow is over. It was a mess in town and it took us about an hour to get from Manchester to I-89, which is usually about a 15-20 minute drive, to head back to Vermont.

    We have had a lot of discussions lately about our e-newsletters and I am very interested in your feedback on Kibbles & Bytes. It has always been my intention that this would be a vehicle that allows us to talk to our most loyal and valuable customers each week with a combination of news about Small Dog and Apple as well as a handful of special offers. I have tried to keep it personal and personable and to balance it as a friendly communique to our customers.

    Every now and then, questions are raised about the value of the effort and what the return on investment might be. I feel that the value is in the communication itself, not necessarily how many of our specials sell each week. I think that many companies would find the ability to talk directly to almost 30,000 opt-in customers each week to be a real asset.

    What are your thoughts? Do you find this newsletter to be of value? Do you look at the specials? How could we make it better? “*Drop me an email and let me know!*”:mailto:don@smalldog.com

    I’m often asked about which Mac is the best purchase for a home. In general, we ask a lot of questions about what the Mac will be used for, who will be using it and whether a portable or desktop Mac would be most suitable. I’ve put together a special bundle for Kibbles & Bytes readers today on a complete system for your home that would suitable for anything from a dorm room to that new house up in the mountains.

    This week, we’re featuring a desktop solution: a 21.5-inch iMac with 8GB of RAM, a 2.7GHz i5 processor and a big 1TB hard drive. It comes with a full-sized keyboard and Bluetooth mouse. This iMac is ideal for a family with several people who would share it for homework, internet, email and general use. It always makes sense to include a backup drive (especially with a standard hard drive), so we’ll add the Seagate Backup Plus 2TB drive that is sized just right for this iMac. With Time Machine, you will always have an up-to-date backup of your data when the drive is attached.

    For Wi-Fi and network connectivity, we’ve added an AirPort Base Station (Apple refurbished) with 1-year Apple warranty that will do just fine. No system is complete without an Apple TV, so you can access all that content on your big screen TV or mirror the content from your iMac. We will toss in an HDMI cable, too! Last, but not least, you might want to print out some of that homework or some photos, so we’ll add in a Canon Pixma MX522 Multifunction AirPrint Photo Inkjet printer. This will allow wireless printing from your iMac (or any other Macs, iPads or iPhones in the house). It is a printer, copier, scanner and fax machine in one!

    Since this is a shared iMac, we will also add a set of Urbanears Plattan Headphones in Tomato (red for belated Valentines) so that you can listen to music without bothering others or the kids can do some gaming without all the game noise. We want you to be ready for anything, so we have included the AppleCare Protection Plan for iMac that will give you three years of hardware warranty (instead of one) and three years of Apple technical support (instead of the 90-days that comes with new Macs). This bundle has it all: a great family desktop Mac, a backup solution, wireless networking, a color printer and some cool headphones.

    Just for Kibbles & Bytes readers, I am offering this bundle this week for only *$1777.77!*

    “*Buy Don’s amazing Mac bundle special here.*”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900001277

  • Black History Month – Fort Mose

    Fort Mose is known as the very first black settlement in America. The fort was formed in 1726 and was nestled two miles…

  • Disable Window Animations in Terminal

    If you have an older Mac and have updated it to more current software and feel that the machine is just not responding as quickly as it used to, this could be a useful trick for you.

    The newer operating systems utilize a lot of animation features that are very slick with a machine powerful enough to show them well, but if you are on an older machine, they can cause sluggishness that is just unnecessary. If you want to disable them, here is a command for Terminal that will allow you to do just that.

    Before playing with Terminal it is always a good idea to make sure that you are comfortable with it as entering something incorrectly could be catastrophic for your machine.

    @defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool false@

    What that does is disables all window animations in OS X, allowing the processor to focus on what you’re trying to do. To disable it is enter the following:

    @defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool true@

    This will bring back the functionality that was disabled by the previous command.

  • Solid State Drives

    The Small Dog Electronics service department regularly uses adapters to connect internal Apple solid state drives (SSD) to our backup and recovery hardware. Particularly the MacBook Air SSDs available since 2010. However, since the advent of the 2013 Haswell chipsets, hardware to connect the new SSD interface has been unavailable. In the past, Other World Computing has been reliable in finding solutions for replicating Apple’s interface and providing solutions to those needing to access MacBook Air and MacBook Pro Retina SSD drives. Apple has been changing the interface regularly, partly due to changing technology as drive speeds skyrocket, but this time it’s a slightly different story.

    Recent efforts in standardizing low profile solid state drives has resulted in the NGFF, or Next Generation Form Factor. This standard is also called M.2. This standard prevents connections for these “gum stick” SSD drives from differing, ideally encouraging compatibility between different computer and SSD manufacturers (much as the 2.5″ drive standards have been a boon for consumers and the repair industry). Within this new M.2 standard, we see SATA and PCIe (although you’ll be hard pressed finding adoption of the direct PCIe interface outside of Apple). In addition, the PCIe can run on two lanes (X2) or four (X4). There’s some compatibility confusion between these different types, although none of that currently relates to Apple’s configuration, which is what we’re covering right now.

    Apple provides a PCIe SSD in the 2013 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro Retina models. It’s also the Samsung XP941, a drive that performs outstandingly fast (In MacBook Airs it’s reported it can benchmark 1.2GB/s, while the more standard version has been clocked at close to 1.8GB/s. The downside of the change Apple has made is that the new drives are using a proprietary interface for these drives, and there is no compatibility between these and the previous Apple drives, or the M.2 format. At this point the fact of the SSD being removable is likely only a slight concession toward hardware owners desiring flexibility, to allow data recovery, and keep cost down on logic boards.

    Apple is moving rapidly in the SSD business (working in conjunction with Samsung), and staying at the head of the game while simultaneously keeping their products proprietary. In the future we should be seeing some incredible performance from even base model MacBook models, as far as moving data is concerned.

  • To Clone Or To Backup

    The benefits to cloning software versus back up software is something measured in time. How technologically savvy you are tends to guide you toward one or the other. Currently, my workstation here at Small Dog in South Burlington has a failing hard drive. Since everything is backed up to our remote management server, I’m not worried about data loss, but my concern at this point is the amount of time my workstation will be down and how productive I can be once it’s up and running again.

    As I type this article, my workstation’s hard drive is currently being cloned to another hard drive that will replace the failing one. Cloning allows for the entire drive contents, OS and all to be copied over to a new drive, allowing you to pick up where you left off as if nothing has changed. There is an amount of setup and reorganization with backups and restoring from them. Both are a good thing to do, but cloning is only really a benefit if you are going to be doing the hard drive installation yourself.

    I always recommend some form of backup regimen, but if you are experienced and know how to replace hard drives, then cloning software might be better then say, Time Machine. Or, you could use both — have cloning software constantly keep one hard drive backed up while using time machine for a redundant backup. That way, if one drive fails, taking your clone with it because of software corruption, you still have all your files backed up with Time Machine.

    Of course, there is a possibility that the clone might become corrupt while cloning from a failing drive. I’m watching my drive getting cloned and there are error messages about sections being difficult to transfer. I will probably have to install a fresh copy of the OS over the top of what I have, effectively replacing the OS and leaving all my work data there. Then, I will have to reconfigure a lot of settings to be able to interface with work systems. If this happens, I may be down longer than I originally anticipated, and may need to restore the system the long way.

    The manipulation of data is a crap shoot at times, especially whenever the medium that its placed on is in the process of failing. There isn’t really any guarantee that everything or even anything will be recovered, but if you catch your drive failure at an early stage, the better your chances are of being able to recover everything. (For previous articles on data recovery, “*check out the Tech Tails Archives.*”:http://blog.smalldog.com/techtails)

    I’m currently using Mac-based software “*Carbon Copy Cloner.*”:http://www.bombich.com There are numerous Windows-based programs that do similar services, and “*Acronis*”:http://www.acronis.com is one that I can recall off the top of my head. Once the cloning process was complete, I installed the new drive into my workstation and booted it up.

    Other than a few programs which I will have to reinstall, it appears to be working as if nothing happened, which allows me to get back to work in a timely manner. I can’t stress enough — back up your data because if you lose it, it may be gone forever.*

    __*Or super expensive to recover using DriveSavers or other data recovery service!__

  • How iOS Touch Screens Work

    Back in the day, I owned a Palm Pilot and recall the touch screen behaving far differently than iOS devices in that pressure was required (and felt) to signal the processor. This type of digitizer is called a “resistive screen,” and takes advantage of finger or stylus pressure causing two thin layers to come into contact at a precise point, thus changing the resistance and signaling an instruction to the processor. These screens were predominant back when Palm Pilots were all the rage — I can assure you they no longer are.

    We know that iPhones and iPod Touches are the rage though and they use what are called “capacitive touch screens,” relying on the conductivity of your skin to affect changes via signal path. The display houses an LCD, a glass substrate containing a very thin conductive layers, another glass substrate containing another very thin conductive layer, a transparent “bonding” layer, and finally the glass cover that you actually touch. On later models there is yet still another fine anti-reflective, oleophobic — from the Latin “oleum” (oil) and Greek “phobos” (fear) — layer.

    So if you were to get up close and personal with the screen — using a microscope of course — you would see a grid array in the glass substrates: the bottom layer houses very thin, vertical, metal strips called sensing lines that detect electrical current at intersections (“nodes”) with the horizontal lines of the top layer, called driving lines. The driving lines carry current whenever the screen is on so that any interaction with the fingertip or stylus can be registered. This symbiotic relationship of the two layers is called mutual capacitance.

    Because living creatures have capacitance (we can store / conduct electricity), when you touch the screen, you are lowering the amount of charge at specific junctures as a small amount of the charge from the driving lines (why its substrate is closer to you than the sensing lines), transfers to your finger. Electrical impulses are sent to the processor for further analysis once the raw data of your touch is collected based off of its coordinates on the grid and its affect on the circuitry.

    The processor uses several important pieces of software, built into the device’s memory, to analyze your electrical impulses. It needs to know the size, shape, and duration of your touch; movement (for gestures), placement, context (what application are you trying to use), and it needs to know whether there are one or multiple simultaneous touches. Apple has engineered the software to recognize a relatively limited set of possibilities so that if the software receives raw data that is unknown, it will not acknowledge the signal as a touch.

    As with all modern day computations, the aforementioned sequence of events happens in nanoseconds, giving you the impression that you’re executing commands in real time with your finger. If you feel like your screen is not responding the way it should across all applications, there is likely an electrical fault that requires a replacement.

    These incidents, however, seem few and far between due to technological advancement (manufacturing techniques) and that the LCD/digitizer/glass is all crammed into one thin component. You may notice that cracked glass rarely renders the digitizer useless because you’ve only damaged one of the several layers comprising the display. You should seek to get it fixed regardless so that there is no breach in the system and so you don’t hurt yourself!

  • Greetings Again!

    I hope you enjoy another week of Tech Tails and learn a little something. We have some very interesting articles for you this week. I am one of the technicians in the Manchester, NH store, and one thing I always seem to notice is how little people backup their data. Unfortunately, since most people have SATA hard drives rather than solid state drives, many will experience hard drive failure at some point in their computer lives.

    There are the obvious ways, such as a clicking sound, but there are other signs as well. Frequent freezing and/or a flashing folder-slash-“blue screen of death” (for Windows users) are some. If you begin to find files that fail to open and are corrupted even though you may have saved them without errors, they could be indicating another form of hard drive failure.

    Of course, various other symptoms can seemingly be unrelated to hard drive failure at first, so you should automatically be making a backup of your data (just in case).

    We’re here to help diagnose the problem if you see or hear any of these signs. If you are not currently backing up your data, we have solutions and ways to teach you and get you up and running. With so much based on computer processes, it’s never been a more important time.

    Have a great week everyone!

    Barry
    “*barry@smalldog.com*”:mailto:barry@smalldog.com