Kibbles & Bytes Blog

  • 'Tis the Season for Extra Green

    Can’t wait to get your hands on the new iPad Air? Jumping to get your hands on the new 15″ MacBook with Retina Display? Stretch that holiday budget a little further this year with our special in-store financing.

    GE Financing is back, just in time for the holidays!

    *6* month offer
    (no minimum purchase amount)

    *12* month offer
    (purchases of $499+)

    *18* month offer
    (purchases of $999+)

    *How to Apply*
    Come in to any of our retail locations:
    “*Manchester, NH*”:http://www.smalldog.com/nh
    “*Waitsfield, VT*”:http://www.smalldog.com/waitsfield
    “*S. Burlington, VT*”:http://www.smalldog.com/burlington
    “*Rutland, VT*”:http://www.smalldog.com/rutland
    “*Key West, FL*”:http://www.smalldog.com/keywest

    Any of our helpful associates can assist you with the application. It can take as little as five minutes to receive approval!

  • Sneak Peek: Black Friday Deals!

    Here are a few of our great deals.

    (Note that most specials run through Sunday, Dec 1 unless noted.)

    **Chill Box 50% off!**

    Chill Box

    Refurbished Apple AirPort Extreme $40 off, **Sale Price $99.99** (Reg $139.99)

    AirPort

    Special Pricing on Seagate 500GB Slim Drive **$59.99**

    Seagate

    **Visit our stores for more great deals — most discounts are so good that we can’t put them in print!**

  • 'Tis the Season for Giving

    Charitable giving is an integral part of our business, and we believe that helping our community is especially important during the holidays. This holiday season, a percentage of every sale in each of our retail stores goes toward helping non-profits in our community.

    We’re thrilled to partner with the “*Vermont Foodbank,*”:http://www.vtfoodbank.org, “*Manchester Animal Shelter,*”:http://www.manchesteranimalshelter.org and “*Florida Keys SPCA*”:http://www.fkspca.org to ensure that they do what they do best — help those in need. (And isn’t that what the holiday season is really all about?)

    We can’t think of a better way to spread the cheer this holiday season, and we hope you feel the same way. Shop at Small Dog, and give back to the community while also getting some great gifts for your friends and family.

  • The Holidays Are All About Giving

    At Small Dog, we don’t want to forget about what the holidays are really about, and that’s giving. Just by shopping at any of our retail stores, from Vermont to Key West FL, we will be donating a portion of all of our sales to local charities in your area.

    A percentage of every sale in our three Vermont stores goes toward the “Vermont Foodbank,”:http://www.vtfoodbank.org sales from our Manchester, NH location benefit the “Manchester Animal Shelter,”:http://www.manchesteranimalshelter.org and sales from our Key West location benefit the “Florida Keys SPCA”:http://www.fkspca.org until 12/31.

    We can’t think of a better way to spread the cheer this holiday season, and we hope you feel the same way. Shop at Small Dog, and give back to the community while also getting some great gifts for your friends and family. Don’t forget that this Saturday is also **Small Business Saturday** (#shopsmall), and if you “register your AmEx card”:https://www.americanexpress.com you could get an additional credit when you shop with participating businesses (like us)!

    “Find out more here.”:https://www.americanexpress.com/us/small-business/Shop-Small/

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    p<>. Gift-giving never felt so good!

  • Did Somebody Say Chill Box?!

    So what is the Chill Box? It’s a speaker with great looks, the sound of a big system in a small package, it can go everywhere with you, and you’ll be the star of the party when you pull this little gem out of your bag!

    Now that you know how awesome and super cool the Chill Box is, let me bring on the tech aspect of this beast for all my nerds out there. The Chill Box can connect you to your music anywhere you go via Bluetooth or 3.5mm auxiliary cable. Having both of these options is essential because not every music player has Bluetooth capability, but most should have the ability to use headphones.

    The pairing function is very easy to use and only takes a few seconds to complete. Just hold the power button down until the LED indicator light starts to flash and you are now in Discovery mode. Bring up the Bluetooth menu on your chosen device and the Chill Box should be available to chose from. Click on that and BOOM! You’re connected and ready to enjoy all the supa-fly tracks you love so much.

    The Chill Box also has a battery indicator that will show up on your iPhone screen so you can see when it is time to recharge the lithium ion battery. Battery life is exceptional on the Chill Box, rocking mad beats for hours without the need to recharge. Chill Box charges its battery via micro USB port on top of the device. You can charge it with ANY USB port, including the charger provided with iPhone (which is what I use personally). The Chill Box also has a built-in microphone and can be used as a conference-style speaker phone. There is a button right on top that allows you to answer and hang up phone calls, so no need to reach into your pocket or dive through your purse to find the phone.

    The Chill Box is a great product and makes a great gift for the holiday season (it even makes for a great stocking stuffer, too)! It’s available in three colors — Electric Blue, Lime Green, and Tuxedo Black. Check out our discounts this weekend to take $50 off the $99.99 price, and we’ll be offering a great deal on them throughout December as well. If you are still on the fence about Chill Box, though, stop by any of our retail stores and take a listen for yourself — you might find you leave with more than one!

  • Do the Numbers + Shop Small Dog This Season!

    We’ve got this year’s hottest gifts, and we’re making it easier than ever to check everything off your list. We’re donating a portion of every retail store sale to benefit local non-profits, plus we have special financing options to help you stretch your dollars even further.

    Read on for details and why you should *#shopsmalldog* for all of your holiday needs this season and shop “*Smalldog.com/holiday!*”:http://www.smalldog.com/holiday?utm_medium=email&utm_source=blast&utm_campaign=GC

  • Happy Holidays!

    The holiday season is just about upon us here at Small Dog and to celebrate, we are doing some incredible deals! This month, you will find savings on everything from hard drives to printers, from headphones to speakers, and let’s not forget about our deals on everyday accessories such as cases, cables, and more.

    Of course, we’re doing the big stuff, too! This Friday — Black Friday — we have one-day deep discounts on your favorite brands, as well as deals that run through the weekend. so there is no need to fight the crowds, and many deals run through December 1st. Check out “Smalldog.com/retail”:http://www.smalldog.com/retail for holiday hours and locations.

    Throughout the holiday season (that’s this Friday, 11/29 through 12/24), you will be able to purchase any Mac computer with AppleCare and receive a $50 Small Dog gift card along with a free Hammerhead accessory. Note that this weekend’s special pricing will be announced on Friday, so you just may save even more — become a fan on Facebook “here”:https://www.facebook.com/smalldogrld to get the latest!

    At Small Dog, we don’t want to forget about what the holidays are really about, and that’s giving. Just by shopping at any of our retail stores, from Vermont to Key West FL, we will be donating a portion of all of our sales to local charities in your area. A percentage of every sale in our three Vermont stores goes toward the “Vermont Foodbank,”:http://www.vtfoodbank.org sales from our Manchester, NH location benefit the “Manchester Animal Shelter,”:http://www.manchesteranimalshelter.org and sales from our Key West location benefit the “Florida Keys SPCA”:http://www.fkspca.org until 12/31.

    We can’t think of a better way to spread the cheer this holiday season, and we hope you feel the same way. Shop at Small Dog, and give back to the community while also getting some great gifts for your friends and family. Don’t forget that this Saturday is also Small Business Saturday (#shopsmall), and if you “register your AmEx card”:https://www.americanexpress.com you could get an additional credit when you shop with participating businesses (like us)!

    “Find out more here.”:https://www.americanexpress.com/us/small-business/Shop-Small/

    Thank you for reading, wishing everyone of our readers a happy and healthy holiday season!

    Bronson and the Rutland retail team
    “bronson@smalldog.com”:mailto:bronson@smalldog.com

  • Changing Default Time Machine Backups

    By default, Time Machine backs up your system every hour if you leave your backup drive plugged in. If you are creating a lot of new data, this is a great system as it allows you to be able to have a consistent backup of all your information.

    However, If you don’t need to have data backed up that frequently, or if you want to change it to back up __more__ often, it is possible to change the default frequency for backups with this simple Terminal command.

    Sudo defaults write /System/Library/Launch Daemons/ com.apple.backupd-auto StartInterval -int 900

    The number at the end of the command is how many seconds it will be until the next backup occurs. In the example, I used 900, which is 15 minutes. If you want to change to a backup interval of 2 hours, you would use the same code and change the number to 7200.

  • Hands On Lesson From A Customer Interaction

    The other day, a customer drove over an hour to visit me in Waitsfield and to show me that her computer was being a jerk: Mail, TextEdit, Preview, and some other native applications were crashing before com.apple.windowserver could even load. She had just upgraded to Mavericks and restored data from an older Time Machine backup.

    I repaired permissions in Disk Utility, cleared cache files, and then started canning .plist files in her user library. I usually like to go a step further and get rid of everything in ~/library/”Saved Application State” as well as everything in the “Containers” folder.

    The problem persisted. It seemed likely the OS would need to be reinstalled, but my pride wasn’t gonna have that. After many frustrating minutes passed, I began to investigate the issue and discovered this solution online: launch Terminal, execute ‘cd /var/folders’ then ‘sudo rm -rf ./*’ enter an administrator (or root) password, reboot, and voila — problem solved!

    We can’t repeat enough: back up your information before attempting a procedure like this in Terminal, simple though it may be. Whenever a “sudo” (short for “super user do,” and no, I’m not clever enough to have made that up) command is invoked, you’re playing with fire, especially if you’ve got a typing deficiency. This particular execution clears all user-generated caches in /private/var which is, itself, an upper-level directory purposely hidden from users in the GUI. Apple thought doing this would lessen the chances of a naive user unwittingly rendering their launch daemons — or worse, the file system itself — a vegetable. In Unix-speak, “var” stands for “variable,” so this directory contains dynamic files like .db (databases) and .log (logs) file extensions.

    You can safely execute the command on a healthy system and see what’s lurking in this, one of the most important of your hidden directories, by changing the flag ‘-rf’ to ‘-rfv.’ Here, “v” makes the process run verbose. Of course, if you or someone you love is experiencing the aforementioned computer ailment and none of this works, you can either stop using computers or bring it into the closest Small Dog retail store for service.