TopTen.plist #11: Geeky Halloween Costumes

As many of you may know, Halloween is a very big deal here at Small Dog Electronics. Every year we hold a company-wide costume contest where employees dress up and customers vote to select the winner. Even the dogs get in on the action! Check out the flickr gallery from last year here, and stay tuned to our blog for this year’s costumes, along with a poll for you to vote for your favorite.

If you still need a costume this year, we’ve highlighted a few of our favorite geeky costumes below.

I’d also like to announce a change to the TopTen.plist. Through the holiday season, we are condensing the list to a Top 5, starting this week. Hopefully this will enable a more concise version of each week’s theme. Thanks for reading, and without further ado: The Top 5 Geeky Halloween Costumes. (Click titles to view images.)

5. The Cat5 Ethernet Cable:

Though every Mac is wireless these days, Gigabit Ethernet is still king when it comes to reliability and transfer speeds. Originally featured on Engadget, this costume pays homage to perhaps the greatest network cable ever.

4. The iPhone 4:

iPhone costumes are nothing new. Since the device’s inception in 2007, an increasing number of Apple fans roam the streets dressed as Apple’s iconic piece of hardware each year. John Savio has taken the concept to the extreme with this costume however. Centered around a 75 pound LED LCD panel, Savio’s costume utilizes the video out capabilities of the iPhone 4 to create a working wearable iPhone 10 times the size of the actual device. via Cult of Mac

3. 8-Bit Girl:

This creative costume might not look like much from a distance, but upon closer inspection is an accurate emulation of the pixelated images of a by-gone era. Originally featured on Gizmodo around this time last year, this costume is a particular favorite in the marketing department.

2. The iPhone Dog:

This costume is part optical illusion and part geeky tribute to the 1st generation iPhone. This Apple fan designed this costume for their dog, incorporating an actual image of the pet on the phone’s screen to create an interesting effect.

1. iWear

Featured on Scoopertino yesterday, this faux-costume is essentially how Apple would release and package Steve Jobs’ unofficial “uniform.” Boasting the tagline “Think different, dress alike,” items in the line include a pair of Levi’s 501s, St. Croix mock turtleneck, New Balance 991s, and non prescription glasses. Though it would be hilarious were it real, plenty of Apple fans have taken matters into their own hands dressing as Jobs in years past.

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    Perhaps two of the most awaited features for legacy Office users are Visual Basic and the introduction of Outlook for Mac. While Microsoft’s Outlook-esque all-in-one app Entourage has offered functionality reminiscent of Outlook since 2000, Mac users have never been afforded a direct port of the software until now. With Outlook syncing and integration built in to the Home and Business version of 2011, Exchange-based users will certainly experience greater flexibility in managing their workloads.

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  • Vote For Your Favorite Costume!

    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

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  • 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,
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    *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.)
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    *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.

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  • _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!