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Recently we launched a contest giveaway via our Instagram. We asked our followers to take their best shot at capturing their Labor Day weekend adventures. The best photo submission won an “Olioclip 4 in 1 Lens”:http://www.smalldog.com/product/86350/olloclip-4-in-1-lens-solution-for-iphone-6-6-plus-silver-black Congratulations to our winner **@mtb802** for this amazing photo taken over Labor Day weekend!
**Follow us at @hellosmalldog!**
**September Specials available in store and online** The daylight might be starting to fade, but you shouldn’t have to worry about the power for your iPhone or your iPad! We have a lot of portable charging options available in our retail stores and online for users on the go.
**$5 Off** “Outdoor Tech Kodiak Mini Rugged Powerbank”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900001948
**$15 Off** “Just Mobile Top Gum Power Pack w/Charging Dock”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900001949
**$50 Off** “Lenmar Mutant 20,800mAh 4 Port USB Portable Power Pack”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900001950/special-save-50-on-lenmar-mutant-4-port-usb-portable-power-pack
**$30 Off** “OtterBox Resurgence Power Case for iPhones”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900001951
At Small Dog we have a huge commitment to our triple bottom line of People, Planet and Profit. Sure we are about selling the latest and greatest Apple technology and ensuring that our customers walk out the door with the knowledge and confidence they need to get their new products up and running, but we are also passionate about the people in our community and our planet. Employees at Small Dog have a job requirement to volunteer one day a year for community service. Veteran employees have the option to up a month long sabbatical to pursue community service or education. Recently **Tony Amenta** took advantage of this company benefit and volunteered two weeks of his time to help “**Sinuosity**”:http://sinuosity.net/ build a new trail around Blueberry Lake in Warren Vermont.
It’s been a busy couple of weeks for me here in the Green Mountains. I have spent a lot of time this summer being away on the weekend with various summer activities. It’s been great for my summer bucket list but I can’t say the same for my garden. I have never been much of a gardener and I give amazing praise to those who grow a bounty year after year. I thought I had it down by the end of last summer. I grew a garden just big enough to produce only what we could eat in a few days and only had to spend a few hours a week managing weeds. I even managed to make some amazing dilly beans and pickles. Well this year not even the zucchini grew. The weeds took over despite my utilizing filter fabric, and my tomatoes grew but they fell to blight. Next year I decided to grow just a few things and whatever I can’t grow I will just pick up at the local farmers market. Perhaps I am better off sticking with things I know and gardening is not one of them.
Gardening was not my only struggle this summer. I also found myself in a bit of a bind with my Mac Mini. Recently I discovered that my Mac Mini was utilizing almost 250GB of space. Not a big deal except for the fact that I thought I had transferred over pictures and music when I recently upgraded from a 2007 MacBook to the new mini. Like many of us, when I get any new Mac I simply use migration assistant. As many of us know migration assistant has made our lives incredibly simple but sometimes can also cause a bit of a headache. I downloaded “Disk Inventory X”:http://download.cnet.com/Disk-Inventory-X/3000-2248_4-47967.html which I have used several times over the years. I like this program a lot. It really helps when you discover that your hard disk space is being utilized but it’s just not clear what is taking up the space. In my case I somehow had a 90GB textedit file! I searched and dug but could not find the file anywhere. I also did some basic disk repairs (even though there was no issue with the drive) and several other tricks, including a fresh restore from my recent Time Machine back up to try and free up this phantom space. Ultimately I ended up erasing my drive all together, reinstalling 10.10 and manually migrated the files I wanted from my Time Machine back up verses using migration assistant. Sometimes the easiest option is not always the most efficient!
I hope you are checking off many of your summer bucket list items and as always, thank you for reading.
Emily Dolloff
“emily@smalldog.com”:mailto:emily@smalldog.com
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_
_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**”:http://www.quecheegorge.com/ and to “**VINS**”:http://www.vinsweb.org/. 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**”:http://www.smalldog.com/dogdaysofsummer/summer-sales 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**”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900001928, 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.
**Tech Tails issue number 185, September 2003** featured an article on transferring data to your new mac, for the complete article visit our “archives link here,”:http://www.smalldog.com/techtails/177/ but for now take a moment to revisit memory lane, though admittedly some of these steps and information are still both useful and applicable today.
Mac to Mac, or PC to Mac Transfer:
Direct Ethernet Connection If you have both computers in the same location, you may be able to use an Ethernet cable to connect both computers together and copy files between them. You may need an Ethernet crossover cable depending on which model Macintosh you own. This method has the advantage of being fast and being able to transfer any amount of data. Once connected by Ethernet, turn File Sharing on (Control Panel in OS 9, System Preferences in OS X). Once file sharing is active, share the contents of one of the hard drives. You’ll then need to connect to the shared drive as you would connect to a server.
Portable Hard Drive or Storage Device If your computer has either FireWire or USB, you can use a portable drive to transfer data. Portable FireWire drives provide the fastest transfer rate, and are widely available. However, unless the computer has a FireWire port, which is not as common on PC computers, you will not be able to use a portable FireWire hard drive. A portable USB hard drive can be used, but USB transfers can be slow.
Note: While the faster USB 2.0 standard is available on some PC computers, some Macintosh computers only work with USB 1.1.
CD Burner or Other Portable Media Creating a CD of the files on your computer is one of the easiest methods you can use to transfer any amount of data. This method provides the added benefit of creating a backup of your data.
Using portable ZIP, Jaz, magnetic optical (MO), or other forms of portable media, is similar to burning a CD. Also, as long as the media device can be used on both computers, this method provides an excellent way to transfer any amount of data.
Email For small amounts of data, such as word processing documents, pictures, or small application data files, using email to send data to yourself as an attachment is another option. However, if the data files are over 1 MB in size, or if you do not have a high-speed Internet connection, you should try other methods before using this one.
Note: Some Internet service providers (ISPs) place restrictions on how large email attachments can be, so you may not be able to use this method with large data files, even if you have a fast Internet connection.
iDisk If you have a .Mac account, you can use iDisk to transfer data. Since the iDisk is used through an Internet connection, using this method for large data files without a high-speed Internet connection takes a long time. You can also purchase various amounts of drive space on a yearly basis, which provides additional data storage flexibility.
OSX to OSX
Carbon Copy is a great utility to duplicate existing OS X volumes. Carbon Copy Cloner will retain file permissions and copy all of the hidden files.
PC to Mac Transfer:
Apple has made it really easy for PC users to switch to Macintosh. Move2Mac is a kit that includes software and a USB cable to connect from the PC’s USB port to the USB port on your new Mac. Detto technologies estimates that it will take approximately 15 Minutes to move 500 MB of data. The software allows you to select what folders and files to move. Move2Mac does not translate files or translate PC applications into Mac Applications. For instance, if you wanted to run Microsoft Office, you would need to get the Mac Compatible version. Most files will not require any conversion to operate in the Mac environment. The one major exception to this is Quicken. Quicken files need to be reformatted to be used on the Mac.
When transferring data, most of the information that you have created is stored in your home directory. This is in the Users directory at the root level of your hard drive. There are some files in your Library that will not transfer by hand. The files that you will want to get for sure from your (the tilde ~ character is a UNIX symbol for the home directory) ~/Library are Addresses, Application Support, Favorites, Fonts, iTunes, Mail (if you are using OS X Mail), Preferences, and Safari. There are other files in the Library folder at the root of your hard drive that you may want to move depending on your configuration.
It’s time for Tech Tail Tuesday! We have been cranking out this feature newsletter since the late 90’s. I spent some time this past week going over our “archives”:http://www.smalldog.com/newsletters/subscribe-to-our-fun-informative-newsletters and it’s hard to believe we have published almost one thousand issues of this publication. Looking back over the older issues it’s hard to believe we have only been publishing HTML versions since 2008–a time that feels like it was just days ago now that we are in 2015. Some of our early issues were fairly basic, but were still packed with valuable information…including the importance of backing up your data. Issue number twelve mentioned the importance of backing up your data and well over a decade later we are still stressing the importance of backups with all of our customers today! It’s also been fun to look back and see how excited we all were about what is now archaic in the technology world. The introduction of the G3 iBook, the G4 cube, the Titanium powerbook, the G5 tower and more! I remember when some of these early machines came into the Small Dog warehouse and it was like Christmas morning for us. We would all stand around the box and patiently (or not so patiently) wait for Don to open the box and reveal what was inside. Don would then parade around the building with the latest product and we would all be demanding and asking him for a chance to use it.
Apple and all the accessories that go along with these products really have come a long way from their predecessors. I remember helping customers to pick out the right QuickerTek Antenna to increase wifi range on their iBooks or talking customers through data transfers over the phone. While I am still helping customers with these tasks the processes have become incredibly efficient and intuitive for even the basic of users. I will admit though, I do not miss the complication these processes once had especially data transfers!
Thank you for reading!
Emily Dolloff
“emily@smalldog.com”:mailto:emily@smalldog.com
Now is the time to grab a great deal on computer or iPad bundles in our store! Visit any of our retail stores this month for great deal on a new or refurbished computer! **Buy any new computer with Applecare and get three years of accidental insurance through Safeware for free!**
Want to make sure that the new MacBook Air or MacBook Pro with Retina you just purchased stays like new? We have a great protection bundle to ensure that your new computer keeps that showroom shine! For **$124.99** you can get an external hard drive, a hardshell case from Speck, iKlear and a keyboard cover from KB cover!
With the excitement of the Seagate Event in our South Burlington Store, all of the staff are buzzing about their new products. My personal favorite is the Seagate Wireless Mobile Storage device. I was convinced I did not need a lot of space on my iPhone – and went with an 8GB 4S and instantly regretted it – after a few good photography and video apps, a couple of playlists all of my storage space was used up pretty quickly! With the Seagate Wireless, I don’t have to fret because I have an untold amount of time left on my contract before I can upgrade my phone, I just simply use the Seagate Wireless to stream everything to my iPhone. I have our entire iTunes library on the Seagate Wireless. Another great feature of the device is that it does not need a WiFi network to stream to your phone, tablet or laptop, which makes it great for those long car trips with the kids. Build them a playlist and they can watch whatever they choose on their own schedule. The Seagate Wireless has a built in battery that lasts up to six hours and allows for three devices to to be streaming from it at one time, sharing any music, movies, videos and photographs that you choose. Who needs Pandora or Spotify when you can shuffle all of the songs in your iTunes library making your ultimate personal playlist using the Seagate Wireless Mobile Storage device! Oh and bonus, they come in really cool colors!
We carry the Outdoor Tech line here at Small Dog Electronics and it’s quickly turning into one of our best selling portable speaker brands! They offer a great line up of headphones from wired to wireless and a full line of Bluetooth speakers. In addition to headphones and speakers they offer power banks for all weather and many products are water resistant. Our favorite product is the New Kodiak Mini power bank.
If you don’t own a portable power bank, what exactly have you been waiting for? They’re an on-the-go energy outlet that allows you to keep moving when your phone is running low without having to stop and look for an outlet to plug it into. If that’s not enough, here are more ways they come in handy in a pinch. You can slip a Kodiak Mini into your back pocket and never notice it’s there. It’s great for those times you want to take a charge with you on your next cycling trip. If you find yourself at a lake and decide to dive in, don’t worry, these things are water-resistant too! The Kodiak series of power banks are small enough you can easily pack them for a weekend camping trip. You’re going to need some tunes while you’re lounging around the campfire. Power banks can recharge your iPod up to two or three separate times, so you can keep cranking up the volume.
We are pleased to announce special in-store events happening in our South Burlington location during the month of August. We have teamed together with some of our favorite products and manufacturers to have these events for our customers. Visit our South Burlington location on the Saturdays below and not only take advantage of special deals, but also take advantage of our product experts! Not able to join us in store that day? You might miss out on some special one day only opportunities, but you won’t be left out! We will be running special promotions on these brands throughout August no matter which retail location you visit!
**Seagate special event Saturday Aug 15 10am to 2pm** at 100 Dorset St, South Burlington Vt
**OutDoor Tech special event Saturday Aug 29th 10am to 2pm** at 100 Dorset St, South Burlington Vt
