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This cold weather looks like it will stick around for a bit. I’ve got some inside projects to attend to this weekend but will probably be feeding the wood stove and staying inside.
Thanks for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!
Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,
_Don, Kali & Stephanie_
Apple’s site says they aren’t shipping the highly anticipated new Mac Pro until February, but we have a limited supply in stock currently! So if you’ve been waiting to upgrade your old Mac Pro to the new sleek model, wait no longer. Get yours today!
All the gizmos, gadgets and devices we used today are packed tight full of amazing technologies, many of which have become extremely small. The A7 chip is smaller than a postage stamp, and it’s probably one of the bigger components in your device. The fingerprint scanner sensor on the iPhone is only 170 microns thick. But all these amazing technologies are totally subservient to the true unsung heroes of the mobile digital age: batteries. If your batteries are no good, all the CPU cores and RAM in the world won’t help you. That said, batteries have come a long way even if they don’t get as much press as a new CPU or touchscreen.
To start at the beginning, you’d have to look at probably the most popular, widely used battery of all time: the lead acid battery. Invented in the mid 1800s, we still use them for our cars, boats, battery backup systems and just about anything else that requires a tough, reliable and durable power source. They’ve even had their own share of improvements, from VRLA (Valve Regulated Lead Acid) designs that are sealed, to AGM (Absorbed Glass Mat) designs that don’t really contain any liquid electrolyte at all (it’s suspended in woven glass fibers). Despite being fairly toxic (lead, sulphuric acid, etc), they’re one of the biggest success stories in all of recycling. Upwards of 97% of the lead and other materials from lead acid batteries are recycled in the US. They truly are some of the most robust batteries too as anyone around here who’s started their car in the past few sub-zero days would attest to.
This all makes lead acid batteries sound pretty great, right up until the big ‘gotcha’ that you’re probably already thinking about: weight. If you wanted to run your iPad Air with a lead acid battery, it would be a battery that weighed about 8.5 pounds, and because there isn’t much flexibility in designing the shape of lead acid cells, it would probably be fairly bulky too. Another drawback with lead acid batteries is their life span. Even deep cycle batteries with thick lead plates shouldn’t be routinely discharged below 50% of their capacity. This means that to get the roughly 33 watt-hours the iPad Air requires, you’d need to use a lead acid battery with double that capacity, meaning even more weight.
Fortunately for us lovers of thin, light and robust technological gizmos like the iPad Air, we don’t need to rely on 150 year old battery technology. Check back next week when I’ll discuss the intermediate stages of battery development in the 20th century including nickel-based batteries.
When I started working here in Waitsfield, I knew I’d be spending about a total of an hour and a half in the car every day for my commute and sitting in front of a computer all day. Therefore, I was going to need ??all?? the music to keep me rocking while I worked. “*Spotify*”:https://www.spotify.com/us/ has been my favorite “*app*”:https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/spotify/id324684580?mt=8&uo=4&at=11lb7k&ct=Blog and music service for the past 2+ years. To me, to have access to millions of songs on demand is worth the $9.99 I pay every month.
However, there hasn’t been much competition for Spotify. Sure, there’s Pandora and iTunes Radio, but these are more like glorified radio stations. Enter “*Beats Music,*”:https://beatsmusic.com a new music streaming service that launched Tuesday. The Beats Music “*app*”:https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/beats-music/id781817640?mt=8&at=11lb7k&ct=blog allows you to stream music with your paid subscription of $9.95/month.
What makes this service stand out or compete with other on demand music services like Spotify? With a tagline like, “Music that’s always right for you. Just hit play.” we can only assume that Beats Music is trying to push the message that it’s “the first music service that understands you.” You’re able to tell Beats Music where you are, what you’re feeling, and who you’re with and they will find you the perfect stream of music based on all of this information. Beats has also taken the time to make sure that it has the best audio quality and will provide you with the best version of a popular song (versus a live or cover version).
From a design standpoint, I’m loving the interface. It’s clean and simple, yet a bit more sophisticated than Spotify. Looking at some of the screen shots that they feature on their website, it also looks like there are a few more options and screens: a but more in-depth.
The one downfall of Beats Music is the fact that there isn’t a free version. If you want it, you have to shell out the $9.95/month. However, it is priced the same as Spotify, so it will be interesting to see how it does. If you have an AT&T contract, you can also add a family plan for $14.99/month and have up to five accounts with Beats Music.
If any readers out there have been using Beats Music, “*I’d love to hear your thoughts!*”:mailto:steph@smalldog.com Is it worth the switch?
To those who have read Kibbles over the years (and listen to “*Small Dog Speaks*”:http://www.smalldog.com/sdspeaks-archive), it’s no secret that I seem to have some bad luck when it comes to computer issues. I generally feel like I have good luck in life, so I’ll take some bad mojo when it comes to tech stuff just to balance it out.
My most recent hiccup had to do with my Notes app. I sync my notes between my iPhone and two computers, and I had recently traded in my semi-broken iPhone 5 for a working version of the same model. In the iTunes backup/restoring process to the new phone, some of my iCloud settings had changed, and I found that my Notes weren’t on my phone AND ended up missing from my work MacBook Pro. (I actually found that they were missing from the MBP the day after I activated my new phone, which means that by the time they synced, all notes on my MBP had been wiped out.)
So, what to do? Enter Time Machine. As someone who perhaps experiences computer problems more than the average human, backups are not only my friend, but my BFF and sole reason I don’t go __completely__ crazy. I wanted to just restore my Notes data, so I entered the Time Machine interface to find my last backup to restore. However, since I only wanted to back up a couple files, I had to locate what I needed.
Here’s where you find Notes data: *[User] > Library > Containers > com.apple.Notes (folder)
Note (ahh, the puns!) that you’ll want to restore all the files in this folder. I originally only restored the Container.plist, and it won’t bring back what you need. It stands to reason that you’d want to restore the Data folder, too, to actually get your data back…
Once I grabbed both files/folders, I regained all the notes I had, and I made sure that they were being synced in iCloud from that point forward. Now, they sync with no problem.
_Dear Friends,_
We are back in the deep freeze here in Vermont with temperatures well below zero. My water supply is a spring is shared with my neighbor, and while the water is really great, our system is a little complicated in that it has a pump pushing water into an underground 750-gallon tank. Whenever it gets below zero for a few days, the feeder pipe in the spring box freezes and once the 750-gallon tank is empty, we have to thaw out the pipe.
This system is better than the original (which was a gravity feed system), but it needs to be frequently primed by my climbing into the underground 750 gallon tank and shooting water back to the spring — a major production when it is snowy and below zero. My neighbor has it down now, though; when the pipe freezes, he pulls the pipe and the sump pump from the spring box and takes it up to his hot tub to thaw it out and then puts it back. Still a pain, but I guess that’s the price we pay for awesome spring water!
My high-technology car also does not like the cold. I have an Infiniti Q50 hybrid that has what is called Direct Adaptive Steering. The steering wheel is not actually mechanically attached to the wheels, and all is done electronically, allowing various steering modes, i.e. sport, eco, snow, etc. Apparently, this system, which they claim was 10 years in development, was not tested in very cold weather, because it fails by causing the steering to lock up.
I was going to my weekly radio show and stopped at the grocery store on the way, and when I came out and started the car, there was basically no steering and a bunch of idiot lights were on. It steered like a big truck and I nursed it to the radio station and found a parking spot that did not require parallel parking. Fortunately, the condition cleared itself by the time I got out of the show, but Infiniti towed the car later and are replacing the modules and updating the software. Moral of the story? Well, if you are a pioneer with technology, you can expect some hiccups. And hopefully, not as serious as losing steering in an automobile!
I am pleased to announce that long-time Small Dogger Rob Amon has been promoted to VP of Sales for the company and will be taking on top-line responsibility for all of our sales efforts. Also, Emily Dolloff, who is our Executive Assistant, has been promoted to Director of Retail and Service operations. Both Rob and Emily have worked their way through the ranks at Small Dog Electronics. In fact, both started out in the shipping department and have sought increasing responsibility over the years. I could not be prouder of them for stepping up to take on these new roles.
Apple will release its 1st Quarter (holiday quarter) financials on Monday, and already analysts are jockeying to predict just how many millions of iPhones and iPads the company sold. We know it was a good quarter for the company as our December was our best yet and we could hardly keep iPads and MacBook Pros in stock! One of these days, Apple will get the respect it deserves in the market as the company continues to exceed expectations, produce game-changing products and be a financial success.
High Dynamic Range (or “HDR”) brings a little professional technique to your iOS 7 photos by taking three exposures with one snap: normal,…
Last week, I wrote about the various ways to watch and engage in the 2014 Olympic coverage. However, after receiving a few emails…
High Dynamic Range (or “HDR”) brings a little professional technique to your iOS 7 photos by taking three exposures with one snap: normal, over, and under. The software then combines these three captures into one optimized photo.
In my experience, HDR-optimized photos in iOS 7 take up an average of .8 megabytes more than their normal counterparts. This doesn’t matter for most of us, though if you have a 16GB device and are trigger-happy with the camera, your space will diminish quicker.
You may turn this feature on and off within the camera app by simply tapping “*HDD On/Off*” at the top of the screen. You may also choose (*in Settings > Photos & Camera*) to keep the “normal photo” for every HDR shot you take, effectively having a black sheep twin photo to all your pretty optimized ones.
Some users have complained of their devices “defaulting” to HDR being off upon closing the app and re-opening it sometime later. I’ve discovered that making sure the aforementioned “*keep normal photo*” feature is off in your settings will keep the HDR setting exactly as you left it (either on or off) next time you open your app.
Give it a shot sometime (sorry for the standard issue pun) and compare the enhanced photo to a normal one to see the difference yourself. Any little thing helps with phone cameras!
Like many things in iOS development (and all software development really), there’s the right way to do something, and then there are dozens of articles and forum posts describing various wrong ways to do it.
One I ran into recently was application-wide constants. The top voted answers on stack overflow seemed to be a bit odd looking to me. They usually advocated using some kind of @#define@ to create constants. Further digging revealed what appears to be the safer, more robust and better way to do constants.
To preface this, I’ll say that this is useful for application-wide constants only. If you have a single class with constants, this probably won’t help other than to demonstrate the syntax for constants. This method is definitely the easiest and fastest way to get your constants created and accessible everywhere in your app.
First, you’ll need to create a *AppConstants.h* file and its corresponding *AppConstants.m* file. Next, in the interface, you should add an @extern
Now if you try to start using this constant in your classes, you’ll quickly find it doesn’t work. We need to let the application know about our AppConstants class. The best way to do this is to import it in the prefix header. This file is automatically generated for you and should be found in the supporting files folder. It will have a suffix of *Prefix.pch*. In that file, inside the @#ifdef __OBJC__@, simply #import your *AppConstants.h* file.
You may need to clean the build before Xcode notices the new constant, but after that, you are able to use that constant anywhere in your application.
One of the advantages of this method over something like @#define@ and other methods is that you can actually compare your NSString constant to a string literal directly using == (good job compiler!). This will obviously be much faster than @:isEqualToString@. Xcode will warn about this, and I would personally try to avoid it, but it does work.
As almost always, spending the time looking something up and understanding before using it helps to create a better and more robust product.
A small amount of customers have been complaining about some strange behavior coming from their LED cinema displays recently. This issue coincided with upgrading the Mac being used with the display to OS X 10.9. When the display is connected, both the Mac and the display output flickering video, sometimes coupled with noisy images and graphic distortion.
We recently had one of these problematic displays come into our shop, only to realize that the issue was quite a bit simpler of a fix than we had thought. Not knowing at this point that the issue coincided with upgrading to Mavericks, we immediately assumed hardware when the issue was easily replicated on an in-house test machine.
We’ve learned over the years that with an odd issue like this, it’s always best to check around on some Apple blogs and forums for other user experiences and maybe even a solution. We were successful in finding a very simple solution for this issue, which was a SMC reset of the computer. This is a very user-friendly hardware reset performed by holding a group of keys down.
An SMC reset can also resolve certain power issues (like no power at all). To perform an SMC reset on a *portable* Mac, observe the following steps:
# Turn off the machine and unplug all peripherals except the power adapter
# Hold down *Control + Option + Shift + the power button* simultaneously for a few seconds and release
That’s it — you’re done! On a *desktop,* the reset is even easier:
# Unplug your machine for 10 seconds
# Plug it back in, wait five seconds, and power it back on
“*Learn more about SMC resets.*”:http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3964
As I write this, I find myself trying to work through what looks to be the flu. I’ve had a couple of days to recoup, and I’ve been drinking Emergen-C vitamin drink supplement, which seems to be helping (though a bit gross to me). It has been a rough couple of days, but I’m back to the point where I’m able to come to work and help our customers in the Service department without scaring too many…
This made me think about the other kind of viruses…and the lack of them you find as a Mac user. Now, the myth that Macs “don’t get viruses” is far from true, but it is accurate to say that Apple devices and computers are at a far lesser risk.
* Newer Macintosh operating systems, such as Mac OS X, are built on the Unix kernel, which is one of the oldest and most secure operating systems available.
* Microsoft Windows is used by a lot more people still than the Apple Mac OS. Because of the fact that more people use Microsoft Windows, it is a much better and more common sense target and makes it easier for viruses to spread.
* Most of the computer writers that make these viruses are much more familiar with the IBM platform and Microsoft Windows, which means it’s easier for them create a virus for that platform.
* Many of the tools, scripts, and code used to create viruses or other malware are designed for Microsoft Windows.
* Apple not only makes its own software and OS, but it carefully selects which hardware goes into the computer and that is universal throughout its model.
So while we are still pretty far from worrying about viruses in our MacBooks and iMacs, more use means eventually, more risk. However, I am certainly not worried about it now; we’ll keep you posted, as always, if threats evolve!
Thanks for reading, and enjoy Tech Tails!
Barry
“*barry@smalldog.com*”:mailto:barry@smalldog.com