Kibbles & Bytes Blog

  • Dear Friends,

    It is hard to believe we are already in February. My gardens down here are really flourishing now that the nutrient-sucking Ficus tree is gone. We have tomatoes, cilantro, basil, hot peppers and lemons all coming in and the farmer’s markets seem to have more and better produce.

    I miss Vermont but not that much when I get a call from the heating oil company saying they can’t get up my driveway because it is a sheet of ice! We did get the driveway sanded and the truck was able to make it up to deliver the fuel. I also asked Hapy to go over and change the batteries in my Arlo cameras, which he did. My cameras allow me to always enjoy winter from here!

    We now have an iMac Pro on display at our S. Burlington store. Come on it and check out the fastest Mac ever!

    News manipulation is nothing new but the blatant propaganda we are all learning about is really the tip of the iceberg. Stock manipulators have been messing with the news for some time, leaking tidbits of unverified news that might influence the price of a stock. With Apple, this week it came with a highly unreliable report of production cuts on the iPhone which got picked up and amplified just before Apple released its financials. Suspicious? Yeah. Meanwhile, Apple sold over 22 million iPhones in the 1st quarter, has a 44% market share and just posted the most sales and profits of any quarter ever! Those are facts, folks.

    This week’s Kibbles & Bytes Exclusive features the configure-to-order MacBook Pro 13-inch non-TouchBar unit. It has a 2.4 GHz i7 processor, 16GB ram and a 256GB SSD drive. It is silver in color. It is a demo model with a 1-year Apple Warranty and we are bundling it with AppleCare+ to extend the warranty to three years. This includes accidental damage coverage (with deductible). This week only for Kibbles & Bytes readers the bundle is only $2079.99!

  • Terminal Tidbits

    Most Mac users know if they want to know what’s “under the hood” of their Mac, they could boot into the OS, click…

  • Motorcycle mechanics, yard work, crafts fair, Academy Awards movies and a party are all on tap this weekend down here in Key West. I am going to build a foundation for the garden shed we are replacing and we have to hit our favorite garden center up in Big Pine for some plants to grow on our newly installed trellis.

    I wish I had a HomePod but I guess I have to wait until Apple decides that their partners are worthy of selling this new product. I understand that Apple has its own outlets and that those guys with the blue shirts are a big customer, but I would expect a little more loyalty to the channel that stuck with Apple during the darkest hours and are the most adamant evangelists for the brand. But then again, the older I get the more patient I become (isn’t that sorta backwards?) and I know it won’t be long before HomePod is on our shelves.

    Thank you so much for being loyal customers of Small Dog Electronics and for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

    Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

    Don & Emily

  • HomePod

    Move over Echo and Google Home, HomePod is officially available today for pre-order from Apple, and, in the coming weeks, we hope to be able to offer it as well. In the meantime, let’s take a closer look at HomePod. HomePod is a music system, a note taker, a translator, a timer and the hub of your home with its HomeKit controls. Unlike some of the other smart speakers on the market, Apple is focusing on Music with this new product. The HomePod acts like just about every other smart speaker, but what makes it a step above the rest is in the sound quality.

    HomePod is just under 7 inches tall and features a seven-tweeter beamforming array which allows better control of the sound and produces a more room-filling sound. It also has a large woofer for deep, clean bass. HomePod can adjust the sound accordingly, be it sitting on a shelf or sitting on a table. It can also adapt to the acoustics of the room giving you the best sound quality possible based on the environment the HomePod is in. You will also be able to add multiple HomePods to a room for stereo effect.

    HomePod is smarter than regular speakers with its A8 chip, which provides it with processing power equivalent to an iPhone 6. Software running on the HomePod gives it spatial awareness, so it can sense it’s surroundings and adjust the audio quality automatically for the best listening experience. You can use Siri to easily set timers to remind you it’s time to flip your burgers, and its six microphones ensure it doesn’t miss a request. You can ask Siri to read you the news, let you know the weather forecast and even transfer a phone call to the HomePod. Not to worry, if you prefer the comfort of buttons, HomePod has basic buttons and you can either single, double or triple tap to get it to play/pause, skip tracks and more. In software updates scheduled for later this year, you’ll be able to control multiple HomePods in different rooms as well as the feature of stereo mode when you have more than one in a room.

    But wait, what about controlling your lights? HomePod aims to put your Google Home and Echo into retirement, so, of course, it can do that! Hopefully, you made sure all your smart home devices were compatible with both HomeKit and your smart speaker. Your HomePod will control your devices the same way you’re controlling them through AppleTV and Siri with one exception. Now you can put down the remote, and just say “hey Siri” without worry of needing your phone nearby or what to do if your Apple Watch is still on its charger.

    I am eagerly awaiting the side by side comparison between my Echo and my new HomePod!

  • Going Dutch with Apple Pay Cash

    Let’s say you are out to lunch with some millenial friends, one of whom picks up the check and says, “Just send me your share via Apple Pay Cash.” Say what?

    Apple Pay Cash is Apple’s new person-to-person payment service, designed to make it easy for individuals to send and receive money. It’s perfect for repaying a friend who buys concert tickets or a relative who picks up some groceries for you. Or rather, it’s perfect if your friends and relatives use iPhones with iOS 11.2 or later—for green-bubble Android acquaintances, you can rely instead on cross-platform services like Venmo, Circle, and Square Cash. I’ve been sending money to my granddaughter at BU with Apple Pay Cash instead of Venmo and it works great..

    Here’s how to start using Apple Pay Cash:

    First, if you haven’t yet enabled Apple Pay, go to Settings > Wallet & Apple Pay > Add Credit or Debit Card, and follow the prompts to add at least a debit card. You will also need two-factor authentication turned on in Settings > Your Name > Password & Security—regardless of Apple Pay, two-factor authentication is essential for security. With Apple Pay enabled, tap Settings > Wallet & Apple Pay > Apple Pay Cash and run through the setup process. You might also be asked to verify your identity after setup—it just might be necessary to send or receive more than $500 in total for that really fancy meal you are having.

    When you’re done, you’ll end up with a new Apple Pay Cash card in the Wallet app. It’s a virtual card that stores money you receive and works like any other debit card for payments. If it doesn’t have enough money on it to cover a payment, you can choose any other debit or credit card you’ve added to Apple Pay. You can also add money to it or withdraw money to a linked bank account. You’ll want to use a debit card when adding money or paying beyond your balance with Apple Pay Cash, since then there is no transaction fee. A credit card incurs a 3% fee.

    To send or request money via Apple Pay Cash, you use Messages. While in an iMessage thread (blue bubbles) with the person with whom you want to exchange money, make sure the app drawer is showing (tap the app button if necessary) and then tap the Apple Pay button in the drawer.

    A panel appears with a dollar amount, + and – buttons, and buttons for Request and Pay. Use the + and – buttons to set the amount, or tap the dollar amount to show a keypad where you can enter an exact amount, with cents if necessary. Then tap Request or Pay to insert the transaction into the message. It won’t be sent until you tap the black send button, so if you change your mind, you can tap the little x to delete. Lastly, you’ll be prompted to verify the transaction in the usual Apple Pay fashion, which means authenticating with Face ID on the iPhone X or Touch ID on all other iPhones.

    You can even use Siri to initiate transfers—“Send my mother $15.” or “Ask my sister for $4.99.” And if you have an Apple Watch with watchOS 4.2 or later, you can also send money from the Messages app, or send or request money via Siri. On the watch, double-press the side button to confirm the transaction.

    The recipient can store their money on their Apple Pay Cash card and use that to pay for stuff or transfer right into their bank account. I discovered when sending money to Khadija, that it takes 3-4 days for the money to be successfully transferred to the bank account so if you need immediate cash that might not be the best way.

    Frankly, the only downside to Apple Pay Cash is that it works only within the Apple world. But as long as you want to exchange money with Apple-using friends and relatives, it’s fast, easy, reliable, and one less reason to visit the ATM.

  • Dear Friends,

    Apple’s long awaited HomePod got its release date this week and it looks like supplies will be limited. Apple is not releasing them to their independent resellers just yet but we will certainly let you know when we have them for sale. I look forward to checking out Apple’s entry into this smart speaker market. Check out Emily’s report below.

    I was disappointed to learn about the misguided action to slap a huge tariff on solar panels. A 30% tariff means that the cost of solar electricity just went up substantially. That is very shortsighted as there has been some real progress with the installation of solar renewable energy for electricity. This installed capacity is an insurance policy for the future. We installed a large array at our headquarters about 7 years ago and it has provided most of the electricity that we use at our facilities in Vermont. We have severely limited our carbon footprint by installing this array. There is no way we could have afforded to do that if the prices were 30% higher. This is a mistake that undermines the world’s efforts to combat climate change.

    The big strangler fig tree in our yard that got damaged by Irma is gone. It was quite the project that culminated with the big stump grinder that turned it into mulch. I think that tree was sucking all the nutrients from our yard and everything seems to be growing much faster now. We even have some lemons on our tree!

    This week’s Kibbles & Bytes exclusive takes off on the HomePod home automation features. Did you know the the HomePod can replace your Apple TV or iPad as your HomeKit hub? This week’s exclusive is a home automation starter kit. This kit includes a Philips Hue starter kit, an August lock and a Honeywell Lyric thermostat. Each of these items is HomeKit compatible and can be the start of your smart home! Normally this bundle sells for $449.97 but for our Kibbles & Bytes readers it’s only $389.99

  • Funkify Your Format!

    We’re taking a little break from Cryptocurrency in this edition of Tech Tails. But fear not, fellow investors! We’ll get back to it next edition.

    Lately, I’ve been fielding a lot of customer questions regarding APFS, Apple’s latest file system format so let’s talk about format types.

    APFS is the latest file system format Apple released this past year. When you install macOS High Sierra on the Mac volume of a solid-state- drive, that volume is automatically converted to APFS. Fusion Drives, traditional hard disk drives (HDD’s), and non-Mac volumes are not converted. APFS carries a huge advantage as the format type can replace all of the existing file systems Apple currently uses across its platforms. APFS is suitable for macOS, iOS, tvOS and even watchOS.

    Mac OS Extended (Journaled) is the default file system format for Mac OS drives. Formatting a drive with this will give you full interoperability with Macs. You can even set up a macOS startup drive if you have the right files, the know-how, and a large enough drive. The downside to this format is the compatibility between Mac and PC. A drive formatted as Mac OS Extended can be read by a PC, but the user will be unable to write data onto the drive. If you’re transferring files from Mac to PC this won’t be an issue, but going from PC to Mac in this format won’t work.

    MS-DOS (FAT) is Disk Utility’s name for the FAT32 file system. FAT32 offers near-universal interoperability with every computing system. A drive formatted this way can easily transfer files between Mac and PC. The drawback to this format is FAT32 does not support files larger than 4 GB.

    ExFAT essentially carries the advantages of FAT32, and bolsters this by supporting files larger than 4 GB. If transferring large files between Mac and PC, this format is for you.

  • Terminal Tidbits

    Most Mac users know if they want to know what’s “under the hood” of their Mac, they could boot into the OS, click on the Apple logo, and click “about this Mac”.

    But, did you know you could go into Terminal, and type in “hostinfo” and hit enter?

    The command host is usually used for DNS lookup and info but you can use it to find out which kernel version you’re running, how many processors you have, the amount of physical memory and the number of Mach tasks. Mach tasks are a variant of the load average, number of threads using.

    The syntax looks like this
    hostinfo

    That’s it, there are no further options as it is a simple command. We Techs use it a lot when performing RAM upgrades and when we don’t want to wait for the Mac to boot all the way into the MacOS to see if the RAM modules are recognized.

    Shut down the Mac completely, and wait a couple seconds. Then, hold down the Command and S keys simultaneously while pressing the power button to start up the Mac. You’ll hear the chime, and then a black screen will appear. Shortly thereafter, a bunch of scary white text will show up. This is single-user mode.

    Here you simply type “hostinfo” and you’ll see something like this:

    Mach kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 16.7.0: Thu Jun 15 17:36:27 PDT 2017; 
root:xnu-3789.70.16~2/RELEASE_X86_64
Kernel configured for up to 8 processors.
4 processors are physically available.
8 processors are logically available.
Processor type: x86_64h (Intel x86-64h Haswell)
Processors active: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Primary memory available: 128.00 gigabytes
Default processor set: 377 tasks, 2201 threads, 8 processors
Load average: 1.95, Mach factor: 6.04

    This outlines the following information about your machine:

    • Mach kernel version: basically the version of the version of Darwin or the open-source Unix that your OSX is based on.
    • How many actual processor cores you have, in this case we see 4 processor cores as it’s an Intel i7 processor. In this chip, each core can run 2 threads so we get…
    • 8 processors logically available – 4×2=8
    • The identifier of the actual main processor chip you have installed.
    • An enumeration of each processor that’s active and available 0 through 7
    • The amount of RAM available in your machine
    • What your processor is busy doing at that moment in terms of tasks and threads
    • Load average, or how busy your machine has been over the last minute. Higher numbers mean more activity.
    • Mach factor, which is a variant of the load, but divided by the number of logical processors. The closer to 0, the more load the processor is experiencing. So in my example, an 8-core processor doing nothing should show pretty close to 8, whereas if it was running full speed rendering video or something, you’d see a much lower number.

    When you’re finished exploring this info, simply restart you computer by typing:

    reboot

    This info is the tip of the iceberg of the information you can coax out of your machine from the command line but it’s a good way to get your feet wet to explore what’s possible.

  • Projects, projects and more projects. Grace and I have loaded up on projects for the next couple of weeks. We have some repair to her BMW motorcycle that I will be doing this weekend. We are planning a road trip to New Orleans in a couple months so I want to be sure that bike is in tip-top shape.

    We got rid of our garden shed that was damaged by the big Ficus tree in our yard. Several huge limbs from that tree came down during Hurricane Irma, and we also discovered that it was damaging our neighbor’s house, so we took the tree down. Our next project is to work on getting rid of the huge roots sucking up every bit of nutrients from our yard. We are planting some Confederate Jasmine to cover the fence, but of course that means another project, painting and hanging some trellis. And then there is the new garden shed which the manufacturer says will take two people at least two days to assemble. I liked erector sets as a youth so I am looking forward to this one.

    So it looks like no rest for the wicked with all these projects!

    It has been chilly down here in the Keys, it did not make it to 60 today. I have become acclimated to this climate because if it was 60 and sunny in Vermont in January I would be wearing sandals and shorts, but here in Key West I am bundling up in my Vermont winter gear.

    Thank you so much for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

    Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

    Don & Emily

  • Photos Editing

    The latest generation of iPhones have incredible photo capabilities and the quality of the pictures is pretty amazing. Thanks to improvements with the…

  • 7 Tips for Apple TV

    I have found that I am paying for Cable TV and that I use it less than 20% of the time. This may have to change in the near future! Most of the time when I am watching TV, I am using my Apple TV. Because my Apple TV also acts as my Apple Homekit hub, it must be on all the time so that when I’m away, I can adjust the thermostat or unlock the doors. Or I can play practical jokes on Grace by randomly turning on or off lights (she really does not like that!).

    Here are seven handy tips that you might find useful for your Apple TV.

    Force a Reboot

    The other day for some strange reason my Apple TV froze. I was too lazy to get out of my chair and go unplug it to reboot it but remembered that I could force a reboot by simultaneously pressing the Home and Menu buttons on the remote. If you need to do this, the light on the front of the Apple TV will start blinking rapidly. Let go of the buttons and it will reboot.

    HomeKit Control

    Apple TV will configure itself as a HomeKit hub and, as long as you set your Apple TV not to turn itself off, you can control your Apple HomeKit devices remotely. You can also control your HomeKit devices using the Apple TV’s Siri remote. Just say, “Siri lock the front door”, or if you are like me and have set up more automation, you can even be more complex. When I say “Hey Siri, good night” all the lights in my house will turn off (except in the bedroom and the TV), the doors will lock and the thermostat will set to my set sleeping temperature.

    What Did He Just Say?

    Okay you could hit rewind on your DVR and go back to try to hear that important line in the movie but Apple TV goes one step further. This is the most useful command for the Apple TV. If you’re watching a movie and you didn’t understand what a character just said, you can hold the Siri button on the remote and ask, “What did he just say?” The video will rewind to a point before the last person started speaking and Closed Captioning will be temporarily turned on so you can not only hear it again, you can also read what they said. Pretty cool, eh?

    Mirror Mirror on the TV

    You may have this giant flat screen TV with the Apple TV and yet you look at web sites or pictures on that tiny MacBook screen. Whether it is shopping on Amazon or looking at the latest pictures from the grand kids, screen mirroring is very handy and very simple. You can mirror content from your iPhone, iPad or any Mac running the latest OS versions. Swipe up from the bottom of your iOS device to access Control Center and tap AirPlay, choose AirPlay under the display option on your OS X Menu bar or in the share icon. You’ll be asked to choose the correct Apple TV if you have more than one and once you’ve done so you’ll be able to mirror the action on your screen.

    You Have More Remote

    If you surf over to the App store and download the Apple Remote App you can control your Apple TV with your iPhone. If you have an Apple Watch you can control your Apple TV with your watch, too. You can even use your iPhone or Watch as another game controller when playing a multi-player game on Apple TV.

    Hey! I am Trying to Sleep

    Sleepless nights got you restless and you want to get up and watch Artificial Intelligence gone wild in the Terminator series? But you don’t want to disturb your partner? Apple TV makes it possible for you to listen to the volume up high for all that action by pairing a set of BlueTooth earbuds or earphones. If you are lucky enough to have AirPods you can just pair them and listen in comfort. You simply navigate to the Bluetooth settings – Settings > Remotes and Devices > Bluetooth and pair ‘em up.

    On Screen Keyboard Hell

    The on screen keyboard is not so much fun to use. But there are options! You can hold down the Siri button on your remote and dictate whole words or individual letters. That makes entering your very secure 27 character password much easier. Or if you have downloaded the Apple Remote App, you can use your iPad or iPhone keyboard making it even easier.

  • Meltdown and Spectre, lots of Intel

    If you pay any attention to technology news, you’ve probably already heard of the recently discovered Meltdown and Spectre exploits that are reported…