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  • Almost all of the nearly 400 restaurants here in Key West will deliver their food. But for some reason, Grace and I do not take advantage of this service. I know that my employees here will have cups of coffee delivered as well as lunch but I must have lived in the boonies too long to feel okay about that.

    Our citrus tree got trashed by Irma so we planted another this week. We are determined to grow tropical fruit in our yard or I may have to move back to the frozen northland. We currently have mango, lemon, lime, pineapple, banana, orange, and grapefruit but no food! Well, it did take me about 25 years to finally grow apples in Vermont so I will just have to be patient.

    This next week has the lighted bicycle and lighted boat parades which are part of the Key West holiday celebration. Grace keeps trying to spell something out with some lights on our fence but I guess we need some new lights.

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

    Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,
    Don & Emily

  • Siri Tip!

    It has taken several years, but it has happened! I am a HUGE fan of Siri. Why now you ask? In short, it’s the progress in how this technology works and increased cellular, wifi coverage and software updates. When Apple first introduced Siri way back in 2011 with iPhone 4s the results were mixed, I honestly adjusted and accepted that it just didn’t work the way I wanted it to. Fast forward to iPhone 7 (and now on my iPhone X) and I useI’ Siri all the time. The voice recognition, the search features, the ability to correctly recognize words has come a long way. The other day I asked Siri to locate a pizza shop near me and without ever taking my hands off the steering wheel or eyes off the road I had ordered pizza for the family.

    Here is a little something I’ve learned since I started to use Siri once again. If you ask Siri to search the Web, you often get multiple results back from Google (not Bing anymore!). Tap one and it opens in Safari. But what if that page doesn’t contain the information you want? How do you get back to Siri’s results? The easy way is to tap the little Siri button that appears in the top-left of the screen. Or activate Siri again, but instead of speaking, swipe down on the screen until “What can I help you with?” disappears and your recent Siri queries appear with your last search results in view.

  • Strong Women, Proud Women

    Start Soapbox

    After hearing Geraldo Rivera say that the recent “perv of the day” revelations is ?? criminalizing courtship ??, I could not remain silent anymore. He clearly does not get it and to be honest I don’t think I can truly understand what it means to be sexually harassed without being a woman any more than I can truly understand racism without being black.

    It is ironic that we have a President who admitted to sexual assault while there is a groundswell of courage from women all over the USA and other places in the world that are saying “ENOUGH!” This is not about sexual innuendo, friendly banter or certainly not about courtship. What it is about is unwanted assault, the blatant misuse of power and the inalienable right of women to be fully equal members of our community.

    When men (or in rarer cases, women) use their position of power as a business person, a personality, a boss or just someone that intimidates to touch, grope and assault it is simply a crime. It is worse when it is this sort of power play where the victim is put into a position of fending off unwanted advances from someone that has some power over them in terms of career, etc.

    It really doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know the difference between a welcoming hug or a comforting touch and a grope, grab or an assault. This is not the end of a sexually diverse workplace nor is it the end of men and women being friends in the workplace. It must be the end of those one-sided encounters where strength and power lead to humiliation and discomfort.

    I do not think we can effectively criticize cultures where women are treated much more severely if we do not show the way to how men and women should be treated with equality and respect. We need to be the example, and like in so many areas, our leaders are failing. It is those so-called leaders that have misused the trust of those they lead.

    I listened to Donald Trump talk about assaulting women on the Access Hollywood tape. He described it as “locker room talk” but I have been in many locker rooms and that would not be acceptable. And I don’t care if it is his “playpen” talk, it is wrong and he should be held accountable just as each of the men accused recently have been. He needs to resign and get some serious counseling before he blows us all up.

    I have always been around strong women, starting with my mom who would have been very angry about this but also my wife, my daughters and all of my employees have a strong sense of self-worth. Feminists? I sure hope so! Women gained the vote less than 100 years ago, women in Saudi Arabia have just been allowed to drive. That is not progress, this is a travesty, women deserve equality in every way, in every land, right now.

    End Soapbox

  • Dear Friends,

    I spent some time this weekend up on my roof, repairing the damage to my solar water heating system caused by Irma. I sure don’t have the stamina that I had as a youth, but I managed to get it done and even got Grace to climb the ladder and help me.

    Black Friday has changed. It was named Black Friday because it was the day that retailers after losing money all year, finally crossed over into the profitable black. Now, it is a race to see who can open earliest, draw the most crowds and have the lowest prices. We do not stay open late and certainly, would never open on Thanksgiving but this year we came up with some great deals and we had a stronger sales day than last year.

    I have been having a series of Mac glitches over the past weeks. First, my MacBook Pro failed and needed a new display and logic board, then when it came back from Apple the new logic board failed so back it went. Restoring from Time Machine was easy but somehow I got things all bolloxed up again and this restore didn’t go well and I am learning a lot about iCloud and iCloud Keychain as I work to make this functional again. The good thing is that I am using my iPad Pro more and realizing that my Mac is not essential to my digital existence.

    This week’s Kibbles & Bytes exclusive is an iOS bundle. I am bundling three Hammerhead products for you. The first two are 2-port USB chargers. One for your car and one for your home. Both will charge an iPhone and iPad simultaneously. We are bundling these two chargers with our latest product, a selfie stick in your choice of color. Normally, these would sell separately for $50.97 but this week for Kibbles & Bytes readers only you can get this bundle for only $35.99

  • Fuel, Energy, Charge, Power.

    When it comes to resources, alongside time it’s seriously the most important one to ensure dependability with. So why are we still so confused? From what I can piece together, when we discuss sustainability it gets tricky to rationalize many fuel sources over time, so we start to develop newer more efficient solutions to the consumption needs of our various infrastructures, tools, and modern comforts. And yet of course not all individuals or institutions can afford the most current technology, so we grandfather in old standards (think Coal, Crude Oil, even Nuclear power) to satisfy the demand of the (by contrast perhaps labeled such) Proletariat who continue to consume and consume and further deplete our precious and quickly dwindling natural resources. Some of us are spending our lives working to remove ourselves from the Grid and reduce our usage of non-renewable energies to an ideal of zero. However, the few of us pushing for more renewable off-grid life are of course so self-centered that we aren’t always as focused on how our renewable lives could be applied on a macro scale. I see large scale solar popping up around the world slowly but surely, that makes me happy to see but also worried that it’s mostly privatized and effectively recreates the grid just with a more renewable source but doesn’t resolve the issue of keeping people less dependent on one unified fuel source that is not managed on the homestead/extremely locally.

    Wind power was a big deal for a while but died out as an idea for individuals looking for a worthy investment given the lack of guaranteed power just like solar and the prohibitive cost of building a turbine in your backyard. That’s one reason wood fire has been an interesting option, considering we could fairly easily gather electricity from thermal sources and store that alongside our solar and hydro. Speaking of hydro-power there are some great options for hydroelectric generators from a number of big companies out there, and the setup could be much simpler than you’d think, to the point that one could use small nodes of micro-hydro generators for a single 10w device like a light or a fan or water pump or heating element, etc. and avoid the maintenance of a larger water wheel/turbine in a stream that’s hopefully close to your home. Remember, the truly ideal solution is to reduce electricity consumption and therefore it should not take fully configured Solar, Wind, Water and Heat power all together just to simply run your tech off as long as the tech you’re using is energy-efficient and setup with smart outlets/monitoring/scheduling through a home-automation linked system, just as you could monitor your battery usage and stock levels of food and fuel and thermal sensor data around the homestead, you could identify soil health of plants with the Parrot pot and tech of that type, automatically disable lights and other nonessential hardware automatically when not in use, the list goes on and is seemingly endless. Perhaps we are entering the age of self-sustainable bio-domes that are fully connected, where it’s intuitive to interact with all the hardware and software that is effectively seamless with the natural environment.

    My hope is that we will constantly grow and thrive through the exploration and study (and inevitable automation) of well-groomed permaculture, to the extent of using the inherent strengths of the wide range of environments we inhabit more than we ever imagined. You psyched for the future? It’s only what we make it, so let’s make it this awesome! Who’s with me?