Kibbles & Bytes Blog

Apple news, tech tips, and more…

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  • The notorious “i” autocorrect in iOS 11.1

    If you’ve updated to the new version of iOS 11.1 with all 70+ fun new emoji and the triumphant return of the 3D touch multitasking feature along with other various bug fixes and battery life improvements, I’m sure you may have noticed a slightly LESS useful feature. A bug that replaces your “i” character with A and [?] character. It has caused a lot of frustration and confusion and I’m here to try and bring things back to normal for you!

    Up until today, Apple’s solution for the bug was to use it’s Text Replacement feature to create a workaround by following these steps:

    Open Settings. Navigate to General -> Keyboard Text Replacement.
    Tap the Add button in the toolbar.
    In the Phrase field, enter the uppercase ‘I’ character.
    In the Shortcut field, type the lowercase ‘i’ character.
    Add the text replacement.

    They were quick to offer that solution to the public but they were also working on a new update to fix the bug without having to use a workaround. Apple has now officially released iOS 11.1.1 for all iPhone and iPad users. The latest software update includes bug fixes and improvements including a fix for the notorious ‘i’ autocorrect bug that resulted in the A and [?] character appearing.

  • Hard Drives

    Hard Drives (Hard Disk Drive, HDD for short) is where all your stuff is stored, they’re a terribly boring subject that I’m very passionate about because they’re arguably the most important part of your computer. The hard drive on your computer is where all your stuff is stored, (now SSDs or Solid State Drives on newer computers) it’s where your files live, all that data that basically makes the computer yours. While the internal drive, (the storage mechanism that’s built into the computer) is becoming increasingly more blurred as the primary storage location as more stuff is moving to the cloud and online accounts, there’s still a lot of stuff that lives on the internal hard drive, and for most people it’s worth assuming that not everything is backed up to the cloud.

    We sell a lot of external hard drives at Small Dog for backup purposes and a frequent issue is them not being formatted correctly. There’s no such thing as a Mac HDD in terms of physical design or manufacturing, but there are different formats that will make any most any HDD or SSD compatible or incompatible on a Mac. For a great many years (at least a great many years in computer terms) HFS+ has been the file format to Macs, the latest release of macOS 10.13 High Sierra has changed over to the new APFS. Windows uses NTFS, a Microsoft brainchild. Because most computers in the world run Windows, most hard drive manufacturers format their HDDs as NTFS, these can be read on a Mac, but new information can’t be written to them, this means you can plug a drive you’ve been using on a windows machine into a Mac, and you can see all the stuff on it, but you can’t add anything new. A drive formatted as HSF+ or APFS can’t be read on a Windows machine without special drivers, and if you plug a drive you’ve been using on your Mac into a Windows machine, it won’t even show up as a location you can drag and drop files into.

  • Happy November, folks!

    Welcome to another edition of Tech Tails! This week in South Burlington, we’re prepping for the holiday rush by stocking up on popular items. Not surprisingly, I believe the Apple Watch is going to be a top seller in the gift category. Lately, I’ve been seeing parents in the store asking questions about the Watch with the intent of getting one for their teenager. These days, Apple Watch is leading the fitness tracking market, so I expect we’ll see them more and more in the high school demographic.

    Last week I wrote a bit about the DSLR market and today I want to talk about storage options for photo archives. Exciting stuff, I know! But after the cold set in last weekend, I found myself at home organizing digital files from the past couple of years and finding a logical place for everything. The truth is, a single hard drive cannot be relied on, you need redundancy. My suggestion to everyone is always, important files should always be in two places. Following that rule, I usually use an application called SuperDuper to clone my hard drives, any time changes have been made. This week I also started mapping my disk inventory using a mind mapping application called Mind Node. I never thought of this until now, but having a virtual layout of all your hard drives and what era they cover can be very helpful. If you asked me, “where are those engagement photos you shot for your friend Mike last year?” I’d open MindNode and search for his name, and it would give me the location of the folder containing his photos. This could become a very useful tool if I were to somehow lose a pair of hard drives so I would know exactly what was lost. On the general topic of organization, I do not claim to have the best method. In fact, I’m really hoping to hear from our customers this week. How do you archive files? Do you organize by year or subject? A customer once told me all of his photo archiving was done by the TYPE of photo it was (portrait, landscape, etc.) and subsequently sorted by year.

    On that note, I am due for another Seagate purchase. My archives are currently scattered across a handful of 1TB drives, and about once every two years I fill them up and retire the cloned pair. Naturally, I’ll always compare all of this to film, where I have a permanent hard copy in the form of negatives. This is one of the downsides of shooting digital. People take the seemingly unlimited shutter count for granted. You should make sure your photos are safely backed up somewhere, and prepare for the worst! Hopefully, these redundant backups are a waste of money, because your primary system never fails. Anyway, I’m going to get back to work here, enjoy our tech-y articles today!

    Patrick McCormack
    patrickm@smalldog.com

  • Joanne showed me her iPhone X and it just made me more anxious to get mine. Mine will not show up for another couple of weeks but Emily already got me a case for it. While I would love to carry it around without a case, I am just too clumsy and will certainly break it.

    While I shouldn’t do it, I do like basking in the warm weather down here and giving my co-workers in Vermont a lot of ooo’s and ah’s at their low-temperature reports. I should have sympathy, right? I am bad, I just remind them that it is 80 and sunny here. But I did pay my dues with 45 Vermont winters under my belt.

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

    Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

    Don, Emily, and Joanne

  • iPhone X

    On November 3rd I received my iPhone X! I was really anxious to start using it and I stayed up on October 27th until 4:30 a.m. to confirm that I ordered the phone. There were some technical difficulties when I first received and started using my new iPhone X. I have been using a Samsung phone for the past three years and since I had all of the other gadgets; iPad, iPod, MacBook, and Apple TV, it was time to finally switch back to the iPhone. I knew that if Apple took on the idea of Face ID that they had it all figured out; Samsung tried with the Samsung S5 and it was a fail. The only failure I’m experiencing is unlocking my phone at night. Being black and trying to access my phone at night has been a challenge!

    The home button has always been my way of waking my Samsung phone screen. I can now do a simple tap on the screen to wake up my phone. I am loving the all screen display and learning a few new gestures. The new gestures: swiping up and holding to switch between Apps are interesting and may take some time getting used to. I got stuck with a lot of background running applications the first few days. Because of the missing home button, I found out when I swipe up and hold I can then long press on one app to enable the red minus icon at the top left of my background running apps.  Despite my difficulties, this phone has been growing on me in the last few days. Anyone who knows me also knows that I’m a “selfie freak” and I must say, the new portrait mode filter is Amazing!

    I’m looking forward to learning more about my new iPhone X and returned to the Apple ecosystem completely. I know I still have a lot of things to learn about using this new phone after so many years away from iPhone. However, despite a few hurdles, I am thoroughly happy and impressed with my new phone.

  • Apple Stomps the Street

    I made a solemn pledge to my Kibbles & Bytes partner, Emily, that I would never make her write about Apple’s financial results….

  • Dear Friends, We are mostly settled back in Key West with mostly vegetative damage from Irma. As we were driving down to Key…

  • This weekend we will hopefully finish the last of our major projects before Winter. Over the last year or so we’ve slowly been converting a covered porch into as much of a four-season space as we can. Last summer we enclosed the space with energy efficient windows and insulated the underside of the decking. Saturday we will finish insulating the walls, install skirting under the porch so we can minimize drafts through the flooring and replace the generic storm door with an exterior door to seal out as much of the winter winds and weather as we can.

    The project has taken us longer than we anticipated, but then again, when we originally designed the porch almost 20 years ago we never anticipated we’d one day want to use the space in colder months.

    Thank you for reading Kibbles & Bytes, Don returns next week and will be sharing the latest Apple financial news.

    Don & Emily