Kibbles & Bytes Blog

Apple news, tech tips, and more…

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  • Flood warnings in the Mad River valley as the snow melts and my neighbors report that Prickly Mountain road is a mess of mud. Down here in Key West, it is getting warmer each day. Jezebel was chasing a big iguana around the yard who decided to hang out on the wall for awhile. I hope that the iguana had a traumatic experience because they are real pests. I learned that they are not native to the Keys but the result of pets released to the wild who thrived in this climate.

    As our legislators struggle with how to deal with health care. I have a hint for them. Look at prescription drug prices. I have diabetes and most of my drugs that I take have been covered by Small Dog’s health insurance but now since I am on Medicare and buying my own prescription plan I am much more aware of the costs especially as I find myself in the ridiculous “donut hole” each year. The costs of life-sustaining drugs such as insulin and others have skyrocketed. I was shocked to see that on prescription was $6700 for three month supply. It is no wonder our health insurance costs keep going up while pharmaceutical company’s profits soar.

    Okay, off the soapbox, Don.

    Thanks for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

    Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

    _Don, Emily & Hadley_

  • Reviewing The New iPad

    I’ll start this article by saying some of this information might come as a bit of a surprise to some of our readers, but I’ve passed up multiple iPad revisions and releases and have been using outdated technology for years! Normally when something new comes out from Apple, that product lands in my hands fairly quickly after the release. But for various reasons, I’ve stuck with my **original 16GB iPad mini** and passed up several generations of upgrades.

    We just started getting shipments in small batches of the 9.7″ iPad and I got to thinking that it’s time to upgrade my old faithful mini and officially pass it along to my youngest daughter. I’m a huge fan of the size of the iPad Mini and debated for several days if I wanted the iPad Mini 4 or the iPad with 128GB of storage. Ultimately I decided to go back to the larger screen and upgraded to the new iPad 9.7″ as I’m now using my iPad more for video watching.

    The reviews of the new iPad are mixed, it’s heavier than the iPad Air 2 it replaced and is slower than the iPad Pro. When I first took mine out of the box the weight was the first thing that I noticed; it does feel heavy. I held it up against the iPad Air 2 and it’s amazing that such a small difference seems so significant. Coming from a background of using a mini for the last several years it’s no surprise the weight was a temporary negative for me when I was unboxing the iPad.

    My reasons for upgrading were primarily speed of the iPad in everyday use and storage. With more and more streaming options and the ability to download and view content offline I found the battle of storage to be never ending. My first big test of the iPad was using Safari, running different apps and accessing my iCloud drive. Knowing this release was in some regards just a minor bump and refresh of the mid-range iPad family lineup this was an important trial for me. For someone going from an older and outdated iPad to this unit, there is a huge difference! Where I saw delays in just the apps themselves opening or just opening a new browser window on my old mini I experience none of that with the new iPad. Even something that seemed insignificant like how fast the screen rotates from portrait to landscape suddenly seems lightning fast, I actually debated turning off that feature while playing around with the iPad.

    I also spent some time both taking pictures and transferring some photos from my iPhone 7 plus. I was very impressed with both the image quality of the photos that I took and the viewing quality of photos that I moved from my iPhone. For an iPad and comparing it against some older models there’s a significant improvement with the photo quality. I then spent a little bit of time comparing sound quality from the iPhone 7 plus and the iPad and that one is a tough call. In our unofficial testing here at the office there was slight disagreement over which sounded better, so I’ll leave that final decision as undecided.

    Ultimately I went with the new iPad and my only regret is that I couldn’t get it in Rose Gold to match my watch and iPhone. This revision is not meant to compete with the iPad Pro in my opinion, but it’s a huge upgrade and an impressive unit for hold outs like myself. Apple has reduced the pricing and increased the storage capacities of their mid level iPads and I think that’s huge for the everyday iPad user like myself.

  • Mac Pro Revised

    On Tuesday Apple announced some revisions to the Mac Pro. The former $3,999 model is now the $2,999 base model, while the previously built-to-order 8-core model with dual D700 GPUs is now the high-end stock configuration for $3,999. Both models are equipped with 256GB PCIe-based flash storage, four USB 3.0 ports, six Thunderbolt 2 ports, and dual Gigabit Ethernet ports.

    The former quad-core model with dual AMD FirePro D300 GPUs and 12GB of RAM now has 6-cores with dual D500 GPUs and 16GB of RAM, while the 6-Core model with dual AMD FirePro D500 GPUs is now 8-cores with dual D700 GPUs and 16GB of RAM. There are no other hardware changes–not even Thunderbolt 3 ports.

    This is the first revision in 3 years and came with an apology of sorts from Apple for neglecting the Mac Pro. Surprisingly, and unlike Apple, they also indicated that all new Mac Pros will be coming in 2018 that will be modular, a common complaint about the current model is that it is not modular. They also announced that there will be new Apple displays to accompany the new Mac Pro.

    They also hinted that new iMacs would be coming that would cater more to the “pro” market.

    We thank Apple for this peak at the future. Knowing the roadmap does help us serve our customer’s needs better.

  • What's Slowing up my Mac? Look Closely with Activity Monitor

    Does it seem like your Mac is running slowly? It’s always possible that you need more RAM, a speedy SSD to replace a slow hard drive, or even a new Mac. But you might just have a rogue app that’s hogging your Mac’s CPU.

    Activity Monitor shows the processes that are running on your Mac, so you can manage them and see how they affect your Mac’s activity and performance. Activity Monitor is a kind of task manager that allows you see how apps and other processes are affecting your your CPU, memory, energy, disk, and network usage.

    Activity Monitor is bundled with every Mac. Open your Applications folder and scroll down until you see the Utilities folder. Open that to find and double-click Activity Monitor.

    The processes shown in Activity Monitor can be user apps, system apps used by macOS, or invisible background processes. Use the five category tabs at the top of the Activity Monitor window to see how processes are affecting your Mac in each category.

    * CPU
    * Memory
    * Energy
    * Disk
    * Network

    Activity Monitor can seem daunting because it lists every “process” running on your Mac. In many cases, a process is the same as what you think of as an app, so you’ll see processes for apps like Mail and Safari. However, some apps use multiple processes, and macOS itself relies on a ton of processes too. You can limit the processes you are looking at with the View menu. There you have the choice of limiting your view to:

    * All Processes
    * All Processes Hierarchically: Processes that belong to other processes, so you can see the parent/child relationship between them.
    * My Processes: Processes owned by your macOS user account.
    * System Processes: Processes owned by macOS.
    * Other User Processes: Processes that aren’t owned by the root user or current user.
    * Active Processes: Running processes that aren’t sleeping.
    * Inactive Processes: Running processes that are sleeping.
    * Windowed Processes: Processes that can create a window. These are usually apps.
    * Selected Processes: Processes that you selected in the Activity Monitor window.
    * Applications in the last 8 hours: Apps that were running processes in the last 8 hours.

    Those views show the impact each process has on those aspects of the Mac. For now, we’ll focus on the CPU view that’s the default, but if you were trying to figure out why your MacBook Pro’s battery was draining so quickly, you’d look in the Energy view.

    At the bottom of the CPU view is a graph of CPU load, and numbers that correspond to how much of that load comes from the system and how much from the user (apps you’ve launched). As long as the sum of those numbers stays under 100% most of the time, you’re probably fine. But if you’re near or at 100%, you’ll want to hunt for rogue processes.

    To identify them, click the % CPU column header to sort the process list by CPU power. If necessary, click again to change the direction of the sort so the arrow next to % CPU is pointing down, so those processes using the most CPU power are at the top. Be aware that the percentages in this column are by core (unlike the graph and numbers at the bottom), so a runaway app on a 4-core iMac could claim to be using as much as 400% in the % CPU column.

    Now watch the list for a while. If one process is sucking CPU power, you’ll see it at the top of the list. If it matches an app you’ve launched, quit that app to give other apps a chance at the CPU. That often solves your problem quickly. In the most extreme case, the process name will be in red, which means it’s not responding, at which point you can force quit it by selecting it and then clicking the X button at the left of Activity Monitor’s toolbar.

    You can use Activity Monitor to quit a process, even if it’s in a loop or not responding. You can also send a signal to a process to terminate it. If you attempt to quit a process you don’t own, you may be required to authenticate as an administrator.

    # In the process list, select the app or process you want to quit. An unresponsive process is marked with (Not Responding).
    # Click the “Force quit” button in the upper-left corner of the Activity Monitor window.
    # Choose one of the following options:

    * Quit: This is the same as choosing File > Quit within an app. The process quits when it’s safe to do so. If quitting the process could cause data loss or interfere with another app, the process doesn’t quit.
    * Force Quit: The process quits immediately. If the process has files open, you may lose data. If the process is used by other apps or processes, those apps or processes could experience problems.

    To see if a process is used by another process, choose View > All Processes, Hierarchically.

    Equally likely, though, is that the top process will be one you don’t recognize immediately, like backupd (Time Machine), mds or mdworker (Spotlight), photolibraryd or photoanalysisd (Photos), or kernel_task or WindowServer (core macOS functionality). You can’t (or at least shouldn’t) quit those processes manually, but at least you’ll know that things are slow due to a Time Machine backup running, Spotlight indexing new files, or Photos analyzing the images in your library. If one of these processes has gone nuts, the best solution is to restart your Mac.

    You might need more memory. To see how your memory is being utilized you would go to the Memory tab of Activity monitor where you can see the amount of system memory being used on your Mac. The Memory pane displays how much memory your Mac is using, how often it is swapping memory between RAM and your startup disk, and the amount of memory provided for an app and how much of it is compressed memory.

    * Memory Pressure: Graphically represents how efficiently your memory is serving your processing needs.
    Memory pressure is determined by the amount of free memory, swap rate, wired memory, and file cached memory.
    * Physical Memory: The amount of RAM installed.
    * Memory Used: The amount of RAM being used and the amount that’s immediately available.
    * Cached Files: The size of files cached into unused memory to improve performance.
    * Swap Used: The amount of space being used on your startup disk to swap unused files to and from RAM.
    * App Memory: The amount of space being used by apps.
    * Wired Memory: Memory that can’t be cached to disk, so it must stay in RAM. This memory can’t be borrowed by other apps.
    * Compressed: The amount of compressed memory in RAM.

    When your computer approaches its maximum memory capacity, inactive apps in memory are compressed, making more memory available to active apps. The Compressed Mem column indicates the amount of memory being compressed for an app.

    The key to understanding whether you need RAM is the Memory Pressure graph. The Memory Pressure graph lets you know if your computer is using memory efficiently.

    * Green memory pressure: Your computer is using all of its RAM efficiently.
    * Yellow memory pressure: Your computer might eventually need more RAM.
    * Red memory pressure: Your computer needs more RAM.

    If memory pressure is yellow, red, or has spikes, check to see if an app is using up memory and causing the memory pressure to increase. If you no longer need to have the app running, you should quit the app.

    Your computer’s memory pressure is accurately measured by examining the amount of free memory available, the swap rate, and the amount of wired and file cached memory to determine if your computer is using RAM efficiently.

    Activity Monitor is a powerful tool and we will talk about Energy, Disk and Network panes in a future issue. But if you are finding yourself staring at the beach ball a lot your first step should be to check out CPU and Memory panes in the Activity Monitor.

  • Dangers Of Liquid Spills

    If you are like me and like to multitask while surfing the web or getting work done online by having your morning coffee while browsing, then make sure you’re extremely careful. Let me warn you about the dangers of sipping and surfing at the same time.

    Liquid damage is one of the most of deceptive and destructive things that can happen to your machine. It is deceptive because the the machine may boot and function normally, but the corrosion has already begun, and it is only a matter of time until things start acting wonky. Also one really important thing to note is that spilling a beverage on your Macintosh voids warranty and AppleCare.

    Now you may ask if there is no visible sign of corrosion then how can you detect liquid damage? There are these things called LCIs. Liquid Contact Indicators, which are white, turn red when liquid makes contact. Once you have installed a latte on your keyboard you can’t uninstall it. However, the most important thing is not to use rice. It can clog really important components like fans designed to keep your mac running cool. The best thing you can do is drop it off at an Authorized Apple Reseller or Apple Store and talk to a technician about what needs to be replaced and/or if your data is still recoverable (always have a back-up).

  • Track Down Rogue Apps That Are Slowing Your Mac

    Does it seem like your Mac is running slowly? It’s always possible that you need more RAM, a speedy SSD to replace a slow spinning drive or even a new Mac. But you might just have a rouge app that’s hogging your Mac’s CPU. Here’s how to figure out if that’s the problem.

    The key is in your Activity monitor bundled right into every Mac. Open your Applications folder and scroll down until you see the Utilities folder. Open that to find and double-click Activity Monitor. Activity Monitor can seem a bit hectic because it lists every “process” running on your Mac. You’ll see processes for activities like Mail and Safari, some apps use multiple processes and macOS itself relies on a ton of processes at once as well.

    Notice in the picture below, at the top of the Activity Monitor there are buttons that provide access to different views: CPU, Memory, Energy, Disk and Network. Those views show the impact each process has on those aspects of the Mac. For now, I’ll focus on the CPU view that’s the default, but if you were trying to figure out why your MacBook Pro’s battery was draining so quickly, you’d look in the energy view for example.

    At the bottom of the CPU view is a graph of CPU load, and numbers that correspond to how much of that load comes from the system and much from the (apps you’ve launched). As long as the sum of those numbers stays under 100% most of the time, you’re probably fine. But if you’re near or at 100%, you’ll want to hunt for rogue processes.

    p{text-align: center;}. !http://blog.smalldog.com/images/5025.png!

    To identify them, click the % CPU column header to sort the process list by CPU power. If necessary, click again to change the direction of the sort so the arrow next to % CPU is pointing down, so those processes using the most CPU power are at the top. Be aware that the percentages in this column are by core (unlike the graph and numbers at the bottom), so a runaway app on a 4-core iMac could claim to be using as much as 400%in the % CPU column.

    Now watch the list for a while. If one of the processes is sucking CPU power, you’ll see it at the top of the list. If it matches an app you’ve launched, quit that app to give other apps a chance at the CPU. That often solves your problem quickly. In the most extreme case, the process name will be in red, which means it’s not responding, at which point you can force quit it by selecting it and then clicking the X button at the left of Activity Monitor’s toolbar.

    Equally likely, though, is that the top process will be one you don’t recognize immediately, like backupd (Time Machine). mds or mdworker (spotlight), photolibraryd or photoanalysisd (Photos), or kernel_task_ or WindowServer (core mac OS functionality). You can’t (or at least shouldn’t) quit these processes manually, but at least you’ll know that things are slow due to a Time Machine backup running, Spotlight indexing new files etc. If one of these processes has gone nuts, the best solution is to restart your Mac.

    If you can’t identify a single rogue app, or if the slowdown doesn’t seem to be related to any app, you might just need to have your Mac evaluated by a service technician or it just might be time to upgrade to a new Mac.

  • I’ve always been a gadget girl and I’ve always been attracted to technology and what it can do. I remember the day I got my first stereo system. It was the whole package and I’d waited a long time for it. Dolby surround sound with speakers as big as a small child, dual tape deck, 6-disk CD changer, VCR AND an equalizer. I completed the package with a 19″ CRT television that fit just right on top of my stereo cabinet. I watched movies and listened to CDs in all my stereo’s glory as it shook the walls of my 150sq ft bedroom. My friends and I even figured out how to win a radio contest while being in class at the same time through the stereo. We rigged the VCR and the radio together and programed the VCR to record the radio show at specific times. You had to listen to the station 3 times a day, write down the song they play at the specific time and at the end of 30 days whoever had the most correct answers won 100 CDs. To this day still the only radio contest I’ve won.

    My old stereo is now down to the two speakers and old receiver being used in my brother’s garage. The VHS and cassette tapes are long gone and a few CDs kick around collecting dust around my house. I tried to explain how complicated it was to make a playlist once to my kids. A moment met with limited success as I put together a dance mix for them in about 15 minutes on my computer which automatically synced to my daughter’s iPod and played wirelessly to my Sonos speakers.

    Now my focus has switched from how loud of a stereo can I have in my house to how cool of a house can I have! I tell Siri to turn on my bedroom light, I tell Alexa to turn on my living room and I can check on the air quality in my bedroom from anywhere. I couldn’t impress my kids with my cassette tape mix stories, but I sure can impress them by turning the lights off on Dad while he’s home and we’re at the grocery store.

    It’s no surprise that I have quickly become attached to and am slowly working on “home automation”:http://www.smalldog.com/category/Home_Automation in my home. We continue to expand our offerings at Small Dog Electronics both online and in our stores. Naturally it’s tough to troubleshoot customer issues without trying these products first hand, so I test as much product as I can!

    Thank you for reading Tech Tails!

    Emily Dolloff
    “emily@smalldog.com”:mailto:emily@smalldog.com

  • My granddaughter, Khadija, turned 18 this week. It was here in Kibbles that I first said “just call me gramps” and of course, my grandkids do just that. But to have a granddaughter choosing a college just seems impossible – aren’t I just like 25 years old?

    College is unbelievably expensive. I did not realize just how much it costs until I started looking at the schools Khadija is considering. It is no wonder this became a political issue. It is just not right that a kid should be saddled with such an enormous debt when they are just starting their lives.

    I just want to mention Small Dog Electronic’s privacy policy. From the very beginning we have pledged to never sell or give your personal information to anyone. You can see our complete privacy policy at http://www.smalldog.com/privacy/privacy-policy.

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

    Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

    _Don, Emily & Hadley_

  • Sensors, Sensors, Sensors

    Somewhere along the line, even basic devices started becoming loaded with sensors. iPhones (and indeed many smartphones) now come with a pretty wide array of sensors. This includes things like basic light sensors, proximity sensors, accelerometers, barometers, magnetometers, and of course, the Touch ID fingerprint sensor. Some of these sensors are pretty interesting and easy to explain, but others are complex in design and operation.

    One sensor that is typically very easy to use, even in analog circuits, is an ambient light sensor. Some types of light sensors use semiconductors and are more complicated, but one basic type of light sensor has been around for decades. It’s called a photoresistor. I took a basic electrical engineering course in college and one of our projects was to design a build a circuit with two LEDs and an op-amp. The circuit needed to show one LED when the room was bright, and flip to the other LED when the room was dark. There are actually at least two simple ways to use an op-amp for this, but the actual sensor used to gather information about the ambient light was a photoresistor. As the name might imply, the device simply changes its resistance based on how much light it is exposed to. More light means less resistance and less light means more resistance. Even simple circuits can be designed to accomplish complex tasks based on changing resistance like this.

    An accelerometer sensor is much more complex than a light sensor, especially in terms of physical construction. The ones used in something like an iPhone are extremely small, but the basic construction is the same. They use a mass that is dampened by some type of spring device. When the sensor is accelerated, the mass, which is free to move independently, lags behind the initial movement. This lag in movement is what we measure and how the accelerometer measures acceleration. The lag can be measured in a number of ways, but one of the simplest is by using a piezoelectric crystal. When the mass resists the initial movement, it exerts pressure on the piezoelectric crystal. I’ve talked about piezoelectric crystals before, but just to refresh, when a piezoelectric crystal is compressed or pulled it will create a voltage. This voltage can then be measured and the magnitude can be converted into some amount of acceleration. By using three independent masses locked into three axes a single sensor can measure acceleration in any direction.

    Proximity sensors can vary wildly in their construction and size. In high school I remember we used ultrasonic range finders in a number of our basic physics lab experiments. These devices emit an ultrasonic sound wave that propagates away from the device. When the sound wave hits an object, it bounces off of it and returns to the sensor. The internal circuitry is then able to determine the difference in time from the time the wave was sent to when it returned since the speed of sound is known. This allows it to compute the distance. A laser rangefinder works the same way, except it uses light (visible or infrared) instead of sound. Since light travels so much faster than sound, the circuitry must be capable of operating fast enough to measure the extremely short amount of time it may take for the light to be reflected back. Even a simple photoresistor could technically be used to create a kind of crude proximity sensor under certain conditions. If an object got close enough to the photoresistor, the ambient light would probably be reduced. This type of sensor wouldn’t really be able to determine distance, but it would be able to answer if something was close or not.

    A barometric sensor is basically a specific type of pressure sensor. Pressure sensors are actually not too complex because once again, they often use piezoelectric crystals. In fact, this is pretty much the most basic property of piezoelectric crystals. When they come under pressure, they produce a voltage, which can be easily measured. Depending on what kind of pressure you’re looking to measure, the sensor can be set up to respond to that type of pressure. For example, a barometric air pressure sensor would need to have some way to have a sealed, known quantity of fluid or gas (air in this case) and then be able to pressurize or depressurize that fluid based on the environmental trigger.

    In most cases, sensors are fundamentally simple, but engineers have come up with ingenious ways to miniaturize them so that we can enjoy the benefits of a large array of sensors in something as small as our phones. I eagerly await the day when Tim Cook announces that the iPhone will come with sensors able to detect Klingon warships under cloak. “One more thing” indeed!

  • Big Brother is Watching You

    Okay this article is admittedly partially a soapbox but I think most of you will agree. I believe that our congress sold out to the large internet providers like Comcast, AT&T, Verizon and others when both houses passed legislation to strip away internet privacy rules that prevented these same internet providers from SELLING your personal browsing history and personal information to anyone that wants to pay for it. And who might want it? All those guys with pop-ups and advertisements that mysteriously try to sell you whatever you might have been looking up on the internet. How did they know I was looking at Chicken shoes for Grace?

    Our elected representatives are charged with looking out for our best interests. In this case, they abandoned that and sold out to these companies. It is no accident that the same congress-people that voted for this bill, which btw, was written by those same internet company lobbyists, received huge campaign contributions from these companies. So, rest assured, it was not a big national emergency that required a new law to allow them to sell your information, nope, it was, as usual, money. There is no reason whatsoever that these companies should be selling your data, it is not in your interest and not in the national interest. It was a complete sell-out.

    But this is going to be the law and you need to be informed about how it may impact your internet usage and what you can do to protect your data.

    When I learned about this, one of the first things I did was to contact my internet service provider in Vermont, Green Mountain Access. I got an immediate response from my friends there saying not only were they not ever going to sell my data but that they reiterated their long standing privacy policy. They even posted a notice on their web site:

    ??Recent news has prompted many to reach out regarding changes in Internet privacy protection. Please be assured that Waitsfield and Champlain Valley Telecom/Green Mountain Access has stood for customer privacy from the beginning. We have no intention of selling or freely distributing private information.??

    So, one of the best ways to prevent your browsing history from being sold is to know your ISP and check into their privacy policy. If they do not explicitly say they will not sell your information, assume that they will.

    Okay, so I have Comcast down here in Key West so I am pretty sure they are on the other side of this discussion and would love to sell my boring web browsing history. Well, I don’t want them to regardless of how boring it is because, well it is mine, not theirs to sell. So, one way is to use a VPN connection. Fortunately, Small Dog Electronics maintains a VPN network and our ISP believes in privacy so using VPN makes sense. Even if you do not have a company VPN network there are many VPN networks that will give you access for a monthly fee. Do NOT use free VPN services — there really is not a free lunch!

    There are more secure browsers to try if you do not want to use a VPN network, such as Opera or Tor but they come with trade-offs in terms of ease of use and speed.

    Those are really the only options I can think of besides making your internet browsing really really boring. But the most important thing you can do is to write or phone your congressperson and express your outrage that they would sell you out and remind them that they work for you. This is not a little minor hiccup it is a major shift in privacy that certainly reminds me of Orwell’s 1984.

  • Four New Operating System Features

    Apple just released new versions of all its operating systems–iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS–fixing bugs, plugging security holes, and, best of all, adding a few new features. Here are four things you can do once you’ve updated.

    1: *Sleep better after using your Mac late at night*

    macOS 10.12.4 Sierra has gained Night Shift, a feature from iOS that automatically shifts the colors of the screen to the warmer end of the spectrum after dark. Night Shift may help you sleep better by reducing the amount of blue light that tricks your body into thinking it’s earlier than it is. Drinking less coffee late in the day works better for me.

    To set up Night Shift, open System Preferences > Displays > Night Shift and choose Sunset to Sunrise from the Schedule pop-up menu. Night Shift knows when the sun rises and sets wherever you are, but if you prefer, you can also set custom on and off times. (If you don’t see the Night Shift button in the Displays preference pane after upgrading to 10.12.4, your Mac is unfortunately too old to support Night Shift.)

    If you’re working with graphics at night, or if video looks odd, you can to turn off Night Shift manually. Do that either in the Displays preference pane or by scrolling down in Notification Center (click it in the upper-right corner of the screen) to see the Night Shift switch.

    p{text-align: center;}. !http://blog.smalldog.com/images/5018.png!

    2: *Find the AirPod that fell between the couch cushions*

    Apple’s wireless AirPods earbuds are cute, but they’re also easy to misplace. If you can’t find yours, iOS 10.3’s Find My iPhone app can help. Bring it up, tap the AirPods icon in the display, and then tap the Play Sound button to make them play a locator sound. If you’ve lost only one AirPod, you can mute the other so it’s easier to hear where the sound is coming from. Make sure to grab all that loose change from the couch cushions while you are at it!

    Note that Find My AirPods works only when in range of a paired iOS device, so it may not help if you lose an AirPod while running.

    p{text-align: center;}. !http://blog.smalldog.com/images/5020.png!

    3: *Don’t be “that person with the Apple Watch” at the theater*

    You’re in a darkened theater, at a movie or a play, and when you move in your seat or cover your mouth to cough, your Apple Watch’s screen turns on, annoying the people around you. Even worse is when a notification rolls in, causing the watch to make a sound. Embarrassing, we know. Happily, watchOS 3.2 adds Theater Mode, which turns on Silent mode and keeps the screen dark by disabling its standard “raise to wake” behavior.

    To enable Theater mode, open Control Center by swiping up from the bottom of the screen. Then tap the Theater Mode button, which is emblazoned with theater masks. After the performance, you’ll need to disable Theater mode manually by tapping its button again.

    If you do need to check the time surreptitiously (who knew this performance would go so long!), tap your Apple Watch’s screen, or press the Digital Crown or side button.

    p{text-align: center;}. !http://blog.smalldog.com/images/5021.png!

    4: *Ask Siri to find your car in a humongous parking lot*

    We’ve all been there. You parked at the stadium or mall, but got turned around while you were inside, and now you can’t find your car in the sea of automobiles. In iOS 10.3, you can now search for “parked car” in Maps, or just ask Siri, “Where did I park?”

    And if you ever lose your car at a place like Disney World, this feature alone will be worth the price of the iPhone.