Kibbles & Bytes Blog

Grace and I are planning a little motorcycle trip over to New Orleans before we head back to the green mountains in May. We traded our 2003 Victory for a 2004 BMW R1200C which is the same bike that Grace rode on our epic 2001 journey across the USA.

Do I miss the snow? Absolutely not. I am glad that my snow-crazed skiers got some fresh powder after a couple years of sparse snow.

Thank you for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes. All of us at Small Dog Electronics realize that ultimately it is you, our loyal customers, that pay our wages and we appreciate your loyalty and business!

Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

_Don, Emily & Hadley_

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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.

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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