ByMike Moffit

Dear Friends,

There is snow on the ground at my house, and I have had to get the winter coats out. However, a warm spell is coming this weekend, so I’ll probably get one last ride in before the long winter.

I stayed up late on Tuesday to watch the election returns and hear President Obama’s speech. It was one of the best speeches I have heard, and I was very proud of our country and the millions of people who voted in the election.

I am giving the keynote presentation at the Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility on Wednesday, and have been thinking a lot about what to talk about. My friend Ken Squire, who owns our local radio station, WDEV, wants to carry the presentation live, and I told him that will be a guarantee that I will screw it up somehow.

As I look back on my business career of over 40 years, the one thread that has been consistent has been that I am motivated by corporate responsibility. When a business “incorporates” — if you look at the Latin base for that word — it means that you “create a body.” A business is a body in society and it has a much greater footprint than any individual. It has buildings, it creates waste, it hires workers, it provides useful products and services. With that greater footprint comes a greater responsibility, and that is the basis upon which I see socially responsible business. Businesses can be enormous agents of positive change and have such a vital impact upon workers that this responsibility is an essential part of our approach to business.

Fortunately, I have a great team of people here at Small Dog Electronics, starting with Hapy, my son and partner, who also ascribe to this philosophy of measuring our success in equal measure by People, Planet and Profit. At our weekly management meetings, each of the managers has an opportunity to make suggestions on how we can do better with our commitment to people and planet and we have adopted many of the ideas presented. As a business that operates on razor thin margins (the new iPad mini, as an example, carries a 7% margin), it is vital that profit is also one of our measures, because without profit it is impossible to fulfill our obligations to people and planet.  

During my talk on Wednesday, I want to talk about how it is easy to be socially responsible if your company is very profitable, but that the real challenge is how to maintain that commitment to People and Planet when profit margins are slim. I think that the socially responsible business movement will never reach its full potential unless traditionally low-margin businesses like the corner store can see how their business can also act in a socially responsible manner.   

We have a great selection of Apple Certified Reconditioned (refurbished) MacBook Pros with both 17-inch and 15-inch models in stock right now. These models all carry the same 1-year Apple Warranty as new Macs and they are eligible for AppleCare Protection Plan as well.  If you are looking for a new laptop, these MacBook Pros can save you some change!  

View the 15-inch model here and the 17-inch models here.

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  • MAC TREAT #192: Forgotten Your Login Password?

    Have you ever forgotten a password? I know that I have. With all of the increased security measures that go into making a password these days like upper/lower case letters, numbers and now symbols it is getting harder to remember it all. Luckily for you, I am going to talk about how to reset your login password on your *Mac running OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion).*

    __A word of caution: this method requires you to use Terminal and write a small amount in sudo. If you do not feel comfortable doing that, don’t proceed. Using Terminal can quickly damage your machine faster than fixing it if you don’t know what you are doing. Please use this method at your own risk; Small Dog is not accountable for any damage done by following these steps. You can always bring your machine to any of our retail locations where we have certified Apple Technicians who are trained to reset passwords.__

    With that disclaimer out of the way, let’s get into the nitty gritty and reset your password.

    *Step 1: Reseting The Machine*
    The easiest way to accomplish this is to press and hold the power button for about 10 seconds until your computer shuts down — this is sometimes known as a hard boot or reset. I don’t recommend using this method to shut your computer down all the time. In fact, it is always best to let the operating system shut the computer down if that option is available to you.

    *Step 2: Booting Into Recovery Partition*
    Before powering up press and hold the *command* and *R* keys. Then with your other hand press the power button to turn the machine on. I recommend doing this in that order because if you aren’t fast enough you will miss the small window of time when the computer recognizes these key combinations and you will have to start over again.

    *Step 3: Accessing Terminal*
    Go to the *Utilities* drop down menu and select *Terminal*. This will open up a new Terminal window for you to begin typing in — but don’t type anything yet.

    *Step 4: Accessing Reset Password Utility*
    In the Terminal window type “resetpassword” without the quotation marks and hit enter. This will bring up the *Reset Password* utility in a new window. That little bit of sudo is all you need to type in Terminal. I told you it was a small amount, but if you go on using Terminal as a text editor to write your next term paper (don’t do it) you can seriously mess up your machine.

    *Step 5: Resetting The Password*
    We are now in the home stretch.
    * Select which Volume Hard Drive you need to change the password for. Most people will have just one hard drive to select from. If you have more than one then you should know why because you probably did it.
    * Select the user whose password you want change from the drop down menu.
    * Enter a new password for that user.
    * Reenter the new password for that user.
    * If you want you can enter a hint for that password but it is not required.
    * Hit the *Save* button in the bottom right of the window.
    * A new window will pop up confirming the password change.

    *Step 6: Finishing Up*
    At this point your password has been reset. Now we just need to reset the computer to boot back into the operating system. To do this, go to the *Apple* drop down menu in the top left of the screen and select *Restart*. Your computer will restart itself and you can enter your new password at the login screen. Ta-Da; password reset success!

  • The biggest event of the fall coincides with the start of hunting season here in Vermont, and that is the Cabot Hosiery Mills annual sock sale over in Northfield. Literally thousands of people come from all over Vermont to stock up on socks during this sale that is held this coming weekend and next. In its 22nd year, the sock sale is a community event.  

    The last few years, Grace and I have been able to ride our motorcycles over to the sale. Since the weather forecast is cooperating again and Grace will be back from Costa Rica on Saturday, who knows?

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

    Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,
    _Don, Kali, Mike and Stephanie_

  • REVIEW | OmniGraffle

    One of the first tasks given to me when I started my job in the marketing department here at Small Dog was to create banners for the different categories of products on our website. Since the structuring of these was a bit complicated, I decided to devise a system that would rework the organization of those categories.

    I started out by using just a pen an paper to keep track of all the categories, but soon I ran out of room. After looking at my diagram, I remembered a program that I used back in college for laying out the flow of a website called Visio by Microsoft. Unfortunately, this is a Windows-only program (and I don’t have Parallels or a copy of Windows on this machine), so this led me to find a Mac equivalent.

    I stumbled upon OmniGraffle, which many of you have probably heard of and/or used in the past, as it used to come with a new Mac. It is a fairly useful tool for creating diagrams, whether you are in need of creating a quick website wireframe or a comprehensive technical diagram.

    As I mentioned before, I first stumbled upon OmniGraffle when I was looking for a Mac equivalent to Visio. OmniGraffle seemed to have the tools I desired for creating website wireframes. Tools like shapes and lines that stay connected when moving elements around. My needs were rather minimal, but OmniGraffle offers so much more on top of that. It has a feature that allows you to automatically organize the document, set up styles for shapes, colors, and types of lines — it’s very feature-rich to say the least.

    It comes in two versions: Standard and Pro. The Standard version has essential tools like mini inspectors, bezier lines and graphing tools but the Pro version has some extra neat features like combining shapes, support for Visio and SVG exporting, to name a few. I find that these extra features can be useful on a case-by-case basis but aren’t necessary, so for most people, the Standard version will suffice.

    It’s meant for the Mac, but Omni has taken this program one step further and put OmniGraffle on the iPad as well. I think this is a great feature for professionals who are on the go giving presentations but also use a workstation in the office. Of course, integration is seamless between the two because they’re made by the same company, but it goes without saying that the mobile version isn’t as feature-rich as the Mac versions. You still have shapes, lines and means to connect the two — that’s all you really need. You can also freehand it if you’re in need of a quick mockup — speed and ease of use are your friends when you are on the go, after all. No word yet on how exactly it works with the iPad mini, though I don’t anticipate any issues since the screen resolution on the iPad mini is the same resolution on the iPad 2.

    Now for the heart stopper: the price tag. What, OmniGraffle ain’t free? It’s true, there’s too much going in this app to warrant a $0 price tag, but I believe it’s rather reasonable compared to alternatives. The Standard version will set you back $99.99, and the Professional version goes for $199.99. The mobile version for iPad is $49.99.

    I have been very pleased with OmniGraffle so far and I don’t see it disappointing me in the future. Because of the sophisticated features and overall business-friendly options, it’s a small price to pay for software that does it all — and well.

    You can take a look at “*Omni’s website*”:http://www.omnigroup.com for more info about OmniGraffle or their other products. You can also get a free 15-day trial for the Mac version to give the program a test run before you commit. If you trust me blindly (why wouldn’t you?), you can find the Standard version “*here*”:http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/stat?id=19XpSnZWhPI&offerid=146261&type=3&subid=0&tmpid=1826&RD_PARM1=https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/omnigraffle/id404458553?mt=12%26uo%3D6%26partnerId%3D30 and the Pro version “*here*”:http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/stat?id=19XpSnZWhPI&offerid=146261&type=3&subid=0&tmpid=1826&RD_PARM1=https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/omnigraffle-pro/id404645717?mt=12%26uo%3D6%26partnerId%3D30 or if you are interested in the iPad version you can find that “*here*”:http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/stat?id=19XpSnZWhPI&offerid=146261&type=3&subid=0&tmpid=1826&RD_PARM1=https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/omnigraffle/id363225984?mt=8%26uo%3D6%26partnerId%3D30.

    At the very least, if you are interested, I suggest giving the trail a spin — you won’t be disappointed!

  • REVIEW | Trello

    Now that I’ve been with Small Dog’s Marketing department for almost a year, I am well-versed in the number of requests from other departments as well as our own daily responsibilities that we have to keep up with.

    Early last year, we started using “*Trello,*”:http://www.trello.com which is a web-based project management system that allows you to organize anything in a very simple way, from life goals and to-do lists to group projects. Trello refers to their product as a “whiteboard with superpowers.” Well said, Trello.

    Our main Trello board is called “Marketing Projects” (genius, huh?) and on this board are various lists that represent the type of project category, such as “Admin,” “Print,” “Events,” “Retail,” “Web,” and so on. We also have a board called “Done” that’s marked with the current month, so that we have an easy way to see how many projects we’ve completed in a month. When we have finished a project/to-do, we drag it over to the Done board, and it’s a great feeling to watch that list get longer.

    Within each list, we have our separate projects, which are called “cards.” You can think of it as a kind of to-do list — each card represents something that needs to get done, and when you view the entire board, each is a snapshot of what the project requires. The cards are totally customizable, and you can add several layers of detail within each one. You can assign cards to different members of the board (you can invite whoever you’d like to view/participate on the board via email), mark them with different labels (customized however you’d like), add due dates, make comments and upload attachments.

    In our particular case, we have found that there are certain ways that the card system works best for us. For example, while the label titles are customizable with your own text, the number of labels mazes out at six. They’re color-coded, but the colors are set and can’t be changed or added to. Because of this limitation, we’ve found that using the label titles to indicate status rather than the project categories themselves (which we used to do) makes the most sense. We use “Low,” “Medium,” and “High” Priority, “In Progress,” “Waiting on Response,” and “On Hold.” Further customization of the labels would be a great upgrade for Trello (so, developers, if you’re listening…).

    Some other nice features of Trello include multiple view options (dependent upon your browser window size, your list displays either vertically or horizontally), card counts (it’s nice to see how many are in each list at a time, though some view options obscure this), a Subscribe feature (nice for when you’re assigned to multiple cards or when you need someone to get notifications for a particular card even when they don’t have any action items within it) and an Archive feature (used most when we archive the previous month’s Don board).

    We’ve also found that the developers, “*Fog Creek Software,*”:http://www.fogcreek.com are really engaged and responsive. Their “*Trello blog,*”:http://blog.trello.com “*Facebook page*”:https://www.facebook.com/trelloapp and “*Twitter account*”:https://twitter.com/trello are constantly updated, and often include new features and information about their product. In fact, just this past week, they were great at keeping the public updated on the status of their site. Their data centers are in lower Manhattan, and due to the flooding from hurricane Sandy, they were down for a short time. Thankfully for everyone, all were back up and running in a short period of time.

    Whether you’re an individual who wants to keep track of your to-dos at home or a team like ours, Trello might be something worth checking into. It really is a great (free!) way to stay organized in a simple and efficient way!

    Trello has a free app, available for iPhone/iPod touch/iPad, and it has come in pretty handy for me over the past week (see links below). I took a long weekend to visit my mom and sister in Florida, but because of the hurricane, my return flight was cancelled, leaving me there almost a week longer. Since I did not bring my computer with me, I was able to view Trello on my iPhone to have an idea of what I’d need to do when I got back!

    “*Download the app here.*”:http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/stat?id=19XpSnZWhPI&offerid=146261&type=3&subid=0&tmpid=1826&RD_PARM1=https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/trello/id461504587?mt=8%26uo%3D6%26partnerId%3D30 Enjoy!