Kibbles & Bytes Blog

Apple news, tech tips, and more…

KB Dog

  • Dear Friends,

    After a week of very hot and humid weather we are back to typical Vermont summer weather with sunny days and cool nights which makes sleeping a lot easier! Jezebel is already after the dropped green apples but I am trying to keep her away from those tiny apples. Her Native American name is Apple-eater, stain-maker because she loves to eat apples.

    Apple surprised me by releasing new MacBook Pros this week. Unusual to see new product introductions in July but my guess is that Apple’s pipeline is so full that they are going to stagger a complete line refresh over the next few months. I’ll review the new MacBook Pro line-up below.

    This week’s Kibbles & Bytes exclusive is a $25 savings on Apple HomePod! This could be the only smart speaker that you need. I have one in my kitchen and we use it for everything from asking Siri about the Cubs scores or the weather to playing our favorite rock and roll! It has amazing sound and has the added benefit as serving as the hub for our HomeKit home automation products. This week only in white or space gray the Apple HomePod is $324.99!

  • A quick photo tip

    If you’ve ever photographed a sheet of paper or some other rectangular object, the image may have come out skewed because you inadvertently tilted the camera. The iOS 11 Camera app has a level feature to help you avoid this problem, but it’s so subtle that you may not have noticed it.

    To use it, first go to Settings > Camera and turn on the Grid switch. Thin white lines will appear that divide the viewfinder image into a grid of nine rectangles. Then, to access the level, hold the iPhone or iPad flat, so the camera points straight down toward the floor (or straight up toward the sky, if you’re photographing a ceiling). Notice that two crosshairs appear in the middle of the viewfinder, a yellow one that marks the position where the camera will be level and a white one that shows the camera’s current angle. Tilt the camera until the crosshairs merge into a single yellow image, and tap the Shutter button.

  • Terminal Tidbit

    Track your OSi Layer 3 Packets with trace route command. Ever wonder where your internet data goes before it hits it’s destination?

    Well you can find out with the “traceroute” command.

    Let’s say for the sake of this Tech Tails we want to see all the router stops along the way to Google.com. Well, the most basic way is to open the terminal app and type

    traceroute google.com

    And the results you will see are a list of the DNS entry, outside IP address, and time between each hop along the way to the destination server.

    Great info is that if you have a “network black hole”, there are just missing packets of data.

  • Don't forget to update

    We have all seen that persistent little message while using are devices. “An update is available, would you like to install it now?”. We are bombarded with these messages in what seems to be the worst possible times. And what do most of us do? We choose to install later but never end up getting around to actually installing that update.

    Why should we?

    We have all heard the rumors that Apple’s updates make our devices slower. Well, sorry to break it to all you naysayers but the truth of the matter is that updates are actually made to improve on our experiences. There are a lot of talented engineers working around the clock to produce that update. Updates fix bugs and add new features. The problem that exists is that most of us wait to install that update until we don’t have any other choice, devices get so out of date that they lose normal functionality such as navigating the web safely. When we finally run that update so much as been changed and improved on that we respond by thinking the update has broken our devices. However, if we all just update as soon as updates are available the changes we would see on our devices would not be as drastic because we would experience the incremental changes that are affecting our devices software through each update. In other words, higher frequency in which we update our devices the less dramatic the changes we would notice.

    So next time you see that little message pop up on your screen, don’t panic. It is there to help you improve your user experience and to make your device operate correctly in the long run.