Kibbles & Bytes Blog

I am glad I have my canine companions while Grace is volunteering in Honduras. She keeps sending me pictures of her sheet rocking and painting. I told her I have some work here at the house but she didn’t think that was funny at all.

My skiing-crazy employees up in Vermont got a treat with a nor’easter and lots of snow with more on the way. Artie has a long standing agreement with me that if there is fresh powder I should not expect him in at his normal time and perhaps not at all. It is a small price to pay for a happy employee.

I definitely think I am in Superman’s Bizzaro world (you remember that, right?) with the news coming out being weirder and weirder. I would have never guessed that the “strong on security” Republics would be so quick to cozy up with Russia even after it came out that they messed with our election. I guess we do indeed live in interesting times here in Bizzaro land.

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

Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

_Don & Hadley_

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I’ve been interested in green electricity for years. When I was 12 my parents got me a K-nex building set that came with a motor and a tiny solar panel. You could snap the pieces of plastic together into all kinds of creations from a stationary dipping bird to a little drag racer. All you had to do to make them move was plug the solar panel into the little motor and get some sun. I was endlessly fascinated by this and was always trying to figure out how to use the tiny solar panel to run other things.

In the case of my K-nex, the solar panel plugged directly into the motor. If the panel was in sunlight, the motor would run, and if it wasn’t, the motor would stop instantly. The electricity wasn’t being stored. This is one of the fundamental challenges with most types of green electricity even at the grid-level. When you plug your toaster into the wall and turn it on the power it’s consuming has been generated at exactly that moment by the electric company. In almost all electricity grids around the world, electricity is delivered on-demand. There is no storage.

This is actually a very complicated thing when you think about it. All the toasters out there, in all the homes and businesses consume some amount of electricity. The power plant running that grid needs to be able to supply as close to that total amount as possible. Too little and the voltage available will drop. Too much and the voltage may damage equipment. Too little voltage happens all the time, especially in summer when people are using air conditioners on a hot day. This condition is commonly called a “brown out”. To correct a brown out condition, a the grid operator must increase power available to the grid. This can be done in many ways including shunting electricity from nearby grids, bringing auxiliary nuclear, natural gas or coal plants online or incentivizing customers to use less power during peak demand conditions.

This is a major management task and in New England, it’s handled by an organization called ISO New England. They actually need to predict what the electricity demands will be each day and tailor the mix of available electricity to meet that need as closely as possible. Remember that there is no storage on most electrical grids, so if generation stops, power stops instantly. You can actually watch this operation in real time for New England at “**https://www.iso-ne.com/isoexpress/**”:https://www.iso-ne.com/isoexpress/. Pay particular attention to the system load graph. Notice how they have a predicted demand and how close they’re able to keep generation to that demand.

You should also notice that the demand changes significantly throughout an average day. Most types of power generation cannot be easily shut off completely (such as at night when demand is low). This means that the generating stations operate 24/7 even if there isn’t demand. This is why electricity costs can fluctuate depending on the time of day. The price for off-peak power at night is lower to incentivize usage.

How does green electricity factor into all of this? With traditional forms of electricity generation (coal and natural gas mostly) the amount of power being generated/delivered can be controlled to a fairly large degree. Need more power? Burn more coal. Need less power? Burn less coal. Pretty simple. Green electricity (wind, solar, tidal, etc) cannot be controlled in such a way. The two exceptions to this are hydroelectricity and nuclear, though both of those have pretty significant environmental dangers/drawbacks. If it’s a hot summer day, and more electricity is needed on the grid, you can’t just ask the sun to shine brighter or the wind to blow harder.

So in reality, there was never really a green electricity shortage or problem using it. We certainly have the technology. The issue has always been one of storage and the fundamental way our electric grid was designed from the beginning. Without a way to store electricity to buffer the low periods of availability, most green electricity generation is poorly suited to how we operate our electric grids. Recently this issue has been getting some attention and research is being done into how to accomplish this storage. In limited situations, grid-level battery technology is almost to the point of being feasible. One older method of providing on-demand auxiliary power is actually a form of energy storage: pumped hydro.

Pumped hydro works by using electricity during times of excess to pump water up to an elevated storage reservoir. This water is then released back down when needed to provide an extra boost of generation. This works very well but is highly dependent on the local geography. When I was a kid, we used to go on school field trips all the time to a pumped hydro facility (the largest in New England) in Northfield, Massachusetts. They pump water from the Connecticut River up to a reservoir on top of Northfield Mountain. If you live nearby, I highly recommend checking it out. They have a visitor center that explains how it works and you can do an easy hike to the top of the mountain where the reservoir is located. Read more about the facility here: “**http://www.wbur.org/bostonomix/2016/12/02/northfield-mountain-hydroelectric-station**”:http://www.wbur.org/bostonomix/2016/12/02/northfield-mountain-hydroelectric-station

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks (February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005) was an African American civil rights activist, whom the U.S. Congress later called “the first lady of civil rights”, and “the mother of the freedom movement”.

Rosa Parks is one of my heroes that grace my wall by my desk in Vermont. I have this phone signed by Rosa in a place of honor. What a brave, strong and persistent woman!

On December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks, age 42, refused to obey bus driver James Blake’s order that she give up her seat to make room for a white passenger. Her action was not the first of its kind. Irene Morgan in 1946, and Sarah Louise Keys in 1955, had won rulings before the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Interstate Commerce Commission, respectively, in the area of interstate bus travel.

Nine months before Parks refused to give up her seat, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to move from her seat on the same bus system. In New York City, in 1854, Lizzie Jennings engaged in similar activity, leading to the desegregation of the horsecars and horse-drawn omnibuses of that city. But unlike these previous individual actions of civil disobedience, Parks’ action sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Parks’ act of defiance became an important symbol of the modern Civil Rights Movement and Parks became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation. She organized and collaborated with civil rights leaders, including boycott leader Martin Luther King, Jr., helping to launch him to national prominence in the civil rights movement.

At the time of her action, Parks was secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and had recently attended the Highlander Folk School, a Tennessee center for workers’ rights and racial equality. Nonetheless, she took her action as a private citizen “tired of giving in”. Although widely honored in later years for her action, she suffered for it, losing her job as a seamstress in a local department store.

Eventually, she moved to Detroit, Michigan, where she found similar work. From 1965 to 1988 she served as secretary and receptionist to African-American U.S. Representative John Conyers. After retirement from this position, she wrote an autobiography and lived a largely private life in Detroit. In her final years she suffered from dementia and became embroiled in a lawsuit filed on her behalf against American hip-hop duo OutKast.

Parks eventually received many honors ranging from the 1979 Spingarn Medal to the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal and a posthumous statue in the United States Capitol’s National Statuary Hall. Her death in 2005 was a major story in the United States’ leading newspapers. She was granted the posthumous honor of lying in honor at the Capitol Rotunda.

On February 4, 2013, the U.S. Postal Service issued a special Rosa Parks Forever stamp on what would have been the late civil rights icon’s 100th birthday.

One of the great features of Apple HomeKit is the ability to make a scene. Once you have set up your Apple HomeKit compatible devices in the Home App you can control them with your iPhone or with Siri. So, hook up that August lock and you can say “Hey Siri, lock the front door” and bingo, the door is locked.

But if you make a scene you can control multiple accessories at the same time. For example, I have a scene called “good night”. When I am ready to go to bed at night I tell Siri “good night” and both my doors lock, all the lights, except the bedroom light, are turned off and the thermostat is turned to a comfortable sleeping temperature. I only wish Sonos could be controlled there, too, so I could also automatically play the blues in the bedroom but that may come soon.

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To create a scene (act like a crazy person?) no really to make a scene:

1. Open the Home app on your iPhone or iPad and tap the Home tab or the Rooms tab at the bottom and then tap +

2) Tap Add Scene

3) You can either choose one of the included scenes or a custom scene.

4) Tap Add or Remove Accessories

5) Tap the accessories you want to add and then tap Done

6) Touch and hold an accessory to adjust its settings – i.e. slide the bar up or down for thermostat temperature setting

7) To preview the scene, tap Test This Scene. If you want to access this scene in your Home tab, the Control Center and on your Apple Watch you should toggle Show in Favorites.

I think it is pretty cool that I can control my scenes with my Apple Watch and just by sliding up and to the left in the control center.

You can add or delete or adjust accessories from a scene anytime. You just touch and hold a scene in the Home app and then tap Details.

Okay, now let’s say you want MORE automation for your scene. Perhaps you want to run the scene at a certain time every day. I don’t go to bed at the same time every day but let’s say you do come home from work everyday at about the same time. You could set the lights to come on, the heat to go on, etc. as you walk in the door.

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To automate your accessories you must first set up your iPad or 4th Generation AppleTV to be your smart home hub. Once you have done that you can create an automation by:

1) Open the Home app and tap the Automation tab. Then tap Create New Automation.

2) Now you will have the choice of when you want the automation to occur.

* My Location Changes: Have your chosen accessories and/or scenes turn on and off when you leave or arrive at a specified location, like your home.

* A Time of Day Occurs: Choose the time of day and days of the week you want your accessories to turn on and off automatically

* An accessory is Controlled: If an accessory turns on or off, you can have other accessories or scenes react. An example would be whenever the door is unlocked the lights come on

* A Sensor Detects Something: You might use this with a motion sensor.

3) Select the scenes and accessories to automate. Then tap Next.

4) Verify the accessories and scenes. Touch and hold an accessory or scene to adjust.

5) Finish up by tapping Done.

If you want to turn off or delete an automation you do so in the Home app in the automation section. Tap the automation and then choose Turn off, Enable this automation or Delete automation. You can also swipe left over the automation and select delete.

I know Tim Cook talked about how he uses HomeKit every day during the recent earnings call. I don’t know some times all this home automation stuff reminds me of the Jetsons and others of one of my favorite movies ??Brazil.?? But he talked about starting up the coffee maker and had everyone wondering whether that was just a plug switch or something cooler. I know I want to be able to control my TV with HomeKit – so when I say Good Night to Siri she also turns off the TV.

_Dear Friends,_

We are excited by the improvements being made to our Key West and S. Burlington stores and we can see the construction reaching completion. In S. Burlington, we have already made major renovations to the retail area but we are now finishing some back of the house work which will add an Apple HomeKit smart home room complete with working demos of HomeKit with Lutron, August and Kwikset locks, HoneyWell thermostats, Lutron and Philips Hue lighting and much much more. We are also adding a second consulting room as we have an increasing demand for in-store lessons.

Down here in Key West, the changes may seem even more dramatic. We have removed two walls that unnecessarily divided up the main retail floor and pushed back the rear wall to give us more retail space. We also have an Apple HomeKit demo room here that will be set up when Emily comes to visit in a few weeks.

I don’t know if anyone has a need for a Promise RAID but a friend has a HA261LL/A – Apple Promise VTrak x30 Series HA261LL/A 24 x 3TB RAID Subsystem that is brand new that he wants to sell for $12,999. They normally sold for $26,000. This is a 24 X 3TB or 72 TB Promise Raid. If you are interested drop me an email and I’ll get you hooked up.

This week’s Kibbles & Bytes Exclusive is the 9.7-inch iPad Pro WiFi and Cellular version in Space Gray. We bought a bunch of these for a customer that switched to the larger iPad Pro so here is your chance to get this sought after iPad Pro at a great discount. It is the big 128GB version and includes both Wi-Fi and Cellular so you will always have coverage. In Space Gray this unit normally sells for $829.99 but for this week for Kibbles & Bytes readers it “**can be yours for only $765!**”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002595/ (while current supplies last).