Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 Released

It’s our Annual Halloween Costume Contest again, so we need your vote! View all costumes, from the sublime to the ridiculous, “at our blog here.”:http://blog.smalldog.com

Voting ends Sunday (Halloween) at midnight, so get to it and show your Halloween spirit!

If you were hoping to unwrap the colorless cousin of Apple’s wildly successful iPhone 4 sometime this holiday season, it would seem that you’re out of luck. “*Reuters*”:http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN2616379220101026 reported Tuesday that the white version of the iPhone 4 has been hit with delays yet again. When Apple last addressed the issue, the availability of the phone was pushed from July until “the end of the year.” Now, the company expects the phone to be available in 2011, assigning the fuzzy release date of “early next year.”

There are rumors abound speculating as to the phone’s continued delays. Initially, color quality and consistency in the manufacturing process seemingly impeded the phone’s availability. More recently however, theories surrounding camera performance have surfaced. Apparently–due to a flaw in the overall case design–the rear facing camera is having issues with light leaks, effectively ruining one of the phone’s most acclaimed features. Throughout all of this, Apple has remained largely reserved on the issue. Slyly bumping the phone’s availability back in the Apple Store, the company has not officially acknowledged any problems beyond a June 23rd “*press release*”:http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/06/23iphonestatement.html which cited “manufacturing challenges.”

Most recently, reports have emerged that Apple may not even intend to release a white iPhone 4 at all. With an annual update cycle, and substantial changes to the platform rumored for early 2011, releasing a “new” model of the iPhone 4 this late in the game may not be first on the agenda for the company. Will we, in fact, see a white iPhone 4 in 2011? I’d say that the odds are shrouded in as much mystery as the phone itself.

*UPDATE:* 10/28/10 – Apple has removed the white iPhone 4 from the Apple Online Store. The elusive phone still appears on the general iPhone 4 product page, but all mention–including the availability status–has vanished from the online store entirely. Is this the beginning of the end?

I am heading up to Montreal this weekend for a getaway with Grace. While our 43rd Anniversary was last week, I was in Austin so we decided to head north to take in a concert and have a nice dinner. It is nice to have such a cosmopolitan city so close.

Don’t scare anyone too much this Halloween weekend!

Thank you for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes.

Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,
_Don, Kali, Ed and Ben_

In the spirit of the season, this Mac treat involves Mac tricks. Here are three easy jokes you can play on your friends and family who use Macs. These jokes are fun in the office and also at home. Needless to say, you’ll need access to your targets computer. Please be respectful of their privacy while setting up these jokes.

*1.* Make your target think their Mac is weirdly frozen. (For this to really work, the Mac will need at least one application window open, such as a web browser.)
First, take a full screenshot of your target’s Mac desktop (by holding down the Command-Shift-3 keys all at once; the Command key is to the left of the space bar).

Next, set the target’s desktop image as the screenshot by moving the screenshot into the pictures folder, then browsing to System Preferences, then clicking the Desktop & Screen Saver button. Here you can easily select the screenshot as the desktop picture. When the turkey returns to their computer, they’ll eventually try to close or move the open application window. Of course, it will just be a static immovable photo that they’re trying to move! You can waltz to the rescue or let them puzzle over the problem.

*2.* This is a dead simple trick, but it works every time. If your target connects their keyboard and or mouse to their Mac, simply disconnect them but keep them propped up as if connected. They’ll figure it out in less than a minute–but for that minute they’ll be wondering what is going on!

*3.* The Universal Access panel in System Preferences has many options for radically transforming someone’s Mac. For example, under the *Seeing* tab in the Universal Access Panel, you can make the screen black on white, grayscale, or radically push up screen contrast. Likewise you can turn on the VoiceOver utility, or make the mouse pointer and cursor huge. These are all designed to assist in computer usability, but can be genuinely confusing if you don’t expect to see them. This is especially true for newer Mac users.

Have some tricks you’d like to suggest? Email them to “ed@smalldog.com”:mailto:ed@smalldog.com and I’ll post them to our blog “Barkings!”:http://blog.smalldog.com/

_Dear Friends,_

Election day is next Tuesday and I want to encourage all of our friends to get out and vote. I have voted in every election since I became eligible to vote. (I’ll credit my mom for that civics lesson.) I am a firm believer in democracy, but also know that if a large number of people do not get out to the polls we do not have true representative democracy. With most states now offering early voting, there is even less excuse for not voting.

The new MacBook Air is a winner! My wife has gotten one of the new 11-inch models and while she struggled with getting the iPad to do all that she wanted, she is relieved by the full features of the MacBook Air and its diminutive size. I had some time to play with it and I am not only amazed by the performance but am simply wowed by the advance of technology. Maybe it is just that I have read about small, powerful devices like this in science fiction books since I was a child, but to think about my first portable computer back in the 70s–an Osborne 1–and then look at this beautiful machine, it is simply astounding to me!

Back in the ’70s and ’80s, I was in the wind industry and I would do cash flow projections on big green ledger sheets. I would add and multiply rows and columns and it would take me literally a week to complete all the scenarios for a full set of projections. An employee back then and a Kibbles reader now, John Kueffener, came in one day with an Osborne 1 and showed me SuperCalc. It was over right then–I made John sell me the Osborne literally on the spot because what took me a week with pencil and ledger pad took a couple hours with the Osborne 1 running its 4 MhZ processor and with 64k (!) of RAM. The 5″ mono display and dual 5 1/4 inch disks provided storage. This first real portable computer weighed in at 24.5 lbs; about 10 times the weight of the way-more-powerful MacBook Air!

Even Apple’s first foray into the portable computer world is a behemoth compared to the MacBook Air. Introduced only about 20 years ago the Apple Macintosh portable weighed 16 pounds and sported a 16MHz processor with an unprecedented 1 Meg of RAM. When Apple puts out ads that say that “everything we’ve learned has come down to this” they are truly understanding just how visionary they have made this new computer.

Thank you to everyone that came out to our eWaste collection events in S. Burlington, VT and Manchester, NH. Both were a big success and I am confident that due to the over 100 tons of eWaste collected that we have retained our pride in saying that we continue to be the only electronics retailer that has recycled more electronics than we have sold. A special thank you to Kali for organizing two events and a big thank you to all the volunteers and to Apple for providing recycling services. It is a comfort knowing that we have environmentally recycled this huge load of electronics. Our plan is to do two of these events in each location each year, so look forward to our spring events!