ByEmily Dolloff

Dear Friends,

It’s Emily, taking over for Don this week who’s making his way back to the Green Mountains from Sturgis. I was fortunate last week to spend a week away from the office as well and had a great week of camping with my family. We stayed at a great campground about an hour from our house and played tourist for a week. My kids got to go river tubing, swimming, hiking and a few day trips to visit some great local spots around Vermont. One of the stops we made was to the Quechee Gorge and to VINS. Living in Vermont I find that it’s easy to take for granted some of the great places to visit. My kids really enjoyed seeing all of the birds at VINS and reading about their individual stories on how they came to VINS. We even found a bird that was injured right here in Waitsfield and able to live out the rest of it’s years as one of their ambassadors.

One of my adventures during vacation was to do some back to school shopping for my kids. While my oldest was thrilled to get tons of new clothes and a new backpack, the idea of school beginning again took a bit of the excitement of shopping away. We are seeing a lot of mixed feelings from students in our stores as well, so my daughter is not alone! While the idea of school starting again is not on the top of many kids and adults list for that matter, it is good to know there are a lot of great deals out there, including deals at Small Dog. We still have a few weeks left to our Dog Days of Summer sales and if you’re in the South Burlington area some great events planned for our flagship location. This coming Saturday, August 15th, stop into any of our retail stores for exclusive one day only deals on Seagate or for Kibbles readers, order some great deals online!

Emily’s deal of the week! Buy this MacBook Pro with Retina display and Applecare, we will give you a Seagate 1TB slim drive for FREE. Just in time for back to school, send your student or yourself off to class in style.

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  • Summer Product Testing with Will and Dean

    Summertime has been treating us well here at Small Dog. The weather has been a little less than ideal with colder temps and wetter conditions than usual, but when the sun is out, we are all sure to make the most out of it. With so many outdoor enthusiasts working under one roof, we try not to be too biased when it comes to the accessories we carry, but let’s face it, we have ALOT of fun gear for the outdoors.

    With all of the fun summer products in, Will and I decided to get our hands dirty and put them to the test. We see Vermont as being the ultimate testing grounds with all of its rugged trails and deep swimming holes. We had the perfect products at our disposal to test against the typical Vermont weekend.

    We found the perfect swimming hole to do our testing and started the session by putting on some music. In came the “**Outdoor Tech Turtle Shell 2.0**”:http://www.smalldog.com/search?search=turtle+shell. I have written about this speaker in the past and if you have read any of those articles, then you know that I am a fan. I will recap and say that some of my favorite features of this product are its long-lasting charge, its versatility (hooks for hanging, ability to be mounted on handlebars, etc.) and of course, its durability. This little speaker was put to the test when I (accidentally) dropped it while attempting to climb with it in hand. I also did not feel too on edge as it took a few splashes while playing near a waterfall. The reader should note that the speaker is water resistant and not water proof, meaning that it can take on some water but not full submersion.

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    With music playing in the background, Will was off playing with the “**LifeProof Nuud Case**”:http://www.smalldog.com/search?search=lifeproof+nuud for his iPhone 6. I think that we can both agree that this was the most fun product of the day to play around with. We found that we were able to push the limits of the iPhone 6 even further, especially when it came to taking photos and recording video. LifeProof prides themselves on the durability of their “**cases**”:http://www.smalldog.com/category/?mmfg%5B0%5D=LifeProof and the biggest draw for us that day was the waterproof capabilities. Will took this feature on headfirst (literally) and into the water he went, LifeProof case in hand. Before he took the plunge, Will had already tested the case without the phone in the case and it is highly recommended that you do the same. With the phone fully submerged, Will was able to capture some really great photos and video of a rarely documented underwater world. We also played around with some of the cool features of video on the iPhone such as slowmo and that provided some very interesting results which we will be sure to post on our “**Facebook**”:https://www.facebook.com/hellosmalldog, “**Twitter**”:https://twitter.com/hellosmalldog/ and “**Instagram**”:https://instagram.com/hellosmalldog/ soon.

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    As Will wanted to do more swimming and less hand-held recording, we remembered that we brought along the all-terrain tripod, the “**Joby GripTight GorillaPod Stand**”:http://www.smalldog.com/product/86939/joby-griptight-gorillapod-stand-black. The great thing about this tripod is its adaptable design. With flexible, wrappable joints and grippy rubber feet, the Joby GripTight GorillaPod was made for days like these. We simply found an odd-shaped rock to grip it to, mounted our iPhone with the LifeProof Nuud case still attached and hit record.

    Stop by any of our “**retail stores**”:http://www.smalldog.com/retail/visit-us-in-store-at-any-of-our-locations and and let us show you further on how these products to enhance your summer fun.

  • Driving to work this week I have noticed several Maple trees turning color already, a cold reminder that summers in Vermont will never be long enough. In looking at this weekend’s forecast and early next week it seems hot and humid weather will be making it return so I won’t let a few confused Maple trees get me down on summer just yet!

    Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

    _Don, Emily, Dean, Scott_

  • Monitor Your Mac

    Back when I had my very “**first computers**”:https://www.google.com/search?q=toshiba+t3200&espv=2&biw=1471&bih=927&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0CDYQsARqFQoTCMzKpNakpscCFQE1PgodOXoLxA, one feature they always had was a light that indicated disk activity. As the disk was written to or read from, a light would flash. I became very used to this light as an indicator of whether or not my computer was working hard. If it was, that might explain why it was acting sluggish.

    Eventually computers stopped shipping with those hard drive activity lights. I guess manufacturers figured that machines got so fast it wasn’t worth showing that information. It’s also possible that it went the way of the oil pressure gauge in cars (my Subaru doesn’t even have a coolant temperature gauge). Either way, I missed that light. I like knowing what my computer is doing.

    Fortunately there are ways to get that information, plus much more, and all displayed in a convenient way. When I was using Linux as my primary desktop I added in a number of menu bar widgets to monitor network traffic, memory usage, CPU temperature, and CPU clock speed. The menu bar in the version of Linux I was using is almost identical to the menu bar on OS X. Like in OS X, unless I had a full screen app, that menu was visible.

    Now that I pretty much exclusively use my Macbook Air though, I was once again without a way to easily monitor system functions. About a month ago I decided enough was enough and went looking for a solution. I found exactly what I was looking for in “**iStat Menus 5**”:https://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/.

    This thing is really sweet. If there’s something your machine is doing, this app will let you monitor it. CPU temperature, fan speed (and fan speed control), detailed battery status, voltage at various sensors, network up/down traffic, detailed power consumption stats (Mavericks and Yosemite only), and so, so much more! It displays all this information in the menu bar so it’s available at a quick glance no matter what you’re doing. One thing I really like about it is the fact that it gives several different display options for each monitor widget. If you prefer to have your memory usage shown as a graph, you can do that. If you’d rather see it as a number showing free memory, you can have that too. If you’re not interested in showing the icon for CPU temperature at all, just remove it. The display is completely customizable. If you click on any of the menu bar widgets you get a huge amount of additional detail and graphs.

    My favorite widgets to have are CPU temperature, network up/down activity and speed, load average, memory usage mini graph and HDD status. The battery widget is also worth checking out since it shows a lot more information than the default battery indicator like charge/discharge cycles and discharge graphs.

    The app itself costs $18 for a single license and $25 for a family pack of 5. They have a 15 day trial which is what I used first to see if it could actually meet my (pretty demanding) needs. In an age of cheap $4.99 or $0.99 apps, $18 might seem like a lot, but after using iStat Menus for almost a month, I don’t think I could live without it. I would highly recommend giving it a try if you ever wished you had more information about what your computer was doing.