Some of the Belkin items that were formerly exclusive for the Apple store are now available for everyone. One of the first that we tried is the Belkin Watch Valet. If you travel a lot, you know how inconvenient it is to disconnect your Apple Watch charging cable and take it with you. One of the big advantages of the Belkin Watch Valet is that it comes with its own charging cable. For the person that would like a stylish, well designed Apple watch dock, this is the item. It plugs into a USB charging port with a 4-foot cable. It has a watchband support, allowing the watchband to sit neatly out of the way while in use.

Grace found it a little “persnickety” when attaching her watch for charging, so it is important to make sure the watch is in the charging mode before leaving it to charge.

At $89 retail, it is a bit on the pricey side but it is stylish and you do get that charging cable which is $29 by itself.

We’re always talking about keeping good data backups here at Small Dog. You just never know what will happen to cause data loss or data corruption, and no matter how technical you may be it could still happen to you.

Earlier this week I was logging into my WordPress blog and instead of being greeted with the administration index page which is normally just a login window, I was greeted with Russian writing and some music. Fortunately, I’m meticulous about keeping WordPress updated and following all possible security precautions, including two-factor login authentication. So it didn’t appear as though anyone had actually gotten into my blog or the database.

Still though, I was stuck locked out of my blog. Time Machine to the rescue! I was able to get into my server and find recently modified files. There was only one: the index.php file for the WordPress administrator page. I fired up Time Machine went back a few days (those files shouldn’t ever change in normal use) and just replaced the whole directory with an earlier version. I was back into my blog within 10 minutes. Without a solid backup, it might’ve taken much longer. I might have needed to reinstall my entire blog suite and that would’ve taken the better part of a day.

How do these kinds of hacks happen? Generally they’re performed by bots crawling the web with known exploits of popular and widely installed web software such as WordPress. I truly believe that two-factor authentication saved me from a much bigger disaster. After this incident though, I’ve taken the additional step of turning on HTTP Basic Authentication for the entire admin directory. This should help add yet another layer of protection.

WordPress is a great blogging engine, but if you’re going to host it yourself, you really need to stay on top of updates and good security practices. Personally, I’d never run my own WordPress installation without two-factor authentication installed. It’s not a native feature of WordPress unfortunately, but it’s easy to install with a variety of plugins. Enabling HTTP Basic Auth requires some basic terminal skills and understanding of Apache (the web server software). All of the things I use helped make a potentially devastating hack a minor inconvenience. Happy blogging!

I am always amazed at the number of customers that still have AOL email accounts. What is even worse is that they are usually POP accounts and these customers are managing their email on multiple devices. I don’t mean to trash AOL too much, but if you are still using an AOL email account you should change. AOL just doesn’t work the way the rest of the world does, especially when it comes to handling attachments in email.

When you read an email message on your iPhone and delete it, do you have to trash it again when you check mail on your Mac or your iPad? Or is your email kept in sync so that if you delete a message on one system, it never even appears on the other?

If you fall into the first camp, your internet service provider probably has you stuck using an email technology called POP. Conversely, if you’re in the second camp, you’re probably using a different email technology called IMAP. Don’t worry what POP and IMAP stand for—they could be called Spot and Jane for all that it matters. What does matter is that if you’re using POP to read email on more than one device, you’re wasting time and effort and using old technology.

POP was designed in 1984 so that every email message would be downloaded from your mail server and immediately deleted from the server, so the only copy would exist on your Mac. But that made it impossible to check email from more than one computer, so POP’s designers made it possible for a message to be downloaded but not deleted, so it could be retrieved again by another computer. But the POP server has no way of knowing that the message was transferred multiple times, so each computer that gets it sees it as a fresh message, forcing you to delete or file it in each place.

In contrast, IMAP, which came along just a couple of years later in 1986, was designed to keep all your email on the mail server itself so multiple computers could access the same set of messages. And, most important, anything you do to a message—delete, file, or reply—in your email app on one computer also happens on the IMAP server, so if you check email from another computer, your email collection reflects all those previous actions.

Fast forward to today, where you might check email with your Mac at work, with your iPhone while at lunch, and on your iPad at home. If your internet service provider is using IMAP, anything you do on any of your devices is reflected on all the rest. As an extra bonus, you can search through all your email at any time, from any device, which is great when you realize you need the address for today’s meeting after you’re in the car.

But some ISPs still rely on POP, and for those of you who have had the same email account for many years, even if your ISP supports IMAP, they may not have switched you over. If your email is stuck in the POP past, call your ISP and bring your email into the 21st century. If they aren’t willing to help, remember that you can always use your free iCloud email account instead or sign up for a free account with Gmail or Yahoo.

For those who are shaking your heads because you don’t want some IMAP server in the cloud to hold the only copy of your precious email, rest assured that it doesn’t have to be that way. By default, Apple Mail downloads a copy of every message and keeps it locally on your Mac too, so even if something bad were to happen in the cloud, you’d still have your local copy and your backups of it.

Life is too short to waste time dealing with the same email messages on multiple devices. Computers and smartphones are supposed to make things easier, not harder, so if you’re not already using IMAP for email, do yourself a favor and switch Now!

I got my little Austin Healey Sprite out for a spin after checking the oil and tires. Amazingly, it hadn’t leaked oil during the winter. I guess replacing that oil pan gasket was worth the crawling under the car. Not all of the roads have been swept yet so motorcycling takes a bit of extra caution.

Last Saturday was Vermont Green-up day. It is a somewhat unique Vermont tradition. Thousands of volunteers from every corner of the state trek the roads with bright green bags and pick up a winter’s accumulation of trash. This year there were an estimated 21,000 volunteers, over 200 tons of trash collected including over 5000 tires. It is the 46th year for Green Up day.

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

Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

_Don, Emily, Hadley & Amy_

_Dear Friends,_

I was only home here in the Green Mountains for a couple days before I hopped on a plane and went to Austin (not Houston, Emily 🙂 ) for the annual Apple Specialist Marketing Coop’s conference. The weather in Austin was nice the couple of times I was able to leave the hotel but with all the meetings and events I mostly saw the inside of the hotel and had bad hotel food.

Nevertheless, it was great to re-connect with other Apple resellers, vendors and some Apple folks. I had good meetings and the trip was definitely worthwhile. I got home the next morning and as Grace got up to let Max out she says “don’t look out the window”. Of course, I immediately did and all I saw was white. I mentioned this to our store manager in Key West, Joe Lytton, and when I missed a call from him later he cracked “I thought you were outside making snowmen”.

Notwithstanding the momentary snow, spring is truly here and the big apple tree outside my window here at the office is full of blossoms ready to burst open. I got the old rototiller started and the garden is ready. Of course, the black flies are now out in full force, too.

This week’s Kibbles & Bytes exclusive features a fully loaded MacBook Pro. This Apple factory reconditioned MacBook Pro has a 1-year Apple warranty just like new models. We are bundling it with AppleCare which extends that 1-year Apple warranty to 3-years but also extends the 90-days of free Apple technical support to a full 3 years as well. The “**MacBook Pro is a 15-inch model**”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002218 that features the 2.8GHz i7 processor, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD drive. I only have three of these left so it is first come, first served on this bundle. The special price for Kibbles & Bytes readers only is “**$2699.99!**”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002218 That’s a $325 savings for the first three to grab this deal!