Kibbles & Bytes Blog

With all of Florida in the path of Irma, I think I’ll be watching this closely and figuring out what I need to do to recover after the storm passes. If you are in Irma’s path, please heed the warnings and evacuation plans! As the governor said “we can rebuild your house, but not your life.”

I took the wheels off my Indian to get new tires and it is on the plan to put it back together. I still prefer to do this work myself to make sure it is done right but my back does a lot of complaining and keeps calling me an old man. But with new tires, maybe I can get out to see some early fall foliage. I have a bright red tree in my front yard already!

Stay safe and away from Irma!

Thank you for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

Don & Emily

Have you found yourself wanting to add more color or make an image stand out better? Maybe you’re touching up a photo, or want to find a shade of red that reminds you of Dorthy’s ruby red slippers in the Wizard of Oz. Did you know you can do this on your Mac without the need for specialized programs like Photoshop? Well if you didn’t, you’re about to learn how.

You likely have found the color window on your Mac already. It’s commonly used to change the color of font or change a spreadsheet cell to a specific color. Like many longer-standing elements of the Mac experience, most people have seen and used it for these basic purposes, but it can do so much more. How you bring up the Colors window varies depending on what app you’re using, but it usually entails clicking a color button associated with styles or formats. The Colors window has three sections: button for the color pickers at the top, their individual controls in the middle, and the color wells at the bottom. Click the buttons at the top to switch between these pickers:

Color Wheel: This picker is useful for exploring a wide range of colors. Don’t forget the brightness slider at the bottom, this changes the colors in the wheel above.

Color Sliders: Use these sliders to replicate specific gray scale brightnesses or RGB, CMYK, or HSB color by number. Or, you can find a color with another picker and then look up its exact values. If you have used Photoshop you’ve likely done this, but perhaps didn’t know your Mac can do it by default as well. When matching colors with outside sources, click the gear button to choose the appropriate standard color pallet before picking a color.

Color Palettes: This picker shows color swatches from different customer pallets. Use the gear button to make, add, rename, and delete palettes. ( Find them in /Libray/Colors ) The utility of these palettes is that you can share your own color collections, enabling co-workers to use identical colors easily. This is also very helpful if you have a file created by someone else and you want to match the color easily.

Image Palettes: Click the gear here to load a new image, after which you can select any color in that image by clicking it.

Pencils: Do you remember when they looked like crayons? Well it’s the same thing, just now they are colored pencils.

Within each color picker, it’s usually obvious how to select different colors. Click the wheel, move the sliders, enter cyan-magenta-yellow-black percentages and so on. The selected color, which will be applied to your drawing or text, appears in the large square color well at the bottom left. However, there is one other extremely useful way to select a color: the eyedropper. Find it in the bottom portion of the Color window, and click it to see a circular loupe that magnifies anything under it. Move the loupe until the single pixel in the middle is over the color you want, and then click. If you press the Space bar while the loupe is showing, the loupe displays the RGB values of that pixel.

What are those little squares to the right of the eye dropper? That area is called the swatch drawer, and it’s where you store particular color swatches that you want to use repeatedly. Just drag the color from the color well to the left into a swatch square. You can even pick a color swatch up and move it around, so you can arrange your swatches in a way that you’ll remember. Swatches you store here become available in all Mac apps, so it’s a great way to ensure you’re using the same colors everywhere. To remove a swatch, drag it to the right of the swatch squares and let go just inside the right edge of the Colors window. If this doesn’t work, try to expand the window to the right as much as possible.

Now you can use colors in your everyday work and even turn out images and work that look like a professional photo editor created!

I have a friend running for Governor of Vermont, James Ehlers. He texted me about sharing his calendar with his campaign manager. It is pretty easy if the person you are sharing with has an iCloud account (and most Mac users do) and if both of you are using an iPhone. Well, it was complicated by one of them using an Android device but we will get into that later. I might have to make a campaign contribution so they can get an iPhone.

But let’s assume that you are running for office and your campaign manager is using an iPhone and so are you. This is the easy way! You both need to have iCloud accounts to share calendars.

1) The first step is to launch Calendars on your iPhone or iPad.

2) Click on the ‘Calendars” button at the bottom

3) In the iCloud section, click on the “i” on the calendar you wish to share

4) Click on the “Add Person” and enter their iCloud email address and click “add”

The person you are sharing with will simply receive a calendar notification asking them to accept your invite. Once they do, they will be able to view and edit events. Remember, calendar sharing currently only works with iCloud calendars. Both you and the person you want to share the calendar with have to be using iCloud.

Okay, but back to my friend and his campaign manager’s Android phone. How can they do it? I have not tested this but I think it should work.

Android phones do not have CalDAV client built-in so to make this work you will need to get a CalDAV client onto your Android phone. There are a number of Android apps that add a CalDAV client:

SmoothSync for Cloud Calendars (Note: Problems with Samsung Galaxy S5 reported)
CalDAV-Sync (Note: Problems with Samsung Galaxy S5 reported)
Sync for iCloud Calendar)

The free Sync for iCloud Calendar seems to work the best. Here’s how to sync iCloud calendars with Android Phones and Android tablets:

1) Install Sync for iCloud Calendar from Google Play and tap on ‘Install‘
2) “Accept” the apps need to access your calendar and contacts
3) Once it is installed, open Sync for iCloud Calendar and tap on ‘Add Calendar Account‘.
4) Select ‘Sync for iCloud Calendar‘ as account and fill in your iCloud user name (Apple ID / iCloud email) and your iCloud password.
5) Select the iCloud calendar you want by taping on the link.

As I said, I have not completely tested this yet since I do not have an Android phone but adding a CalDAV client seems logically the way to go to sync calendars between and iPhone and an Android.

Easier still is having Irma take care of that Android and getting an iPhone – I hear some new models might be coming out next week.

Dear Friends,

Our hearts go out to those already touched by Hurricane Irma in St. Martin, Barbuda, Puerto Rico and other Caribbean Islands. This giant storm is heading right for Key West and the rest of Florida. We have boarded up our store and closed until we have the all-clear. Two members of our team have evacuated but Tommy Allen has decided to ride out the storm in Key West despite my pleadings. He is a Conch and I assume he knows what he is doing but we will be nervous until the storm passes.

My house is all shuttered and just about everyone has left Key West, the cams show empty streets and beaches. Mallory Square, the site of the daily sunset celebration was completely and eerily vacant. With Hurricane Jose following Irmas tracks and Katia hanging out in the Gulf it is a dangerous and unprecedented hurricane season. I liked a meme on Facebook that said “It’s like Mother Nature heard all the climate change denials and said ‘here, hold my beer’ “ .

Hopefully, Irma takes a hard right and goes off to sea and dies but we are thinking of all those in the path of this dangerous storm!

How about those Red Sox using Apple Watch to steal signs from the Yankees. That was the best “feel good” story of the week!

This week’s Kibbles & Bytes exclusive features the Apple Factory Refurbished MacBook Pro 13-inch with Touch Bar. This unit has a 2.9GHz processor 8GB ram and 256GB SSD drive. I have a few in Space Gray and some in Silver. I am bundling this unit which has a 1-year Apple warranty with AppleCare + to extend that to three years and also cover some accidental damage (deductible applies). But to make this a really cool system I am also including a BenQ PD2710QC Designer Monitor that includes an integrated USB C hub. This is the set-up I use and it is fantastic! You get the MacBook Pro 13-inch with Touch Bar, the BenQ display and AppleCare + for only $2199.97!