Kibbles & Bytes Blog

  • Order from Tech Data

    To order from Tech Data, add everything in the bundle except for the free items. Your free products will be shipped from the Small Dog warehouse once we receive your qualifying Tech Data order number.

    Once you’ve placed your order with Tech Data, email our inside salesperson “*Tony Amenta*”:mailto:tony@hammerheadcase.com and copy “*Ted Moorman*”:mailto:ted@hammerheadcase.com, with your Tech Data order.

    We will ship the free goods from the Small Dog Electronics warehouse. Tech Data will not be shipping the free goods.

    The deadline for ordering these bundles is *Wednesday, November 23rd.*

    For SubscriberMail users, we have created special content that you can use to promote the Hammerhead Hard Shell Case with a free stylus. A mockup is available “*here*”:http://blog.smalldog.com/images/2659.jpg.

    Please let us know if you have any questions or if we can help in any way.

  • Conserve Your iPhone's Battery, Plus iOS 5.0.1

    “*Last week,*”:http://www.loopinsight.com/2011/11/02/apple-confirms-battery-life-issues-in-ios-5/ Apple acknowledged the battery drain issue in the iPhone 4S, citing bugs in iOS 5 in addition to user preferences within it.

    I mentioned some of the preferences one could change in “*last Friday’s issue of Kibbles & Bytes*”:http://blog.smalldog.com/kibbles/kb748/, and it looks as though there are more settings that Apple recommends changing. Via a little research and a call to AppleCare, I’ve found the following have substantially improved the battery of the iPhone 4S:

    # *Settings > General > Slide Bluetooth to OFF*
    # *Settings > General > Set Auto-Lock to 1 Minute*
    # *Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Fetch New Data > Set to Hourly or Manually (you can leave Push ON, but turning off would likely save even more battery life)*

    Just how much more battery life have I experienced? The battery would last about 3/4 of the day (approx. 4 p.m.) before the “10% battery” message would pop up, and now that message appears either by 10 p.m. or the following morning (though I end up charging the phone every night anyway).

    The AppleCare representative also reiterated that the iOS 5.0.1 update should be out “momentarily,” and sure enough, it was released yesterday. To update to iOS 5.0.1, simply *plug your device into iTunes and click “Update”* or *update wirelessly within your device’s Settings panel.* This update marks the first available for wireless syncing.

    In addition to battery bug fixes, iOS 5.0.1:

    * Adds Multitasking Gestures for original iPad
    * Resolves bugs with Documents in the Cloud
    * Improves voice recognition for Australian users using dictation

    Combined with the preference changes, the iPhone 4S battery is back from the brink!

  • Order Direct

    To order direct, email your PO to “*Tony Amenta*”:mailto:tony@hammerheadcase.com and copy “*Ted Moorman*”:mailto:ted@hammerheadcase.com. You may pay via credit card or use an open account.

    Our credit application is “*here*”:http://vendor.hammerheadcase.com/pricelists/HH_CP%20credit_app.pdf. Feel free to call Tony at 888-746-9813 if you have questions or prefer to give credit card information over the phone.

    The deadline for ordering these bundles is *Wednesday, November 23rd.*

    In addition to the special offers above, we will also be creating a special edition of our SubscriberMail newsletter with exclusive deals. A mockup of one that offers your customers a free Hammerhead Stylus with purchase of each Hammerhead Hard Shell Case is available “*here*”:http://blog.smalldog.com/images/2659.jpg.

    Please let us know if you have any questions or if we can help in any way.

  • MAC TREAT #171: Utilizing Quick Looks in Mail

    You may have noticed that certain parts of a message in Mail can be highlighted when you hover over them, such as dates, times and addresses. For a while now, users have been able to select this information and add it to either Address Book or iCal without leaving the Mail application.

    In Lion, there is now added iCal functionality that allows the user to edit the event that has just been created–all within Mail. Along the same lines, one can now preview webpages without having to open a separate browser! In either case, there is an option to then open the application separately, but having this added integration makes workflow a lot more seamless.

  • Hammerhead is offering this special through *Wednesday, November 23rd.* It isn’t too late to get your orders in and complete your inventory with the Hammerhead and Chill Pill lines.

    *Special Offers for Free Goods:*
    Hammerhead Styluses ($14.99 MSRP) and Chill Pill Mobile Speakers ($39.99 MSRP).
    “*Click here to view all three special offers.*”:http://vendor.hammerheadcase.com/pricelists/HH%20ASMC%202011_specials.pdf

    Taking advantage of these offers can net you margins as high as *66% on the Hammerhead iPad cases* and *55% on the Chill Pill Mobile Speakers*.

    Hammerhead and Chill Pill Audio are divisions of Small Dog Electronics, and you may place your order through Tech Data or via Small Dog directly. To request manufacturer and Tech Data part numbers as well as cost and retail pricing, please email “*Tony Amenta*”:mailto:tony@hammerheadcase.com or “*Ted Moorman*”:mailto:ted@hammerheadcase.com. You can download a dealer price list with pictures of all our products “*here*”:http://vendor.hammerheadcase.com/pricelists/SS_pricelist_10.01.11.pdf.

  • _Dear Friends,_

    Is it still called Indian summer if we set record highs in the middle of November? The temperatures on Wednesday were in the 70s, and lucky for me, I had scheduled an appointment with the US Customs and Border Patrol way up in Champlain, NY to enroll in the Trusted Traveller program. This necessitated a motorcycle ride up US Route 2 through the Islands and across Lake Champlain for a 10-minute meeting and fingerprinting session. Now I can go in the fast lane when I re-enter the USA. The ride was spectacular and rare this time of year. Already the temperatures have changed and snow is in the forecast.

    I recorded radio and TV voice -overs this week for our new advertising campaign for our anniversary celebrations and Black Friday sales. Our South Burlington store turns five years old and our Manchester, NH store is one year old, and we are celebrating with five days of savings next week. Black Friday also promises to be a big day for our retail stores. Manchester gets the prize for opening earliest and will open the doors at 4 a.m., South Burlington opens at 5 a.m. and, due to town restrictions, Waitsfield opens at 10 a.m. All three stores will stay open late to make sure all customers can take advantage of these specials.

    With Vermont still struggling to recover from the devastating effects of Hurricane Irene, our hearts go out to the people of Thailand who are still under water from some of the worst flooding ever seen in that area of the world. This flooding in Thailand has had a severe impact upon the supply of hard drives; much of the world’s hard drive production is in Thailand, including some critical components in all hard drives like the motor that spins the discs. We have seen a rapid increase every day in hard drive prices and a very scarce supply as a result. Prices are rising quickly, so if you are considering a backup solution, do not hesitate as recovery is not projected for at least a few months.

  • iPad in Space

    In the Star Trek universe, one of the most common devices in use by Starfleet is the PADD, a handheld touch-screen device that…

  • Making a Bootable Lion Installer

    Unlike its predecessors, Lion is primarily a download-only version of Mac OS. You can purchase a preloaded flash drive from Apple, but it’s…

  • A Greener AppleCare

    Over the years there’ve been reports from various end users that Apple’s packaging of service parts is preposterously and unnecessarily large for the product inside. Of particular note was the recall of the latest form-factor USB power adapter for iPhone. The first version had a defect that could cause dangerous failure, and anyone who’d bought one was urged to send it back for a replacement. Replacements were sent in boxes that could fit dozens of the adapters.

    Of course, this is an extreme example. That service part was just so tiny, and mailing labels can only be made so small, that smaller packaging may not have been feasible at the time. There’s also the issue of using packaging that already exists in a recall situation for the sake of speed. Some time after an initial burst of bloggers’ discontent, and in the midst of Greenpeace’s attack on Apple, the packaging was revised to be something much more reasonable.

    Needless to say, a 27-inch display will be shipped in a very large, very sturdy box. But small top cases for the early MacBook used to ship in boxes much larger than necessary. We kept those boxes and reused them to ship orders taken on “*smalldog.com*”:http://www.smalldog.com and to create a homemade solution to laptop storage in our service departments. Recently, though, these boxes were made much, much smaller, reducing Apple’s shipping costs and allowing more stuff to fit on the hundreds of FedEx airplanes delivering service parts around the world. The same thing is happening with the latest-generation equipment. The current MacBook Air logic board comes in a very thin, small box; older MacBook logic boards now come in very durable corrugated plastic boxes that can be reused indefinitely.

    With each new generation of Apple product, the service part packaging gets smaller and smaller, while the actual part sizes remain more or less the same. This is a trend that is mirrored with Apple finished goods like new laptops. Six years ago, the iBook shipped in boxes almost big enough for a dorm room mini-fridge; the MacBook Pro now comes in very smart, completely recyclable, very compact packaging. There’s a way to go, but Apple is clearly taking their packaging seriously as a driver of both increased customer delight and decreased per-unit carbon emissions and disposal complications.

  • Making a Bootable Lion Installer

    Unlike its predecessors, Lion is primarily a download-only version of Mac OS. You can purchase a preloaded flash drive from Apple, but it’s significantly more expensive than the standard download version. Here’s a way to make your own:

    Step one is to get yourself a flash drive; it needs to be at least 5GB in size. Step two is to download the installer. If you’ve already downloaded and installed Lion, you’ll need to download it again from the App Store. If you haven’t downloaded it yet, go ahead and do that, but don’t let it install. Once it has downloaded, it will be called Install Mac OS X Lion.app and will be in your Applications folder.

    Step three is to extract the useful part of that installer. What you want to do is right click (or control click) on that installer and choose Show Package Contents. Next, open the Contents folder and then Shared Support. In that folder is a disk image called InstallESD.dmg–copy that to your desktop. To copy instead of move this file, hold down the option key while dragging.

    Step four is making the bootable drive. Open up Disk Utility (located in /Applications/Utilities) and drag that InstallESD.dmg into Disk Utility’s left sidebar. Now plug in your flash drive and make sure it’s formatted with GUID partition table with a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format. Now click on the Restore tab and drag the InstallESD.dmg from the left-hand pane into where it says Source, then drag your flash drive from the left-hand pane into where it says Destination and click Restore. Your computer will take it from there. Once completed you’ll have a bootable installer for Lion.

    Should you ever need to use this boot drive (generally when your hard drive has failed and the recovery partition is of no use), simply insert the drive, turn on your computer and select your USB key as the boot device.