Kibbles & Bytes Blog

  • Yes, Mac User, Viruses Do Exist!

    There is really big MYTH that Macs don’t get viruses. We know today that this is false. Apple malware has existed for Mac since 1987 with the appearance of the nVIR virus, which started with the sharing of floppy disks (remember those) that were infected. This is when the first anti-virus tools began to appear.

    Fast forward to 1998 when the AutoStart 9805 spread very rapidly in the desktop publishing community, once again using removable media. With the release of OS X just around the corner the bad guys would have to go back to the drawing board with their attacks. When OS X was released, the first malware script Renepo worm, also known as Opener was unleashed. This was a nasty one. It would disable your firewall then download the hacker’s dream software tools including but not limited to, password sniffers and crackers. This would give hackers admin-level access to your machine. The latest baddy was BlackHole RAT in 2011. This was a Trojan, and a lot like Renepo, it allowed unauthorized users to take control of your Mac.

    The most common malware I see is fake anti-virus or system maintenance software that boast they will speed up your mac or clean your mac. When it runs it finds all types of “problems” with instructions to call a number to get a resolution for problems that don’t actually exist. Enter the heroes of this story: the anti-virus software. This tech has two recommendations. The first one is Sophos. “Sophos”:https://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/free-tools/sophos-antivirus-for-mac-home-edition.aspx stands out from the crowd with its light weight and updated virus definitions. It also looks for Windows based virus so you don’t inadvertently send something nasty to your DOS-based buddies. The next is ClamXav which is basically the same thing as Sophos, but it does not have the virus definitions update like Sophos.

    The biggest thing you to protect yourself from this is user education on what is going on with your Mac. I recommend you read this article from “lifehacker”:http://lifehacker.com/the-best-antivirus-app-for-mac-488021445. Surf safe, friends!

  • iOS 9 Public, iPhone 4s and Battery Life

    The iOS 9 public beta came out several weeks ago and I’ve been running it on my iPhone 4S. iOS 9 is really attractive to me (even while using my older phone) because of the under-the-hood refinements. I was hoping those refinements would mean things would be more zippy on this old phone. Many of those improvements don’t really trickle down to me on this hardware that’s three generations behind the current hardware, but it seems features like control center and notification center are more responsive to their gestures.

    There are a few things I’ve noticed that have changed in the day to day operations. The keyboard is different. It now has lower case letters on the keyboard. The keys don’t pop up like they used to by default, but that is a simple flick of a switch in settings. Siri looks dramatically different with really cool and has multi colored waves.

    There is now an iCloud app, but for that to appear on the home screen it needs to be enabled in settings. I like the app. It lets me see what I’ve got in there and allows me access to everything, just like many other cloud services’ iPhone apps let me do. There is a battery section in settings. While this is really cool, it gave me some information that I’m still processing and reeling in shock and disbelief of. Under the battery section of settings there’s a really cool and useful low power mode. It not as aggressive as just putting the phone in airplane mode. The battery usage section is what has me so worked up. It gives a breakdown of what apps are using battery power and a percentage. In that breakdown there were apps that I hadn’t even launched in 6 months that had been doing stuff in the background and gobbling up battery power and processor cycles. It used to be that installing apps wouldn’t bog down the device, but apparently that’s not true. Another experience that further confirms that to me is how often my phone was freezing up after years of installing apps and downloading many many gigabytes of data into every app. I restored it to factory settings, meaning all data that’s not the OS was removed. I then reinstalled all my critical apps, but nothing else. My phone has been a little more reliable, stable and faster since I removed all that stuff. Another detail that I’ve been working with most regularly is the 6 (that’s SIX, as in 2 more than 4) digit security passcode. A four digit passcode never seemed like enough for me, now I’ve got a little more security, without much inconvenience.

    iOS devices are really becoming more and more like full fledged desktops and I’m excited about iOS 9 and wonder how long until the next update to the beta will be released.

  • What happened to all my space?

    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_

  • 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.

    !{display: block;margin-left: auto;margin-right: auto;}http://blog.smalldog.com/images/4485.jpg!

    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.

    !{display: block;margin-left: auto;margin-right: auto;}http://blog.smalldog.com/images/4484.jpg!

    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.

  • 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.

  • _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.

  • Enjoy the Dog Days of Summer and thank you so much for reading Kibbles & Bytes.

    Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

    _Don, Emily, Dean, Scott_

  • Dear Friends,

    I am on the road heading to Sturgis, SD and Emily is off camping with her family so Kibbles & Bytes is taking a bit of a summer vacation. This special short issue will feature our Dog Days of Summer specials. It is back-to-school time with some schools starting within a week or so and these bundles are ideal for those students’ return to books and school.

    Kibbles & Bytes will be back with a full issue next week with Emily as the lead since she gets back first. We will be somewhere on our way back to Vermont with a possible stop in Chicago to catch a Cubs game.

  • From the Archives

    **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.

  • Securing WordPress Installations

    August 2015 is actually a pretty big month for me. It marks 10 whole years of blogging. Back in 2005, I was using blogger.com. Originally created by Pyra Labs 1999, Google bought them and their blog service in 2003. Blogger blogs were primarily hosted by Google via subdomains. This meant you could have your very own blog with your own partially customizable URL for free and without having much technical knowledge. In 2005, that’s what I did. I think I may have been technically capable of hosting my own blog, but in 2005, I was just entering my senior year of high school so money wasn’t that plentiful.

    I wrote for that blog continuously up until October of 2010, a few months after I graduated from college. By that time, my technical know-how had increased substantially. For two years, I created a handful of short-lived blogs before deciding that I wanted to restart a primary personal blog as I had done in 2005. This time though, I knew I could have my own domain and host the site myself.

    There may be some hardcore web developers out there who write their own blogs manually via HTML, but it’s really not the norm. Most blogs are run by software you install on your server. For our own “Small Dog blog”:http://blog.smalldog.com, we use software called “Textpattern”:http://textpattern.com/. Other well known blogging software includes “WordPress”:https://wordpress.org/, “Movable Type”:https://www.movabletype.org/, “Drupal”:https://www.drupal.org/, “Joomla”:http://www.joomla.org/ and “TypePad”:http://www.typepad.com/.

    For my purposes I installed WordPress. It’s free, widely used and has an extensive plugin library and community support. The wide use has a pretty substantial drawback though. WordPress is frequently the target of attacks and exploits. Every time I mention that I’m hosting WordPress on my server, Morgan, my fellow IT person here at Small Dog shakes his head and remarks about how many risks I’m taking.

    I really love the software though, so how do you help protect yourself, your server, and your installation of WordPress? I recommend the following “musts”:

    * *Updates* – WordPress updates are pretty frequent at a rate of one or two a month. Plugin and theme updates may be more frequent depending on the plugin or theme. There’s no excuse not to keep on top of this and install those updates! WordPress makes it easy to install them right from the browser and it notifies you which things need updating.

    * *Jetpack* – Jetpack is an advanced plugin that offers lots of enhancements to WordPress and I would certainly suggest it for all those reasons, but it also offers enhanced security. You can whitelist IP addresses for logins and it offers a captcha system for additional security. Each time I log in I see how many malicious login attempts have been blocked. Answer: a lot.

    * *Akismet* – Akismet is a comment spam filter that works exceptionally well. If you’re a non-commercial blog, you can use it for free. It’s easy to install and configure and I’ve gotten literally 0 spam messages since installing it over a year ago.

    * *Rublon two-factor authentication* – Two-factor authentication is such a powerful tool to secure any login system. You can now add that power to your WordPress installation with this easy to install and configure plugin. This particular system uses email-based authentication, so you don’t even need a token system. There are other token-based two-factor authentication systems available though.

    Overall, I’ve been very satisfied with WordPress and I like that it provides both ease of use but isn’t too hard to extend for a web developer like myself. If I wanted lots more customization, I might use something that leaned more towards a CMS (Content Management System) like Drupal or Joomla. For now though, WordPress suits me well and despite Morgan’s words of caution, I think I’ve secured my installation pretty well.

    Happy blogging!

  • It's Tuesday!

    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