Kibbles & Bytes Blog

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  • I have to replace the solar water heater panels on my roof that got trashed by hurricane Irma but that is a minor inconvenience compared to the devastation just up the Keys a bit. Grace and I took a motorcycle ride up to Big Pine and just about every home has some damage and many were completely destroyed. Huge mountains of debris still line the road and the county just approved some FEMA trailers so that some residents have a place to live while they rebuild their homes.

    Boats were washed up on shore, boats sank and just over on Smathers Beach which is a few blocks from my house there are boats that have capsized and washed ashore. Nevertheless, we see evidence of rebuilding and a can-do spirit here, just as we have seen in other areas devastated by hurricanes or disasters.

    It should be an interesting journey back to the north country this weekend but I love Vermont so it will be good to be back and knowing that I will soon return to the land of sunshine should help to keep me warm!

    Thank you for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

    Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

    Don & Emily

  • Share iCloud Storage

    Apple gives iCloud users 5 GB of free storage, but that fills up fast with iCloud Photo Library, iOS backups, iBooks, and more. For some, the majority of iOS users, the free 5GBs of storage does not get them very far, if your someone who also uses iCloud storage for files on your computer additional storage is an absolute necessity. I have shared more than once that iCloud storage makes my job a lot easier.

    Until iOS 11 and macOS 10.13 High Sierra, each person in a family had to buy extra iCloud space separately. Happily, Apple has now made it so everyone in a Family Sharing group can share a single 200 GB ($2.99 per month) or 2 TB ($9.99 per month) plan. The family organizer can start sharing storage in High Sierra or iOS 11 as follows: on the Mac, go to System Preferences > iCloud > Manage Family > My Apps & Services > iCloud Storage; in iOS, go to Settings > Your Name > Family Sharing > iCloud Storage. Any other family member can then cancel their paid plan and join the Family Sharing plan using their iCloud Storage screen. Keeping your family organized and storage needs managed is made easier with this new update. Until my kids are old enough to have their own devices and files I’m still happy with my 50gb of individual storage, but it’s good to know and have this option available should the time come that I need additional cloud backup storage.

  • Dear Friends, I am flying to Vermont for a quick visit and have been rummaging around for winter clothes as I see snow…

  • 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