Kibbles & Bytes Blog

I think I will do some chores this weekend…er play with my puppy. Maybe I’ll ride my motorcycle…er play with my puppy. Maybe I’ll do some blueberry picking…er play with my puppy. Hey, it is sweet corn season so that is definitely a break from playing with Pirate!

The dog days of summer is sure nice here in Vermont!

Thanks for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

Don, Emily, Hadley & Amy

I’ve written in Kibbles before about all kinds of different data storage mechanisms. Maybe it seems like I’m a little bit obsessed with it, but I like to keep my data around. We always talk up backups here in Kibbles and I sometimes wonder what people are backing up. Photos? Work documents? Financial stuff? Personally I do a lot of creative work on my computer. This is stuff that’s absolutely irreplaceable. I’m willing to bet the most common creative thing people have on their computers is photos. Surprisingly, I don’t have that many photos, but I do ??a lot?? of writing on my computer and I’d be devastated if I lost it. I also shoot a lot of video, compose music and have the occasional software project lying around.

The thing about creative pursuits like these is that there tends to be a lot of stuff and only a little bit of it ever makes it into the final project. For every ten musical compositions I start working on, maybe only one or two will get fully flushed out into a finished product. Video is even worse. I’ve worked on video projects forever, and one thing I’ve learned is that cutting and editing footage is easy. Reshooting footage is difficult or impossible. Writing follows a similar pattern.

What all this means is that I tend to have a lot of raw data (video, music, text, etc) that I have to deal with. When I’m actively working on something, it’s not too big of a deal. I have a good 2TB external drive, and a 1TB hosted RAID. Once I’m done with a project however, what should I do with all this data? It feels very wrong to me to delete footage I shot, especially if I used it in a project. What if I want to recut it later? What it something comes up and I decide I want to use some footage that missed the final cut in some project?

Back in the days when I worked at a public access TV station, we had two massive shelves absolutely filled with VHS tapes. Most of it was raw footage that was available to be reused, recut or just rebroadcast. The principle was the same though; we were holding on to all that footage. If you can afford it, hard drives are great for storing lots of footage or creative projects. They also have the advantage of being rewritable. For me though, I tend to prefer burning things off to DVDs, especially when it comes to raw footage. They’re cheaper and will potentially last a lot longer than a hard drive (good quality discs anyway).

It’s sad that Apple has all but given up on disc drives at this point, but you’re not completely out of luck. They make a very slick USB-powered “**SuperDrive**”:http://www.smalldog.com/product/87099/apple-usb-superdrive that you can plug into any computer and burn discs or read them. I use “**Taiyo-Yuden**”:http://www.supermediastore.com/brand/show/taiyo+yuden DVDs any time I’m saving important data.

I took a bunch of photos on my recent trip and while I shared a few publicly on Facebook, others I want to share with a more select group of family and friends. Thanks to the iPhone, more people are taking pictures than ever, and with an iPhone you always have your camera!

While you probably don’t want to share all of them, friends and relatives might like to see a “Best Of” collection. Or you might wish to share the photos of your new puppy with your dog friends or pictures of your new city with friends back home.

With iCloud, it’s easy to create a shared album, invite other iCloud users to subscribe to it (handy for viewing on an iOS device or Apple TV, in particular), and to create a public web page of the photos that anyone can see, even if they don’t use any Apple devices.

Let’s set it up:

On an iOS device, go to Settings > iCloud > Photos and turn on the iCloud Photo Sharing switch.

On a Mac, open System Preferences > iCloud, click the Options button next to Photos, select iCloud Photo Sharing, and click the Done button.

p{text-align: center;}. !http://blog.smalldog.com/images/4776.png!

Next, follow these steps, which are similar regardless of the device you’re using:

# In the Photos app, select some photos or videos. In iOS, that involves tapping Select before tapping the items to select; on the Mac, just Command-click the items you want, or drag a selection rectangle around them.

# Hit the Share button , and then pick iCloud Photo Sharing.

# Select an existing album or create a new shared album.

# For a new album, provide a name, enter the names or email addresses of any iCloud users with whom you want to share the album, and add an optional comment.

# When you’re done, tap Post in iOS or click Create on the Mac.

To add more photos, repeat those steps to select photos and then add them to a shared album. Alternatively, start with the shared album, though the steps vary slightly between iOS and the Mac:

* In Photos for iOS, if necessary, back out of the view until you see the Shared button in the toolbar. Tap Shared and select the shared album. Then tap the + button, select the items to add, tap Done, enter an optional comment, and tap Post.

* In Photos for the Mac, in the sidebar, select the shared album in the Shared category. Then click “Add photos and videos,” select the items to add, and click the Add button.

It’s easy to tweak the options for your shared album or to create a public Web page for it. The process is again similar in both operating systems:

* In Photos for iOS, tap Shared in the toolbar and select the shared album. Tap People to bring up a screen where you can share the album with more people, control whether subscribers can post their own photos, create a public web page, enable notifications, and delete the album entirely. To share the URL to the public web page, tap Share Link and select a sharing method.

p{text-align: center;}. !http://blog.smalldog.com/images/4775.jpg!

* In Photos for the Mac, select the shared album in the sidebar, and then click the People button in the toolbar. From the popover that appears, you can do the same things as in iOS, although sharing the link is best done by either clicking it to visit it in a web browser and then copying from there or Control-clicking it and choosing Copy Link from the contextual menu.

After practicing these steps a few times, you’ll be able to create shared albums in a flash, and share them easily.

_Dear Friends,_

I had an awesome trip out to my home town of Chicago. Grace and I met there and actually got married at city hall in Chicago. I realized as we were at Wrigley Field, watching the Cubbies beat the White Sox, that I had taken Grace on a date to Wrigley 50 years ago. We had a hot dog and a Goose Island to celebrate.

It was a very hot motorcycle ride to the midwest but we managed to miss all the rain and thunderstorms. We were drinking gallons of water to stay hydrated as we tooled through the corn and soybean fields of Ohio and Indiana. We got home to blueberry bushes loaded with berries.

The day after we got home, we headed down to the NBA Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, MA to pick up Pirate, our new bulldog puppy. Fortunately, the breeder was able to meet us halfway and the Hall of Fame was a good central spot. Pirate is a handful and is already hanging out at the office with me. Now if he would just quit untying my shoelaces.

I have been participating in the 3rd annual Vermont Road Pitch. Each year some 20-30 entrepreneurs, educators, business leaders and venture capitalists hop onto their motorcycles and ride from town to town in Vermont to listen to business pitches. I met up with the crew in Barre to hear some pitches and then onto Randolph for some more. Great new business ideas but the best ideas I thought were from the non-judged high school students. One was making sunglasses from recycled plastic harvested from the ocean–very cool.
Friday I head to Hyde Park and Grand Isle, Vermont for more pitches. It is great fun and good to hook up with other business men and women who share a passion for motorcycles, too.

This week’s “**Kibbles & Bytes special**”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002329/ features the Apple Factory Reconditioned 21.5 inch iMac. This iMac carries the same 1-year Apple warranty as a new machine and has been reconditioned by Apple to be as-new. We are bundling it with the AppleCare protection plan which takes that 1-year warranty and makes it 3 years and takes the 90 days of free Apple tech support and makes it 3 years as well. Here’s a great opportunity to add a sleek and powerful desktop Mac at an unbeatable price. This iMac features a 2.9GHz Intel i5 processor, 8GB of RAM and a 1TB drive. We are also bundling a 1TB backup drive with this special. So you get the iMac, AppleCare and the 1TB Seagate backup drive for only “**$1299.99!**”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002329/