Kibbles & Bytes Blog

Apple announced today that the complete Beatles library is available on iTunes! Matt asked me to write a bit about the Beatles since he is way too young to remember them. I’m not, and as a child of the sixties, the Beatles are the single most important musical influence on my life. The very first LP that Grace and I bought when we were married 43 years ago was “Magical Mystery Tour”:http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/stat?id=19XpSnZWhPI&offerid=146261&type=3&subid=0&tmpid=1826&RD_PARM1=magical+mystery+tour%2526uo%253D6%2526partnerId%253D30 by the Beatles, and we still have the album with our names written on the cover. The Beatles transformed the music industry by taking rock and roll to a whole new level.

I remember watching the Beatles’ first performance in the USA on the Ed Sullivan show and watching as the Fab Four grew up in the public eye. As the Beatles transformed themselves before our eyes, we evolved with them, and their music was the soundtrack to our lives. The message of peace and love through music is ageless and the fact that 50 years later, the availability of their library on iTunes is simply remarkable.

My favorite Beatles tunes are All You Need is Love, With a Little Help From My Friends, and, as I push the date, When I’m 64 (although I can still listen to the Beatles for hours). My grandkids seem to like the Beatles, too, and the first CD Grace made for my granddaughter Khadija is a Beatle mix. Although this announcement is not for me since I have all their CDs, it is a defining moment for the iTunes store as the Beatles were the single biggest holdout.

“See all of the Beatles’ albums here.”:http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/stat?id=19XpSnZWhPI&offerid=146261&type=3&subid=0&tmpid=1826&RD_PARM1=beatles%2526uo%253D6%2526partnerId%253D30

All versions of Mac OS X have a system called Keychain to store passwords. You can open up the Keychain Access program from your Utilities folder to see just what’s being stored, and to manually maintain the database. One particularly useful feature in Keychain Access is the ability to look up forgotten passwords.

It is the Keychain system that remembers the passwords used by iChat, Mail, and many network services. Until recently, when I needed to retrieve a forgotten password, I would locate the item in Keychain Access, double-click it, click the Show Password button, enter my password, and copy the password from there. You can save a few steps by just control-clicking (or right clicking) on the item and selecting “Copy Password to Clipboard.” Just enter your computer’s password, and paste the password where it needs to go.

Keychain Access is also a great place to store secure notes. They function pretty much like the Stickies so many of us know and love, but these are password-protected.

Happy Tuesday,

So, the iTunes store has another band’s music available–some group called the Beetles I think. I looked them up in my Encyclopedia Brittanica, but only found references to a funny-looking car and creepy-looking insects. Google, though, was able to sense that I was actually searching for the Beatles, even when I had typed in ‘beetles.’ Google helped me learn that this flash in the pan band has, to this day, a massive following of sixty-somethings even though the group broke up over forty years ago.

It’s long been rumored that the Beatles were coming to iTunes, and today it finally happened. I’m not much of a fan, and in fact don’t really know anything about the band, so I asked Don (who’s old enough to remember them) to write a short article about the news.

In more specific Small Dog news, we took delivery of several hundred used MacBooks and iMacs that we are in the process of refurbishing at our three service facilities. Look for these on “Smalldog.com”:http://www.smalldog.com next week. They’ll have a 90 day or longer warranty directly through us, so you can expect peerless support if it’s ever needed.

As always, thanks for reading, and keep in touch.

Matt
“matt@smalldog.com”:mailto:matt@smalldog.com