April Specials
10% off any SDE-branded item with coupon code: aprilswag Procrastinating on your Taxes? Don’t despair! Buy Turbo Tax between now and April 15th…
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Class Schedule: April 2010
Please Note: All classes are from 5:15pm – 6:45pm and are $39.99.
*Absolute Mac Basics:*
Sunday, April 11th (in South Burlington)
Saturday, April 17th (in Waitsfield)*Mac Basics: Level Two:*
Saturday, April 24th (in Waitsfield) -
Meet our Dogs!
Tyson and Waylon These two guys spend their days at work greeting customers and chasing balls around our sales office and retail store!
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Product of the Month: 320GB MiniStation Metro
Save $10 on Buffalo Technologies 320GB MiniStation Metro External Hard Drive with coupon below!
Spring is here and it’s the perfect time of year to think about cleaning up files or backing up your data.
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Follow Our Channel on Ustream
Today, we streamed live from our S. Burlington retail store for the first time on our Ustream channel. If you’re not familiar with Ustream, it’s generally used as a platform for live streaming and “lifecasting.”
Gary, one of our S. Burlington Assistant Managers and Tim, our S. Burlington Warehouse Manager, were on hand first thing to chat about iPad, Chill Pill and other gadgets. The cool thing about these streams is that if you’re watching online live, we encourage you to chat questions and comments to them so that they can answer them on-air.
We’ve had success with our Tech Tails TV broadcasts, and we’re excited to really get into the swing of our retail broadcasts as well, so check us out! We’ll keep you posted on future broadcasts.
Check out our stream, “@hellosmalldog, here”:http://www.ustream.tv/user/hellosmalldog and follow us for future broadcasts!
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Switcheasy Rebel Case Review
There are seemingly endless choices when considering a case for your iPhone. Things to consider are: first, protection, then color, style, features and perhaps a screen protector. I currently am using the “Switcheasy Rebel case”:http://www.smalldog.com/product/72973/switcheasy-rebel-iphone-case-for-iphone-3g-serpent-black ($24.99).
It features protection for the 30-pin dock connector on the bottom of the phone to keep dust and dirt out, two protective screen covers with the micro fiber wipe and squeegee to apply the screen protectors, dock adapter (so you don’t have to remove the case to dock it), and a video stand to prop the phone up-while watching videos.
There is a silicone wrap that goes on first, then a plastic polycarbonate exo-skeleton that snaps on after the silicone wrap is applied. There is also a dock connector cover as well. The case has a grippy feel to it, and you can always buy another Switcheasy case to mix-and-match with a two-tone look–they’re interchangeable.
We are always testing and looking for new iPhone cases from different vendors, so check our store often for new accessories and cases for your iPhone!
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Back Up! Just Do It!
BACK UP! This topic is always a conversation piece when speaking to customers about a new computer purchase, and can be the most crucial purchase you make when you buy a new machine. As far as technology has come, drive failure occurs on a daily basis.
There is no magic wand or crystal ball we can use to estimate when a drive might fail, so the best defense is to purchase a backup drive along with your new computer. With 10.6 Snow Leopard (as well as 10.5 Leopard), Apple has built-in backup software: Time Machine. Time machine takes just minutes to set up and works with any external back up drive. The only requirement of Time Machine is that your backup drive must be at least as large as your computers internal drive.
I purchased this 320GB Buffalo drive as my Time Machine Backup on my MacBook Pro. Out of the box, I was very impressed with the quality of the case and the feel of the drive. I was pleased to see that it does include an extension cable in the event that the 4-inch cable built into the drive isn’t long enough. My Macbook Pro sits on a stand so I needed to use the extension cable to allow it to sit nicely on my desk.
As always, setting up the Time Machine was a breeze. The computer automatically recognized the drive with no need to install any drivers or software–this drive is plug-and-play!
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*It’s Spring!*
It’s April and spring is in the air… well almost. I was excited to see the extended forecast for this first part of April predicting temperatures close to 70 degrees, but quickly snapped back to reality of spring time in Vermont when I saw a dusting of snow and sleet early Monday morning.
As I still haven’t succeeded in convincing Don to move our headquarters to a warmer location, preferably one with sandy beaches, I will settle for catching whatever warm rays I can here at the office and maybe an extra dog walk or two to get all the vitamin D I can!
With Spring in the air, we thought what says spring better than a little spring cleaning of our own. On your next visit to our retail store in Waitsfield you will find a number of changes underway, and we hope that when finished our customers find an improved shopping experience and selection of products.
Lets all hope mud season doesn’t last too long!
Emily and the Waitsfield Team
“emily@smalldog.com”:mailto:emily@smalldog.com -
Protecting Your Photographs
Let me ask you a few questions: Do you have a digital camera? How many megapixels does your camera shoot? How many years and how many photos do you have on your computer? Now imagine this… tomorrow morning you wake up and turn your computer on. It boots slower than normal and all you see is a flashing question mark on a gray screen. Your heart drops and you start to think about all of the memories that made up your iPhoto library.
The purpose of all this is to get you thinking about how many pictures you take every week and what would happen if one day you lost all of them. Could be 10 days or 10 years of photos; either way your losing all of those precious memories. Your best solution is to backup your files. The key to a true backup is to have your files in two places. My suggestion is to purchase a pair of identical external hard drives. Several hard drive units ranging from 250 gigabytes to 2 terabytes are becoming more and more affordable.
Click here to see Small Dog’s selection of external hard drives.
When you’re finished with your photo shoot, birthday party or vacation, store your photos on your computer and then back it up to your external hard drive. It may also be good to store your external hard drive in a different location than your computer and pull it out once a week to backup your new work. I like to go one step further and backup my backup. My setup includes my MacBook which is backed up onto an external hard drive which is then mirrored to a second external hard dive. This allows me to delete some photos off my MacBook to free up space while still leaving my photos on two different locations.
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Apple Releases Mac OS X 10.6.3 Update
Apple yesterday released the latest update to Mac OS X, squashing a litany of issues ranging from Time Machine stability to Antarctic daylight…
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Maximize Your Battery's Performance
“Apple’s battery website”:http://www.apple.com/batteries is an excellent resource to help understand how batteries work, the best way to charge batteries, optimal storage conditions, and much more.
A few years ago, in a blackout, I wrote an “article about maximizing battery runtime”:http://blog.smalldog.com/article/657/laptop-battery-conservation-tips/ and while those tips hold true, the article as a whole is a bit dated. After all, it was written before the iPhone existed!
Among the best nuggets of knowledge from Apple:
Use your battery-powered device regularly. If you infrequently use your iPod or laptop, or have backup devices, remember to charge and discharge the battery every month or so. Here’s an iCal “reminder”:webcal://www.apple.com/batteries/images/ipod_icalreminder.ics (link will open iCal).
Assess just how you use your iPod. Do you really need Wi-Fi on all the time? If not, disabling it will help battery life. If your iPod or iPhone has 6 pages of rarely used apps, get rid of the ones you don’t use. Most of us don’t really need the push mail functionality–if you fall into that category, go to Settings/Fetch New Data and turn it off.
When you get your laptop, plug it in, charge it fully, and run software update. There are energy saving updates now and again that you should take advantage of.
If you’re not going to use your device for a long time, storage is best at 70 degrees (F) or so and with a 50% charge.
“Apple’s battery website”:http://www.apple.com/batteries makes for good reading for anyone who’s had premature battery consumption or failure, and I encourage everyone to read it thoroughly.