Kibbles & Bytes Blog

So much to do these days, I hope the weather cooperates. My granddaughter, Khadija, graduates today and gramps is bringing her a Mac for college. Then Grace and I hope to ride over to New Hampshire to Laconia and maybe just a little further towards Maine so we can eat some lobsters.

Looks like a good year for Apples. They seem to like this wet weather as the trees seem to be loaded this year. Maybe it had something to do with Apple updating all their products at once :).

Thank you for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

_Don, Emily & Hadley_

Have you struggled with getting the perfect photo? How many times have we all struggled with a group photo you have to take multiple times because someone blinked, someone yawned or that toddler in front just wouldn’t stay still? Taking photos of animals like dogs and horses can be equally frustrating. One moment it’s the perfect shot, the next they moved or you just keep snapping that photo at the wrong time.

The more an object for your photo is moving the harder it is to get the perfect shot. Images get blurry, you capture just half of the body or any number of other factors that take your photo memory from frame worthy to trash can bound. I’ve long considered myself an average photographer. I’ve purchased a few high end cameras over the years but I never practiced or used the cameras long enough to understand what the settings really do and why. Thanks to the iPhone I really do look like a better photographer than I really am!

Professional photographers shooting sports or even wildlife have been using burst mode features on their cameras to take photos in quick succession for decades, but it typically meant this feature also went along with a very expensive camera set up. Film cameras required a motor to advance the film quickly enough, but now everything is digital. A burst mode simply needs enough processing power and storage space to record frame after frame. Your iPhone or iPad has this capability and is incredibly easy to activate burst mode.

The secret hidden trick to using burst mode on your iPhone or iPad is less hidden than you might realize and it’s likely you activated the feature a times without even realizing it. Rather than pressing the shutter button once, just hold it. The longer you hold it down, the more burst photos you will get. You’ll hear a distinctive and continuous sound of the shutter quickly taking photos.

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Your iPhone can capture 10 frames per second, so just 2.5 seconds of photos can turn into 25 in burst mode. Sometimes the only challenge to burst mode is sorting through all of the photos and selecting the ones that you want. Do note that Photos appear stacked when your looking at them. When you select the photos you will want to then look for the word “select” so that Photos will then display all of the images caught during your burst.

Once you have hit “select” and start to look through all the photos you will see the typical circle image in the bottom right hand corner. As your going through the images simply tap on the circle for any photo you want to keep, it will then display in blue. Once you hit the Done button you will then be asked if you want to keep just the favorites you selected or if you want to keep everything. I normally keep just the ones that I have selected as my favorites.

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One warning. If you use iCloud Photo Library or My Photo Stream to sync photos between devices it might take some times for all the photos in the burst shots to move from iPhone to Mac. Whoops, one more! If you are using My Photo Stream to transfer photos to your Mac only those photos that you’ve marked as a favorite will transfer. To set it so entire bursts transfer automatically, open Settings > Photos & Camera and enable upload photo bursts.

Give bursts a try this summer, you never know what unexpected photo moments you might end up discovering.

Most of you probably have a single Wi-Fi router that might be an Apple Airport Base station or the DSL or Cable modem provided by your internet provider. Your router might be in one corner of your house, or like me down in the cellar. By the time your Wi-Fi signal finds its way up to the other corner of the house you may find that the speed is slow and your signal is not particularly reliable.

The solution to this has been to add an extender or something like the Apple Airport Express to extend the network. That works but it can be a bit complex to set it up so that you have reliable signal. With Apple apparently exiting the wireless network router business (the Airport Extreme was last upgraded in 2013) it is time for a new paradigm in home networking.

Enter mesh networking. A mesh network could solve most, if not all, of your Wi-Fi problems. It’s basically a system of multiple Wi-Fi stations that work together to blanket every corner of your home with a strong, reliable Wi-Fi connection.

Unlike your cable modem router or Airport Extreme that loses signal the farther you are from it, mesh nodes piggyback on one another to create a continuous wireless link throughout your home, making dead zones rare.

Mesh networking has these advantages:

* Using fewer wires means it costs less to set up a network, particularly for large areas of coverage.
* The more nodes you install, the bigger and faster your wireless network becomes.
* They rely on the same WiFi standards (802.11a, b and g) already in place for most wireless networks.
* They are convenient where Ethernet wall connections are lacking
* They are useful for Non-Line-of-Sight (NLoS) network configurations where wireless signals are intermittently blocked.
* Mesh networks are “self configuring;” the network automatically incorporates a new node into the existing structure without needing any adjustments by a network administrator.
* Mesh networks are “self healing,” since the network automatically finds the fastest and most reliable paths to send data, even if nodes are blocked or lose their signal.
* Wireless mesh configurations allow local networks to run faster, because local packets don’t have to travel back to a central server.
* Wireless mesh nodes are easy to install and uninstall, making the network extremely adaptable and expandable as more or less coverage is needed.

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How does a a mesh system work? First, you connect a primary base station to your broadband modem via ethernet cable from the modem to the primary base station. Then, you connect satellite stations or nodes in areas where you might get weak coverage. These nodes can be connected to ethernet if you have your house wired for ethernet but who does that anymore? Otherwise, they plug into the wall for power and gain their signal wirelessly.

Let’s say your primary base station is downstairs in the kitchen, and you have a satellite station in the upstairs bedroom. When you are in the bedroom and watching Netflix on your MacBook, the primary base station retrieves the streaming data and bounces it to the satellite station, which then beams it to your Mac in the bedroom in what’s known as a hop.

Importantly, in addition to expanding your Wi-Fi range, a mesh system helps your device automatically connect to the strongest station as you move around in the house. When you’re in the kitchen, your iPhone will automatically get its signal from the station there; when you move to the bedroom, your iPhone will seamlessly switch to the station there.

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We sell the Eero mesh network and there are also similar systems from Google, DLink and others. Eero is very easy to set up with their iPhone app which will walk you through setting up an account and adding nodes around the house. The app monitors your network so you can see what’s happening, check device usage, diagnose and fix issues and even set up parental controls to limit usage, say in your teen’s room. With parental controls you can create an “internet pause” or just shut the whole thing down. Just like with the AirPort Extreme you can also set up a guest network.

While you are awaiting Apple’s HomePod, if you are like me you have Amazon Echo. Eero will also work with Alexa where you can ask Alexa to pause the internet or find your iPhone.

Mesh networking is the way to go if you are updating your network, having problems with coverage or installing a new network. It is probably overkill if you live in a studio apartment but you could still buy just a single unit to take advantage of the ease of set-up and tools for managing your Wi-Fi.

_Dear Friends,_

I woke up this morning and the heat was on in my house. I think this is against the law in June! Mother nature cannot make up her mind whether it is summer or fall. One day it is in the 80s and the next it is 50. Nevertheless, we did get to ride over to Lake George for the Americade rally. It was a great ride through the Adirondacks.

As we witnessed yet another senseless act of violence in Washington, it is a reminder that we are sometimes isolated from the violence that permeates our world today. There are literally dozens of wars being fought in places like Somalia, India, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Peru, Congo and honestly too many areas to mention. All of this violence is senseless, inhuman and uncivilized. Non-violence should be the highest pursuit of humanity. Thomas Edison said “Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.”

It is so strange to see that amazing scientific advancements we, as humans, achieve. Self-driving cars, missions to Mars, medical miracles all fascinate us but are in stark contrast to the injustices we do to each other through violence, poverty, racism and other uncivilized behavior. I often think that if I were a star traveling alien I would give this wild planet a wide berth.

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