Kibbles & Bytes Blog

  • Blizzards and Solar Storms

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    When I mentioned cosmic rays in my article last week, I actually had to restrain myself from taking a big tangent to talk about the effects of stronger rays on earth. These stronger rays are often referred to as “solar storms” or the more accurately, “coronal mass ejections”. These ejections are essentially concentrated amounts of matter (protons and electrons) as well as electromagnetic radiation. While they are generally associated with other solar activity such as solar flares and sunspots, the relationship isn’t yet fully understood.

    Our sun is always producing these CMEs. Depending on where the sun is in its solar cycle, there can be up to a few CMEs per day or as few as one CME every week. A CME can be produced basically anywhere on the sun’s surface so the odds that one will shoot out and directly hit earth are generally pretty low. However, it has happened, and despite our magnetosphere shield, the effects on the surface (especially to modern technology and infrastructure) can be severe.

    There have been several large CMEs that have impacted earth in recent years, but the largest ever recorded occurred in 1859. To a mostly non-electrified society, a CME poses relatively little risk. The most obvious indication that something has occurred would be aurorae at latitudes much closer to the equator than normal. As I discussed last week, aurorae are the result of high energy particles colliding with particles in the atmosphere. This energizes the particles and can cause luminescence.

    The effects of such events are wide ranging. For a society like ours that has a lot more electric gizmos, the effects can even be dangerous. The earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere shield the surface from the most harmful effects, but the effects become stronger the higher up you go. This makes satellites and aircraft particularly vulnerable. The high energy electromagnetic radiation can induce increased voltages in electrical equipment that can cause failures or even fires. During these CMEs communication that relies on satellites can be disrupted. Electrical grids with their miles of transmission wires act like antennae for the electromagnetic radiation. This can easily cause them to overload and destroy key components like transformers. If a CME the size of the 1859 event hit earth today, the damage would likely in the billions of dollars.

    There isn’t much that can be done to protect equipment from these electromagnetic storms, but Faraday cages can offer some protection. A Faraday cage is basically just a metal cage into which you place electronics to be shielded from electromagnetic radiation. If the cage wires are thick enough, and the holes smaller than the electromagnetic radiation wavelength, it will block that radiation from getting inside. If you’ve ever tried to use a cell phone in an elevator without success, this is why. The cell phone is transmitting electromagnetic radiation and the elevator is an approximate metal cage that absorbs the radiation before it can escape.

    So far we haven’t been faced with a CME with the same strength as the one that occurred in 1859, though they do still happen. In July 2012 there was an event that would’ve rivaled the 1859 event but it missed earth. Smaller events do occur all the time, however, and can interrupt communications and electrical grids. All things equal, I think I’ll take a blizzard over a big solar storm.

  • iPhone's Panorama Mode

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    I’m lucky enough to be in Key West this week work on some improvements at our store here. The temperatures are a bit cool for Key West this week, but at least I wasn’t around for the blizzard that hit Vermont earlier in the week.

    While I’ve been down in Key West I’ve been mixing up work and play, and have been taking advantage once again of some amazing features on my iPhone. I continue to be amazed with the quality of photos I can take with this phone. As I’ve been using my phones camera feature more than usual over the last month with my travels I thought now is a great time to talk about panorama mode in the iPhone. This feature has been around for several generations of phones so it’s not new, but until you try to fit in a photo of a breathtaking sunset or try to capture in a photo of just how vast the water around you is you probably haven’t needed to capture on camera more than what’s just directly in front of you.

    Since iOS 6 phones have been able to use panorama, so I’ll start with a few tips. First you’ll want to hold your iPhone in portrait orientation. Open the Camera app and swipe left three times on the viewfinder to switch to panoramic mode. This is same process you use to switch from photo to portrait. You’ll want to start with the left side of the image in the view finder, hit the round start button (same button you hit to take a photo) and move the iPhone smoothly and slowly continuously to the right to capture the scene. If you move your hands too fast you will get a blurred image, alternatively if you happen to bounce your hand or wiggle your hands too much you will also get a distorted image. If you move up and down too much during the shot you will get black jagged lines in the image. Sometimes it takes a few attempts to get the image right, so hang in there!

    Here are a few tips. Your iPhone will stop taking the panorama automatically when the arrow reaches the end of the line, but you can stop taking the panorama photo at any time before then. So if you don’t want an unsightly tree or the group of people taking photos next to you in your shot you can easily cut them out.

    While we generally think of panoramas as wide vistas, you can also use the iPhone’s panorama mode to capture vertical panoramas as well like a large tree, skyscrapers and more. You can take the photo the same way you did with the phone in portrait mode, the only difference is that you simply hold the phone horizontally.

    Panorama mode works by combining a lot of separate photos into a single image. You can take advantage of that fact by creating some interesting effects:

    You can have someone appear in both the left and right sides of a panorama. After you have panned past the person on the left side, have them run around behind you and have them jump to the right side of the scene! If your in the passenger sear of a car, try capturing a panorama of an interesting screen by taking advantage of the cars motion… the photos come out pretty cool!

    Not every panorama photo comes out the way you might envision, sometimes that’s the fun and frustration of photos! I’ve gotten some pretty silly photos just from accidentally jostling my phone unexpectedly or having someone or something suddenly jump into a photo.

  • _Dear Friends,_

    I got a panicky phone call from a dear friend about her computer but the stress was really about the 3 feet of snow that had fallen and all the shoveling that she had to do. But the skiers were happy and the big dump was one of the largest in Vermont history. Emily is visiting down here in Key West and we are in the midst of a cold wave with temps way down in the 50s. Some of the folks here are pulling out their down for this one.

    Apple hit a milestone this week with the common stock closing at an all-time high and the world’s most valuable company hitting a market value of $736.93 billion! Bigger is not necessarily better and I have noticed the subtle and not-so-subtle changes in Apple over the years as they have grown. It is harder to get decisions and it seems like Apple is a giant steamship who can only turn slowly where in the past they were a bit lighter on their feet and turned like a Segway.

    With the rumors running rampart on the iPhone 8 with OLED screen and new iPads on the horizon it seems that the market is bullish on Apple. I am, too, as Apple continues to innovate and lead. One often overlooked area is Apple services which is a huge growth are for the company. Whether it is the App store, iTunes music store, Apple Pay or any of the other things that fall into Apple services, this area of Apple is growing very rapidly and very profitably for Apple.

    This week’s “**Kibbles & Bytes exclusive**”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002616/kibbles-bytes-exclusive-special is your Apple HomeKit starter kit. If you haven’t used HomeKit you are missing out on some seamless home automation. We are adding more and more Apple HomeKit compatible products but this starter kit includes an Apple TV which acts as the hub so you can remotely “control your home, an August lock, a HoneyWell Lyric thermostat and a Philips Hue white and color starter kit.”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002616/kibbles-bytes-exclusive-special With this gear you can control some lights, lock and unlock your door and set the temperature when you are home or remotely when you are out and about. Need any help installing? We are there to help by phone or in person. This start-up Apple HomeKit bundle is “**$679.99!**”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002616/kibbles-bytes-exclusive-special

  • It is spring break down here in Key West so the place is jammed with college kids. The beaches are crowded and so are the restaurants and bars so it is a boon for the local economy if you forget about the rowdiness. Emily is coming down next week to be one of the spring breakers. Well, okay, not really. She is coming to work on laying out the newly remodeled store here in Key West!

    Meanwhile, in Vermont it is sugaring season and people are thinking about starting seedlings for their gardens. Usually, town meeting day (one of the last refuges of true democracy) is the day to start your tomato plants. Apparently, my friends in Vermont are in the typical spring roller coaster of beautiful sunny days, followed by freezing cold, followed by snow, followed by rain, followed by deep rut mud.

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

    Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

    _Don, Emily & Hadley_

  • All Natural, Organic Radition

    You can’t buy it at a farmer’s market, but it’s all around us. Last week I discussed I discussed the electromagnetic radiation spectrum in a fairly broad, general sense (it’s a big spectrum). Early on, I made a passing reference to natural forms of electromagnetic radiation, especially natural radio waves, x-rays and gamma rays. As I also discussed, visible light, as well as infrared and UV, are also electromagnetic radiation, but since they’re visible, I think there’s less need to really explain their natural sources.

    Let’s start with conventional radio waves. Recall that these waves are typically categorized as those with frequencies ranging from about 3kHz to 300GHz. Another thing worth mentioning is that just like visible light, all electromagnetic radiation travels at the speed of light. Now, on to natural radio waves. Artificial radio waves were first discovered in the early days of electricity experimentation. As anyone who’s experimented with electricity will tell you, one of the inevitable effects is creating a spark. These early experimenters learned that these sparks actually created radio waves that could be picked up by a receiver device. Early radios used this phenomenon to function and they were often called spark-gap transmitters. They quickly fell out of use though because they tend to transmit over a very broad band, which makes interference inevitable. Earth naturally creates its own spark gaps as well during lightning storms. Just like the tiny spark gaps in early radio transmitters, a bolt of lightning will also create a radio wave, albeit a broad band and chaotic one.

    The other primary sources of naturally occurring radio waves are astronomical objects. These need not even be local objects, since radio waves travel at the speed of light. The universe is pretty old, and while our neck of the woods has been relatively quiet in the past few billion years, the rest of the universe has been ??very?? busy. Our greatest local source of astronomical radio waves is the sun. In fact, all stars will give off radio waves, being the hot balls of nuclear fusion that they are. Other sources include supernova remnants, pulsars, star-forming regions as well as echoes from the Big Bang itself.

    All of that stuff is just radio waves though–pretty harmless. We do study and listen to them though, to learn more about the universe beyond what we can see with telescopes. From an astronomical perspective, most of the things that generate radio waves also generate natural x-rays. Another minor source of local naturally-occurring x-rays are cosmic rays. This is where things get a bit confusing, so let me clarify some of this. X-rays as we’ve already learned are electromagnetic radiation. As such, they are not composed of matter. They are essentially the propagation of an electromagnetic field. They require no specific medium for transport (air, water, vacuum) and in the case of higher energies, can pass straight through solid materials. ??Cosmic rays?? on they other hand are not rays in the same sense. Cosmic rays are actually composed of charged particles (protons and high-energy atomic nuclei) which are physical.

    Cosmic rays interact with the earth’s atmosphere and magnetosphere in a variety of ways. This is difficult to describe without diagrams, but I’ll try my best. Because cosmic rays are charged particles, they are subject to the influence of electromagnetic fields, including the giant magnetic field that surrounds the entire earth. The shape of this field (with poles situated at roughly the north and south geographic poles) channels and directs most of these particles away from the earth’s atmosphere and surface. However, particles are able to trickle down to lower altitudes at the poles. When these particles interact with molecules in the atmosphere, many things can happen, including generation of x-rays, gamma rays and other secondary particles (muons, alpha particles, electrons and neutrons). This is also what causes the polar luminescence known as the “northern lights”.

    So that’s one way gamma rays can be generated naturally. Almost all astronomical sources of gamma rays (like x-rays) are screened by our atmosphere and magnetosphere. If this weren’t the case, we wouldn’t be alive as a species. Gamma rays are also generated via gamma decay of naturally occurring radioisotopes. There are even rare conditions that occur on earth that can create gamma rays including lightning strikes and so-called “terrestrial gamma ray flashes”. Both of these are the result of specific conditions in the atmosphere resulting in the availability of natural high-energy voltages. These events are particularly rare though, and are primarily of interest from a theoretical perspective. The actual amount of danger presented by these natural terrestrial gamma rays is very low. Artificial sources of gamma rays such as nuclear fission are far more dangerous because of the amounts of radiation involved.

    High-energy electromagnetic radiation is not only dangerous to biological material but it can also wreak havoc on electronic systems. Semiconductor junctions are particularly susceptible to ionizing radiation (which includes high energy gamma rays). The mechanisms at work are far too complex to explain here, but on a macro level, the issue becomes that if components in digital circuitry (semiconductors) cannot be relied upon to maintain their bits (0s and 1s) the entire circuit becomes useless. In April of 2010, the Voyager 2 space probe (well out of our solar system at that point) experienced some data formatting issues. Those with more active imaginations postulated that the probe had been “attacked” by aliens, but engineers traced the problem to a single bit that had been flipped by ionizing radiation.

    I think I might try to come up with a simpler topic next week, because this article even has my head spinning. Hopefully I’ve been able to at least illuminate a bit more about electromagnetic radiation for you.

  • Mark and Navigate

    Most of us have used and know how to search in Maps where specific locations, maybe you even use Siri to help you look up directions for places you are going. But have you ever wanted or needed directions when you did not have an address or a name of a business? On a recent vacation to Disney I had an opportunity to use Maps without having a specific address address. If you’ve ever been to a large theme park or just a big venue you know how hard it can be to navigate back to a location. Amongst a maze of unnamed aisles or streets of vendors and endless lines of cars in parking lots it can be easy to get twisted around.

    Luckily, the Maps app in iOS has you covered for these situations with a feature that allows you to mark any location and then get directions back to that point. It’s easy to use and provides several enhancements, but like many things in iOS, you might not be aware of these features from the beginning.

    First, marking locations might be easier for you if you use the satellite view in Maps. If you’re in the standard Map view that shows just the street, tap the “i” button in the upper-right corner and you can get the satellite view. I discovered this feature by accident myself. OK, it wasn’t me, it was my 6 year old! Sometimes kids really are the best teachers.

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    Once in the satellite view, position the map over the area you want to navigate to, and then pinch to zoom in. To mark the location, press and hold the exact spot. You can do the same thing in the regular Map view, so don’t feel like you have to be in the satellite view to do this. A pin will appear on the map at the marked location. On the iPad, a panel appears on the left side of the screen with controls and more options. With the iPhone these options appear at the bottom of the screen. From this panel:

    **Get directions:** Tap directions to start navigating to the marked location. The button defaults to tell you how long a drive will be but you can easily switch to walking distances and other means of transportation. You can also tap the route summary to see more details and perhaps choose a different route if that option is available.

    **Move the marker:** To reposition the marker slightly, tap edit location; for a more significant change in location press and hold on a new spot.

    **Share the marker:** If you’re trying to explain to others how to get to you or your marked location, tap the share icon and then an app like messages or mail will appear so you can send the link to your directions.

    **Delete the marker:** Simply tap on remove marker

    **Make a favorite:** For a marked location that you might want to use repeatedly, tap add to favorites and give it a name. After that, you’ll be able to search for the location by name. Maps automatically syncs your favorites via your iCloud account. You can then access your location from another device at a later date if you want.

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    As I mentioned in the beginning of my article I utilized many of these features on my recent vacation. I literally would have been lost without them! I have navigation built into my car, but found Apple Maps to be significantly more useful when driving as it provided me with multiple routes for most destinations and was fairly accurate for traffic issues and potential faster routes. I easily navigated back to our parked car when we left the theme park also easily located points of interest in our surrounding area. Living in a rural state I don’t always get to use all the features in my devices and apps. It was comforting to know thanks to my devices this country girl could make it in the hustle and bustle of busy cities!

  • You're My Firewall

    A firewall is a piece of software or hardware that monitors incoming and outgoing network traffic using rules set up by the user or administrator. You can go and buy a fancy 3rd-party firewall, but Apple has one built into MacOS. With this built-in software firewall you can set what applications can have incoming and outgoing connections.

    Most of the time you don’t have to worry about a firewall because MacOS doesn’t have potentially vulnerable services listening to the outside by default. However, depending on what 3rd-party software you have or if you are running a web server, applications could potentially be communicating in the background with the outside so you might want to limit communication for security reasons.

    Your built in firewall settings are found in the *Security and Privacy* pane in *System Preferences.* At the most basic level, all you have to do is click the button to turn on the firewall. Now that the firewall is on, click the button *Firewall Options.* Here you have some options to customize your level of protection. We will be discussing the firewall settings in MacOS Sierra, but the settings are similar for earlier operating systems.

    The first is *Block all incoming connections* which blocks everything except basic internet services. Most of the time you won’t need lock the system down that much, but the option is there.

    Next is *Automatically allow built-in software to receive incoming connections.* This is referring to the apps that are included with MacOS, so this usually a good thing to leave checked as this software has been designed with security in mind by Apple.

    The next option is *Automatically allow downloaded signed software to receive incoming connections.* Digitally signed software is software that contains a code which MacOS uses to verify the developer. Apple maintains a list of developers that it considers trustworthy so this is typically a safe option to leave checked as well.

    The last option is *Enable stealth mode.* When this is enabled your computer will not acknowledge attempts to access this computer from the network by test applications using ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) methods such as ping. Enabling this helps keep you safe by making a DOS (Denial of Service) attack method known as PoD (ping of death!) useless to the attacker.

    In the middle of the menu box you can see big box with a plus and minus box at the bottom. This is where you can choose specific apps you that want to add or remove network access to or from. This would primarily be used if you have an application that you trust but is not from a trusted developer and you need it to have network access.

    Most users don’t have to worry about a firewall. Since the MacOS is so secure most attacks are done through social engineering. This is when someone tricks you into revealing your password, basically making you open the door for them either by fear or manipulation. Software and hardware can help, but only you can prevent this type of security breach by not revealing your password to untrusted persons.