Kibbles & Bytes Blog

Apple news, tech tips, and more…

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  • The cool, breezy evenings have set in and we’re starting to feel the first wave of Autumn here in Vermont. It is a bittersweet feeling, as always. I hate to see summer go by so quickly. As I said in our last edition, we’re in the midst of our busy back-to-school rush, which affects every department in different ways.

    Going into the fall, we’re all gearing up to take tons of photos, especially here in Vermont. While I’m stocking up on color film and developing chemicals, I’m also looking into a better video rig. One of my coworkers has the latest GoPro Hero5, and I must say, the HD recording at 120fps is quite impressive. For the past couple of years, I’ve shot with a Canon 70D, which is well regarded for its video recording capabilities. This system is especially handy for filmmaking, as you can attach a variety of lenses to the body and achieve almost any cinematic look you desire. I’ve found for action video, this camera falls short for a few reasons. First of all, a larger camera body usually means less stability in the image. GoPros are so lightweight, you tend to have an easier time keeping things steady. In addition, recording 4K video gives you the resolution flexibility needed to apply heavy image stabilization in post-processing stages.

    When I purchased the 70D, I never expected an action camera at half the price would surpass it in terms of video capacity and ruggedness. I should add, the 70D still has a superior image sensor in so many ways I won’t get into here, but if you’re looking to shoot action without the larger camera body getting in the way of your participation in said action, I think a GoPro is a worthwhile purchase. I’m especially fascinated by the extended range of FPS (frames per second) options going all the way up to 240. If you have a minute search for 240FPS GoPro footage on YouTube. Yes, your iPhone can now handle super slow motion at the same capacity, but I’d rather not take my iPhone out water skiing, skateboarding, or strapped to a dog’s head, for example.

    Speaking of strapping to a dog’s head, we have a ton of GoPro mounting accessories at the South Burlington store, including the Karma Grip, which stabilizes even the most rocky footage, using an electronic gimbal. Very cool! If you’d like to hear more about these products, come see us at the store. If you happen to see Erich or Riley, make sure to ask them about their GoPro experience.

    Have fun with your last couple weeks of summer, we hope to see you soon!

    Patrick McCormack
    “patrickm@smalldog.com”:mailto:patrickm@smalldog.com

  • I will be off this coming week and Emily and Hadley will have to entertain you next week in Kibbles & Bytes. Heading south on motorcycles to view the total eclipse sounds like a very romantic trip but it is all about the ride. We love being on the road and the challenges of motorcycling.

    Thank you for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes! And don’t look at the eclipse without proper glasses!

    Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

    _Don, Emily & Hadley_

  • How to Photograph the Eclipse with your iPhone

    I am leaving today for our annual motorcycle trip. This year we are heading down the Blue Ridge Parkway to Asheville where we will visit our friend Jen Mayer, the owner of Charlotte Street Computers an awesome Apple Premier Partner and go to see the total eclipse of the sun. We got new tires for Grace’s Victory so we are ready to go.

    So, I will have to post the requisite picture of the eclipsed sun on Facebook and I was curious about just how to go about that. We did get the official eclipse glasses so we are set there but to snap a picture might be tricky. I had all kinds of questions, would the direct sunlight filter by the moon negatively affect my iPhone? Could I hurt my eyes looking at my iPhone as it is pointed at the sun?

    Well, Apple cleared that up by saying that the iPhone will not be damaged by direct exposure to the eclipsed sun nor would you damage your eyes looking at your iPhone screen. NASA put out a document about photographing the eclipse. One important tip is to make sure that the eclipsed sun is actually in focus. Because it will be a low-light situation for only about 2 and a half minutes you might want to practice a bit by taking pictures of the moon tonight.

    p{text-align: center;}. !http://blog.smalldog.com/images/5199.jpg!

    Okay, so what do you need to remember other than point and shoot.

    # **Turn off the flash.** I don’t know how many times I see people at baseball games or concerts taking pictures with the flash on, mistakenly thinking that little flash will light up that scene a hundred yards away. Take it from me, your little LED flash on your iPhone will not light up the moon which is only 238,900 miles from you.
    # **Turn off autofocus.** You will want to manually focus because your iPhone will have difficulty in the low light focusing on the sun. So, how do you do that? Easy, get the sun centered in your screen the way you want it and tap and hold on that image until the AE/AF Lock banner appears, that will lock in your manual focus.
    # **Reduce the exposure.** There is going to be a lot of stray light (maybe from all your friends with their flashes still on) so you want to reduce the amount of light. To do this is easy, too. Tap and hold on the eclipsed sun and you will see a box around the object and a small sun next to it. That sun is a slider that will adjust the exposure. Turn it way down.
    # **Use a tripod**. Okay, I am not bringing a tripod on my motorcycle and as a result I expect some blur in my photos but if you really want a good shot get one of the many tripod mounts to ensure that you shaking with excitement doesn’t ruin your picture.

    p{text-align: center;}. !http://blog.smalldog.com/images/5201.png!

    The NASA document recommends putting those eclipse glasses in front of the lens but I am skeptical. First, those eclipse glasses are not particularly optically wonderful so you would be degrading the quality of the picture. Second, they are making that recommendation because there was some concern that exposure to the direct sun might hurt some brands of phone cameras. Apple cleared that up by saying that it would not hurt the iPhone so keep those glasses for when you look at the sun directly, your iPhone does not need them.

    Telephoto? You can zoom some with the iPhone but Olloclip and others do make some add-on lenses that will give you greater telephoto capabilities.

    Getting the photo of the disc of the eclipse might not be the perfect photo. Consider taking that picture of your friends with their goony eclipse glasses on starring up at the sky. And by the way, there will be a couple bajillion photos of the eclipse but don’t you want to experience the eclipse? Put your phone down, pull on those goony glasses and enjoy this rare celestial event!

  • _Dear Friends,_

    Thank you to Tim Cook for calling out the hatred and violence in Charlottesville last week and putting Apple’s money where its mouth is by donating to Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League and shutting off white supremacist site. Tim said in a statement to Apple employees:

    “This is not about the left or the right, conservative or liberal. It is about human decency and morality,” Cook writes. “I disagree with the president and others who believe that there is a moral equivalence between white supremacists and Nazis, and those who oppose them by standing up for human rights. Equating the two runs counter to our ideals as Americans.”

    The horrific events in Virginia were frightening and shocking. A woman died at the hands of a nazi while peacefully protesting Nazis in the streets of a city in the USA. It was chilling to see torch-carrying men chanting nazi slogans marching in the streets. Small Dog Electronics condemns the hate and violence and the insensitive and inappropriate response of the president.

    We think that the official motto of Key West and the Florida Keys, One Human Family, is the only appropriate response. Like fingers of your hand we are all connected.

    This week’s “**Kibbles & Bytes exclusive**”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002777/kibbles-bytes-exclusive-special-chill-pill-speaker-with-ipod-shuffle-product-red? is a tiny music system. “**We will combine the newly discontinued but very versatile iPod shuffle in (PRODUCT) Red with a Chill Pill Speaker for just $55.99!**”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002777/kibbles-bytes-exclusive-special-chill-pill-speaker-with-ipod-shuffle-product-red?

  • How to Avoid Phish

    Unlike the band (depending on who you ask, I suppose) to get ‘phished’ is not as groovy, wavy, or as psychedelic as their…

  • Grace and I are preparing for our summer motorcycle ride. This year we are going to ride down the Blue Ridge Parkway to view the total eclipse of the sun and to visit our friend Jen Mayer at Charlotte Street Computers in Asheville. We’ve got our special eclipse viewing glasses and we are almost all ready.

    We are riding down tomorrow to Rutland to get Grace some new tires for her Victory Vision and then we are ready. I rigged up a cup holder that holds my 30 ounce Yeti so cold brew will be the drink for the trip.

    Great year for blueberries, btw.

    Thank you for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

    Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

    Don, Emily & Hadley

  • Set Phasers to Stun

    I received a very good question from a reader about my article last week. The question was about interference between these radar systems on a crowded highway. I couldn’t easily find a good answer about this online, but my suspicion about this is that these systems function in a way similar to consumer-grade wifi transmitters. A full apartment complex might have a dozen or more wifi transmitters on top of each other spitting out signals that overlap and potentially interfere. This situation would be similar to lots of cars packed together on a highway. Wifi transmitters are designed with this possibility in mind. They use different transmission “channels”, basically just different frequency groups, to keep their own traffic under control and optimized. A transmitter will do this automatically by design. I’m almost positive radar systems in cars work the same way. Since they are radio frequency-based, they too can operate on discrete channels and switch to new channels if one has too much interference. However, one thing I did see a lot about was that these radar systems do mess with consumer-grade radar detectors pretty badly. So much so that detector manufacturers are starting to have to design their devices more intelligently.

    Onto my topic for this week: lasers! Believe it or not, when the first lasers were invented in the 1960s, scientists called them “a solution in search of a problem.” It wasn’t apparent at that time how much use lasers could be, but today we rely on them from things as simple as barcode scanning at the grocery store to the fibre connections that form the backbone of the entire internet. Lasers are pretty complex pieces of technology and they involve some electrochemistry too (not my strong suit) but I’ll do my best to explain them for you here.

    First of all, the word laser, like radar, is an acronym that stands for “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.” Would you like fries with that? The acronym is descriptive, but is complicated. At the heart, a laser has some kind of gain medium which can be energized somehow as well as some kind of construction that can provide optical feedback. The amplification part comes in when we start with the gain medium. In order for it to amplify light, we need to give it something to start with. Either energy (in the form of electricity) or light from some other source. This process of supplying energy to the gain medium is called pumping. Lasers can be pumped with many things including flash lamps, electricity or another laser.

    A simple laser could be described as the following. Imagine a cylinder composed of the material to be pumped. On each end of the cylinder is a mirror facing the cylinder. When the gain medium material is pumped, it gives off photons in an amplified state which bounce back and forth between the mirrors, passing through the gain medium and being amplified more each time. Now imagine if one of the mirrors was translucent allowing some light to escape. We’d have a laser!

    What is the gain medium composed of? In most industrial or scientific lasers, the gain medium is often some kind of gas, like helium, helium-neon, or carbon dioxide. If the gain medium is a solid, we call these solid state lasers. In these lasers, the gain medium consists of a glass or crystalline rod that is “doped” with ions in a process similar to “doping” silicon for use in photovoltaics. Finally there are semiconductor lasers. These lasers, while technically solid state, are not generally referred to as such and are most common in consumer grade devices. They are composed of diodes that are electrically pumped and function most similarly to our basic example above.

    As they are most common in our daily lives, I’ll explain a bit more about semiconductor lasers. They can be made to emit laser radiation at wavelengths from 375nm to 3500nm. Why are so many of these lasers red though? Most laser pointers are red for example, as are most barcode scanners. The reason is because laser diodes are cheaply available in those wavelengths. To achieve shorter wavelengths, more sophisticated techniques need to be used. I have a green laser pointer at home that I got in 2006 for about $75 online. Little did I know at the time, but green lasers such as that one only became widely available to consumers in the early 2000s. Green semiconductor lasers are most often a type of diode-pumped, solid-state, frequency-doubled laser. The green light is generated via a two step process that starts with a lower energy laser diode in the infrared spectrum. This light is used to pump a—brace yourself—-yttrium orthovanadate crystal doped with neodymium. That gain medium is then where the green laser light comes from. I think laser scientists just want to obfuscate their devices with wild names.

    I have to stop there because even my head is spinning a bit. Hopefully this was an ok explanation of these interesting and useful devices.

  • Apple Pencil

    I am by no means an artist nor someone who has drawn anything beyond your standard High School art class. However something drew my attention the Apple Pencil, call it intrigue or even memorization of the new slick addition to the Apple line up I could not keep from considering why it was so endearing. Whatever the calling was I finally made up my mind and purchased one of these compelling little stylus, and boy oh boy was I impressed. I had little experience playing with the abilities of the Apple Pencil outside of the store. I have discovered a new found obsession with sketching.

    For anyone who has ever drawn with your standard paper and pencil, (as well if you are as nit picky as I am) you will quickly find by erasing multiple strokes several times you quickly create this indent on the paper, an indent that will never go away. This is infuriating! As with any drawing tablet this frustration is elevated when using a computer to render your work allowing easy (Command – Z) undo functionality. There are some intense differences when comparing drawing tablets vs paper and pencil, and many artists strongly dislike the separation between the two. Again, I am no artist and do not claim to have a strong history with any of the options discussed. However I must express my complete and wonderful surprise that was using the Apple Pencil. The fluidity, precision and pencil likeness was unmatched by any expectations I had. Whether it be lightly sketching out the initial point of reference lines or deeply highlighting the final details it feels as though I am sketching on a piece of paper just underneath the glass of my iPad Pro.

    Without spending all day going into details and further examples, I’ll wrap this up with a final thought. The Apple Pencil is not just for Artists, or people in the field of artistry. If you are someone who draws, sketches, paints or even prefers written notes, the Apple Pencil can be another tool added to the arsenal. Even if you are like me, someone who has never tackled anything artistic but has a nagging urge to create, I highly encourage swinging down to Small Dog and testing out the Apple Pencil. We have one at the counter anyone can test out on one of our iPad demo models and see for yourself what makes it such a unique and diverse product.