Kibbles & Bytes Blog

  • Dear Friends,

    Did you have enough turkey? Every day this fall, I drive by our neighbor’s farm on the way to work and a few dozen wild turkeys are grazing in the harvested corn field. Wild turkeys have had a tremendous resurgence in Vermont over the past few years. In fact, a local newspaper, while reporting on the recent election, pointed out that nearly all of the candidates that went door-to-door seeking votes had been bitten by Wild Tom Turkeys.

    Turkeys and being thankful give way to shopping as the Black Friday shopping frenzy begins.

    This year, we have extended hours and some great specials for Small Dog Electronics customers. Our store in the Mall of New Hampshire will actually be open at midnight because the Mall is requiring all stores to be open. I wrote a letter in protest and questioned the wisdom of stealing my employees’ Thanksgiving evening to no avail. It was, before the days of the internet, the day that retailers moved from operating in the “red” (aka losing money) to operating in the “black” (aka turning a profit). It has become something totally different now, with price cutting and a race to see who can open earliest. I don’t much like it, but we have chosen to be in the retail game.

    Monday is called Cyber Monday because supposedly that is the day after the 4-day weekend that customers rush back to work where they have high-speed internet and do all their online shopping. I think that is changing, too, as more and more customers have broadband at home.

    Nevertheless, I want to wish you and your family a Happy Thanksgiving from all of us at Small Dog Electronics! We have a lot to be thankful for and look forward to seeing you online or at our stores this holiday season!

  • Bring a Toy, Get $15

    This year in our retail stores, we’re collecting toys for those in need this holiday season. As an extra incentive, if you bring…

  • Hello all,

    The holiday season is here and Hammerhead has the products your customers want. We have some great new products that are sure to be a hit. Make sure to order now to have plenty in stock for the busiest time of the year!

    First off, we are excited to announce new screen protectors for the iPad mini and iPhone 5. These will be available for shipment on December 7th.

    For the iPad mini we have three versions: *Bubble-Free*, *Anti-Glare*, and *Glossy*. The Bubble-Free screen protectors come in both black and white, are easy to apply without getting bubbles, and can be removed for cleaning and re-applied over and over again. The Glossy and Anti-Glare screen protectors adhere securely to the iPad mini and come two to a package.

    Here are the SKUs:

    * Bubble-Free Screen Protector for iPad mini – Black: *3/HAM11967*
    * Bubble-Free Screen Protector for iPad mini – White: *3/HAM11974*
    * Anti-Glare Screen Protector for iPad mini- 2 Pack: *3/HAM12049*
    * Glossy Screen Protector for iPad mini – 2 Pk: *3/HAM12056*

    Our screen protectors for the iPhone 5 are also part of our Bubble-Free line with all the great benefits listed above. This product also comes in a variety of colors so your customers can customize their phone while protecting it.

    Here are the SKUs:

    * Hammerhead Bubble-Free Screen Protector for iPhone 5- Black: *1/HAM11981*
    * Hammerhead Bubble-Free Screen Protector for iPhone 5- White: *1/HAM11998*
    * Hammerhead Bubble-Free Screen Protector for iPhone 5- Red: *1/HAM12001*
    * Hammerhead Bubble-Free Screen Protector for iPhone 5- Pink: *1/HAM12018*
    * Hammerhead Bubble-Free Screen Protector for iPhone 5- Purple: *1/HAM12025*
    * Hammerhead Bubble-Free Screen Protector for iPhone 5- Green: *1/HAM12032*

    We are also excited to announce our new *Bumper for iPhone 5•. The Bumper securely fits around the iPhone and protects it from drops and impacts without covering the screen and also comes in a variety of colors. This product will be shipping in two weeks.

    Here are the SKUs:

    * Hammerhead iPhone 5 Bumper – Black/Black: *1/HAM11912*
    * Hammerhead iPhone 5 Bumper – White/White: *1/HAM11929*
    * Hammerhead iPhone 5 Bumper – Black/Green: *1/HAM11936*
    * Hammerhead iPhone 5 Bumper – White/Purple: *1/HAM11943*
    * Hammerhead iPhone 5 Bumper – Black/Red: *1/HAM11950*

    Please contact me for pricing, to place an order, or with any other questions about these great new products.

    We would also like to remind you about our *Leather Bluetooth Keyboard Case for iPad*. This is great add-on to any iPad sale as it gives the customer a genuine leather case to protect their iPad as well as a Bluetooth keyboard and a stylus. The case props up to provide an optimal viewing angle while typing and the keyboard is held in place by Velcro so it can be repositioned or even removed completely for typing in any position. This is a great selling point and makes our case stand out from our competitors.

    Please see the sell sheet “here.”:http://vendor.hammerheadcase.com/pricelists/SS_bluetooth.pdf

    Our hottest product right now is the *Folio Case for iPad mini*. This case is simple and elegant, fits the iPad mini securely and provides excellent protection. The case has cutouts that offer easy access to all ports, switches, and cameras as well a magnets to automatically wake and sleep the display. If you do not have iPad mini cases in stock, you are missing out on a great add-on to this year’s hot holiday product. These are in stock so order now for immediate delivery!

    Please see the sell sheet “here.”:http://vendor.hammerheadcase.com/pricelists/SS_ipad-mini-folio.pdf

    For prices and information on all our products, “*click here to check out our latest price list.*”:http://vendor.hammerheadcase.com/pricelists/SS_dealer-pricelist_11.12.pdf

    Thanks for reading!

    Tony

  • Looking to protect your new iPad mini? Are you having a hard time finding cases? Well search no further. We have just received our NEW Hammerhead Folio case for iPad mini. Now is your chance to buy one and get the protection you’ve wanted. Plus, each case ships FREE!

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  • TT SPECIAL | New Product Savings

    Hammerhead has now released the highly anticipated Folio case for iPad mini. To kick it off for a limited time you can SAVE $5 when you purchase any Hammerhead Folio case for iPad mini.

  • TT SPECIAL | Apple iPod touch with Beats

    Get all geared up for some sweet sounds and savings when you purchase the original Beats by Dr.Dre Studio Headphones in black and an Apple iPod touch 64GB (4th gen) in white.

  • Not Quite as Quiet as We Thought

    Here’s an update to last weeks article on muting your system chime using a Terminal command. It turns out that these commands (as well as the one I’ll be giving you now) may not work on every computer. I’ve found that no matter what I do I can’t get any of them to work on my 2009 27″ iMac. They’ll also not work if you have speakers or headphones plugged into your Mac.

    It’s an interesting thing that from what I can tell has to do with differing firmware for each machine. The startup chime does serve a purpose beyond just making noise. This chime tells you that the computer found no hardware problems at start up.

    A fair number of people wrote in about just muting your system volume before you restart. This does work for most machines but the whole point of using the Terminal command was so you don’t have to remember to do that.

    Here’s an alternate way to mute your volume:

    Step 1: Open Terminal and type in nano. Then press enter. The nano editor will open.

    Step 2: Type the following lines into the nano editor:

    #!/bin/bash
    osascript -e ‘set volume with output muted’

    Step 3: Press control and O then type the following and press enter: ~/Documents/mute.sh

    Step 4: Change the script in the nano window to the following:

    #!/bin/bash
    osascript -e ‘set volume without output muted’

    Step 5: Press control and X, then press Y to agree and change the save name to and then press enter. Nano should quit: ~/Documents/unmute.sh

    Step 6: Run the following commands in Terminal. If it asks for your password give it.

    sudo chmod u+x ~/Documents/mute.sh
    sudo chmod u+x ~/Documents/unmute.sh
    sudo mv ~/Documents/mute.sh /Library/Scripts/
    sudo mv ~/Documents/unmute.sh /Library/Scripts/
    sudo defaults write com.apple.loginwindow LogoutHook /Library/Scripts/mute.sh
    sudo defaults write com.apple.loginwindow LoginHook /Library/Scripts/unmute.sh

    Step 7: Quit Terminal and reboot your machine.

    This may or may not do it depending on your computer. There is a free application you can get called StartNinja (http://www.allvu.com/index.php/sndownloadpage.html) that will do much the same thing, without all the Terminal fun. The app doesn’t work on all machines, so those of us with iMacs may be out of luck.

  • Quick Problematic Data Removal Workaround

    One of the services we offer is data backups and recovery on machines checked into service. Customer data is backed up to our servers in a variety of ways, depending on the state of the hard drive and if necessary, restored to customer machines before pickup time. After a few days to allow for customers to confirm the data, the backups are deleted from our server.

    We sometimes experience permission-related conflicts when attempting to remove those old backups from our server. Data retrieved from failing hard drives can have corrupted permissions and cannot be removed by simply emptying the trash as usual. Normally I would use the “sudo rm -rf” command in terminal, and drag in the corrupted files/folders into the terminal window for deletion.

    I wanted to speed this process up a bit, as I was doing a lot of data backups in this way, and it was proving to be slightly more time consuming than it needed to be. I knew Automator would be able to help me out, so I decided to create a very simple workflow that would allow me to simply double-click to execute the necessary command.

    I opened up Automator, and selected New > Application. On the sidebar, I selected Utilities, and dragged “Run Shell Script” onto the workspace on the right. The command I then inputted is “sudo rm -rf ~/.Trash/*”. This command, when executed, is simply telling your computer to empty whatever’s in the trash, whilst bypassing any permissions tied to those files. The last step is to save the workflow as an application to the desired location on your computer. I also swapped in the stock Apple Trash icon for quick visual identification.

  • Backing Up Boot Camp

    Backing up your data is a critical aspect of computing. A few years ago, Apple started taking steps to make it easier for people to do this with their Time Machine software. In conjunction with an external hard drive, Time Machine will make a complete backup of your computer and continuously update it so in the event of a crash, Time Machine has a very recent backup to help you restore your data. It works well and is simple, but it doesn’t do everything.

    One of the things it does not do is back up Boot Camp Windows partitions. This can be problematic for those of us who spend lots of time setting up and using our Boot Camp partitions — we don’t want to lose them any more than we want to lose our Mac partitions. There are some spendy Windows backup options out there, but we have always used Winclone, a free application that backs up Windows machines.

    Freeware can be great — the Mac backup software “*SuperDuper*”:http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html and “*Carbon Copy Cloner*”:http://www.bombich.com are fantastic tools we use all the time. There are usually compromises, though. In the case of Winclone, the drawback has been that the backups could not be used to restore a Windows partition. All the data would be saved, but it would have to be manually restored after Windows was installed, which can be a daunting task.

    The new version of Winclone, though has resolved this issue. It’s a great way to be able to backup and restore your Windows side as well as your Mac side. You can save the backup as a disk image to your Time Machine drive so it is in the same place as your Mac backup, or if it is small enough, you could even put the image on your Mac side, where it will be preserved in Time Machine with your Mac backup.

    Please note: this only applies to people using Boot Camp. People who use Parallels and other programs that create virtual machines do not have to do anything extra to back up their Windows data, since virtual machines are treated like any other file by Time Machine.

  • Hello all,

    Financial cliff or not, I am planning to relax a bit this week. I will also reflect in my standard happy, yet morose, holiday way about how modern communication separates people as much as it unites them. We never seem to talk to each other, despite having at least a half-dozen ways of doing so basically instantaneously and so on…ad nauseam.

    It’s a good, comfortable soapbox that I enjoy standing on, and likely won’t be bored with for several years. I am also lucky enough to be spending some time with the aforementioned family celebrating the upcoming uniquely American holiday of Thanksgiving. Hopefully this week brings you some good times as well. Best wishes to you all.

    Liam
    liam@smalldog.com