Kibbles & Bytes Blog

  • FEATURED SPECIAL | 11/20/09 – 11/27/09

    From now until January 2, 2010, we are offering a choice of two rebates when you purchase any Mac with AppleCare. The first is on a wireless HP Multifunction printer/copier/scanner–*free* when a mail-in rebate from HP is combined with an exclusive online rebate from “Smalldog.com.”:http://www.smalldog.com/sderebate/

    The second is a $60 rebate on a 500GB or 1TB LaCie Neil Poulton hard drive. That means when you purchase any Mac with AppleCare, you can add a 500GB drive for just $20, or a 1TB drive for just $60!

    Best of all, we’ve made it very easy to redeem our rebates. After you’ve made your purchase, simply go to “Smalldog.com/sderebate”:http://www.smalldog.com/sderebate to enter your information. The rebate will be processed and mailed out to you!

  • Altec Lansing Mix iMT800: iPod/iPhone Sound System of the Year!

    I nominate the Altec Lansing Mix iMT800 as the “iPod/iPhone Sound System of the Year.” This system looks a little like an old school boombox, but is fully modern with built-in iPod/iPhone dock (fully GSM-shielded so you don’t need to put the iPhone into airplane mode), two aux-in jacks, digital FM radio, quality, high-contrast LCD, 7-band graphic equalizer and cool remote control with built-in carabiner clip.

    Finally, while this system is a great bookshelf system, it can also run for up to 30 hours from 8 ‘D’ batteries. It sports handles on the top and front, making it easy to bring with you to the beach, backyard, etc. It would be a great party system.

    The Altec Lansing Mix iMT80 dominates our sound room with crisp audio, excellent volume, and truly deep bass. I was very impressed the first time I connected my iPhone to it, and continue to be impressed every time I hear it. I think it’s better than any other sound system in its approximate price range.*

    That said, I am not a fan of the Mix iMT800’s appearance. I’d love a less retro design (or perhaps more retro design if they’d go all the way back to the early 1960’s, a là Mad Men). The look of the Mix doesn’t really fit in with the rest of my sleek Apple equipment. I can live with it, though, since the performance is more than there.

    The Mix iMT800 has a 4.5 star rating from Apple.com (where it retails for $299). We’re selling these like crazy in our retail stores. People seem to be looking for a higher end, premium sound system for the kitchen, living room, and office. I plan on getting one for my home office, which also doubles as my guest room.

    See the Altec Lansing Mix iMT800 “by clicking here”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag19579, on sale for $70 off MSRP. As always, free shipping and no sales tax (except VT).

    *__Editor’s note: It really is awesome. I expected to like others more, but it truly sounded the best out of what we tried. Worth the $$!__

  • Apple TV vs. Mac mini

    Next week we’re covering the topic of Mac mini vs. Apple TV as an iTunes-enabled home media hub for the living room. We wanted to get feedback from our readers about which you prefer.

    Email “ed@smalldog.com”:mailto:ed@smalldog.com to share your opinion, and we’ll include it in next weeks Kibbles & Bytes! If you’ve been thinking of getting one or the other, please share that too. Finally, let us know if you simply connect your iPod, iPhone or Mac to your TV/home stereo.

    I personally am having this debate. It will be interesting to hear what everyone thinks!

  • User Tips to Speed Up Your Mac

    Back in January, I wrote a list of “10 Tips for Dealing with Unexpected Computer Slowdowns”:http://blog.smalldog.com/kibbles/?c=kb604 which I’ve posted on Small Dog’s “Barkings! Blog.”:http://blog.smalldog.com

    Colleen Thompson, a reader of our Tech Tails newsletter and a Mac consultant, sent in some more advice for dealing with unexpected Mac slowdowns. With her permission, we are reprinting her advice. She definitely has some good thoughts here.

    The original article began with the following, and she picks it up from there:

    bq. __A friend recently sent me an email, questioning why his MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM was “getting slower and slower, with an increasing frequency of the appearance of the SRWOD (spinny rainbow wheel of death).”__

    “FWIW, I call it the SPOD (Spinning Pizza of Death.) Easier to remember and say, as in ‘Why is my computer spodding all the time?’ If you’re getting lots of SPODs, and nothing else is wrong with your computer, look into adding more RAM.”

    bq. __Many apps install helper programs that run by default whenever you startup your Mac. This typically happens in the background, without the user having to confirm anything. Often these aren’t needed and can hog system resources without having anything to show for it. To disable startup items you don’t use, navigate to *System Preferences > Accounts > Login items* and uncheck the list.__

    “Actually, unchecking just *hides* that helper program when it automatically launches. To remove it from Startup Items, you need to click on the minus sign at the bottom of the list.”

    bq. __Check the health of your hard drive. I depend on Onyx to verify the S.M.A.R.T. status of my Mac’s hard drive. Immediately back up your computer if you think there’s a real issue with the drive. Then consider using a dedicated drive diagnostic/repair tool such as Disk Warrior.__

    “The SMART check used by Disk Utility, Onyx, and other applications is pretty worthless, especially in the case of bad blocks, the most common type of disk failure I see. I am very enamored of SMART Utility from Volitans Software (look for it on versiontracker.com).

    It directly accesses the SMART attributes of the drive and gives you advance warning that the drive is misbehaving; and it tells you exactly how many blocks have already been replaced so you can proactively replace a drive (once blocks start going bad, things almost always get progressively worse, and a Write All Zeroes reformat seldom fixes it for long). Unfortunately SMART is not supported by most FireWire and USB enclosures. But it’s great for internal drives.

    As a Mac consultant, I’d say half the work I do these days is dealing with failing hard drives. I think of them as consumables–like light bulbs. When you buy a lamp (computer), you do it fully realizing you’re going to be replacing the light bulb at some point in the future.”

    *Thanks again for sending this in, Colleen!*

  • Coupon For 20% Off All Books

    We have a large list of books for Mac, iPod, iPhone, along with general titles about the Internet, video, and design. Books are a perfect gift on their own, or to go along with the gift of an iPod or a Mac. For the rest of the holiday season, we’re offering a coupon for *20% off all books,* except those books already on sale.

    The coupon code is *bookclub*.

    To use the code, simply add the book of your choice to your shopping cart and then enter code *bookclub* to the coupon field.

    See all books “by clicking here.”:http://www.smalldog.com/category/x/x/x/Books_and_Videos|Books

  • MAC TREAT #106: Choose Finder's Default New Window

    By default, when you open a new Finder window, Finder brings you to your Home Folder. This folder contains folders for Applications, Documents, Music, Photos, Movies, Library, Sites, etc.

    This can be useful if you need to browse different folders to find a file. However, if you frequently go to the same folder over and over again–say, your Documents folder or Pictures folder, the default view requires you to click over to that folder. It would be nice to open a new Finder window and be brought directly to your most-frequented folder.

    To do this, all you need to do is open a Finder window by clicking on the blue Finder icon in the left corner of your Dock, or by clicking on the hard drive icon on your desktop. If you’re already in the Finder, you can also use the keyboard shortcut *Command-N* to open a new window. Next, under the *Finder* menu, click *Preferences*. You’ll now see drop down menu labeled “*New Finder windows open:*”. From the drop down menu, you can choose the folder or location of your choice.

  • _Dear Friends,_

    I saw a bunch of wild turkeys again on the way to work but there were also a bunch of Canada geese hanging out in the harvested corn field, stopping for a break on their way south. Over at the Dead Creek wildlife reserve, there is an organized geese stopover where each year, literally thousands of Canada and Snow geese stop on their way south. I am seeing the V’s of flying geese almost every day now.

    Our big pre-holiday customer appreciation sale is this weekend at our retail stores. While we will have some special sales items only available to our local customers, we have some great deals for all of our customers. If you buy any Mac with AppleCare, you can have your choice of a free (after HP and Small Dog rebates) HP all-in-one printer or you can get a 500GB LaCie Neil Poulton USB 2.0 hard drive for only $20 (after Small Dog rebate) or upgrade to a 1TB drive for just $40 more.

    “Check out the details on our Rebates page.”:http://www.smalldog.com/rebates

    All of our iPod-compatible docking speakers will also be on sale this weekend, too. With free shipping (for orders over $200) and no sales tax outside of Vermont, this can be a great time to beat the crowds at our customer appreciation sale in the stores and online.

    We will be introducing a new periodic newsletter entitled “Deal Retriever” this next week. As a Kibbles & Bytes subscriber you will automatically get this new sheet, and will be free to manage any future communication. This will be insider information of the very best offers from Small Dog Electronics. I’d appreciate your feedback on this new electronic publication!

  • 10 Tips for Dealing with Unexpected Computer Slowdowns

    A friend recently sent me an email, questioning why his MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM was “getting slower and slower, with an increasing frequency of the appearance of the SRWOD (spinny rainbow wheel of death).” This is something I occasionally hear about, but haven’t experienced (except for Safari randomly bogging down for several seconds).

    Unfortunately, mysterious computer slowdowns can be difficult to diagnose. Overstuffed system cache, old temp files, corrupted preferences, a hard drive in the early stages of failure, and faulty RAM are always candidates for causing this problem. Here are some suggestions to resolve system slowdowns.

    Also, please make sure you have a solid backup of your Macs important data before proceeding. *I’ll say it again: make sure your Mac is backed up properly before proceeding.*

    1. Any Mac will slow down when its hard drive is almost full, regardless of processor speed. Simply moving some of your data (especially media files like movies, video podcasts, etc) to an external drive can greatly improve a Mac’s responsiveness.

    Read how to reclaim hard drive space in an old Kibbles article “by clicking here.”:http://www.smalldog.com/kibbles/kibbles_display.php?id=557

    2. Clear your Mac’s desktop. The OS has to draw each of those icons as separate windows, so when you have dozens of files littered on the desktop the system is taxed. Clearing the Macs desktop is proven to improve system performance.

    3. Make sure your computer is up to date with all the latest software and firmware updates from Apple. This can go a long way to improving system performance. To check this, click the Apple in the top left corner of the screen and select “Software Update…”

    4. Simply running a free maintenance program can often help bring a sluggish and flakey machine back to speed. These programs force the Mac’s regular Unix maintenance scripts; normally these run daily, weekly, and monthly early in the morning. “Click here for further reading on this.”:http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2319?viewlocale=en_US

    I use a program called Onyx to run these scripts. You can get it for Tiger (10.4) and Leopard (10.5). It’s effective and easy to use. It starts by checking the S.M.A.R.T. status of your hard drive, so you can determine if the drive is failing. This step takes several minutes. After that Onyx can flush system cache, etc.

    One catch about Onyx is that it has several options that most people shouldn’t use, such as the option for erasing bookmarks and internet browsing history. I do like and recommend Onyx, though–get it for free from the developer “by clicking here.”:http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs/english.html You can also download Onyx directly from Apple’s site “by clicking here.”:http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/system_disk_utilities/onyx.html

    You can also download a simpler program called MacJanitor that will only run the maintenance scripts “by clicking here.”:here:http://personalpages.tds.net/%7Ebrian_hill/macjanitor.html When a tech diagnoses your Mac, he or she runs a battery of programs that are similar to Onyx. This takes several hours. However, Onyx does a great job for occasional repairs and maintenance.

    5. Check the health of your hard drive. I depend on Onyx to verify the S.M.A.R.T. status of my Mac’s hard drive. Immediately back up your computer if you think there’s a real issue with the drive. Then consider using a dedicated drive diagnostic/repair tool such as “Disk Warrior.”:http://www.smalldog.com/product/41941 If the drive is having issues and you’re going to replace it, consider using a 7200RPM model. A faster hard drive will result in a (slightly) faster Mac.

    6. Check the health of your Mac’s RAM. There are several ways to test the health of your Mac’s RAM. I use “Rember,”:http://www.kelleycomputing.net/rember/ which is a free program that is a front-end GUI to a basic Unix ‘memtest’ command. You can read more about testing RAM “by clicking here”:http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20050524014158525

    7. Deal with mutant applications. Ok, so maybe the word “mutant” is unfair. However, it’s always a good idea to delete applications that you don’t use. I use “AppCleaner”:http://www.freemacsoft.net/AppCleaner/index.php to do this.

    Also, many apps install helper programs that run by default whenever you startup your Mac. This typically happens in the background, without the user having to confirm anything. Often these aren’t needed and can hog system resources without having anything to show for it. To disable startup items you don’t use, navigate to System Preferences > Accounts > Login items and uncheck the list.

    Finally, any active, running application uses system resources including CPU cycles, RAM and disk activity, even when it is in the background and you’re not using it. Some programs leak memory when they are running, which makes them gobble RAM over time.

    8. Use Activity Monitor and iStat Pro to analyze which system processes and applications are hogging system resources. You can download the “iStat Pro widget by clicking here.”:http://www.islayer.com/apps/istatpro/ Activity Monitor is found in the Utilities Folder which is nested in the Applications folder in OS X.

    9. If you have an Intel Mac, use Xslimmer to trim away the legacy PowerPC code from Universal binary applications. Read more “by clicking here.”:http://www.xslimmer.com/

    10. Programs that automatically perform syncing, indexing, and backup operations on your Mac can occasionally slow it down. They can sometimes cause minor drags that slow the system for a couple of seconds at a time.

    If none of these helps, the problem will likely be more time-consuming to resolve. At Small Dog, our techs run a battery of tests with several software and hardware tools to seek out and fix strange system slowdowns. Hopefully the above suggestions will keep you from having to send in your machine!

    __Editor’s note: Check out “this cheeky website”:http://marbleofdoom.com/about.html to log your time spent waiting for the “Spinning Beach Ball of Death!”__

    __Originally featured in__ “Kibbles & Bytes #604.”:http://blog.smalldog.com/kibbles/?c=kb604

  • Tip of the Week: Hidden Customization

    There are myriad of customization options in Mac OS X–some are in plain sight in System Preferences and elsewhere while others involve manual editing of plist (property list) files or tricking the system into thinking one file is actually another. One of the most powerful interface tweaks you can make is to the menu bar, and while you can enable menu bar extras through System Preferences and elsewhere, doing so can take some sleuthing.

    Mac OS X is built for multiple users. As such, each user has a home folder with that user’s preferences and settings. But there are common resources shared by all users, and these resources are for the most part located in the System and Library folders at the root level of your hard drive. Before I go further, I should note the importance of taking care when modifying anything in either of these folders. One misstep can lead to a completely nonfunctional computer!

    The menu bar extras I mentioned before are located at Macintosh HD/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras. All you need to do is drag the files in this folder up to where you’d like them to live in the menu bar. Some of the menu bar extras will not “stick” up there because they are not supported on your system. For example, the ExpressCard menu item will not stick if used on a MacBook without an ExpressCard slot. If you use Mac OS X Server 10.5 or 10.6, you can realize power savings with the CPU menu bar item, which allows you to disable and enable processors or processor cores as more or less power is needed.

    Another item in the CoreServices folder is the default desktop picture, which is shown at the login window. You can replace this file with another jpeg of equal resolution and name it DefaultDesktop.jpg to change the desktop picture at the login window.

    Your mileage may vary on these hints. Whatever you do, make sure you’ve backed up your computer before trying anything.

  • Repair of the Week: MacBook Won't Boot

    It is every service provider’s goal to fix each computer quickly and completely the first time. Every so often, though, we don’t succeed. It is the rare intermittent issues that are almost impossible to accurately predict, diagnose, and repair. We have the option to send laptops to Apple’s repair facilities at our discretion, and we do utilize the mail-in facilities when a diagnosis is not entirely clear. Because these facilities service all of the United States and Canada, it makes sense for them to warehouse most every service part available, making efficient and effective diagnosis much easier. Small Dog does keep many hundreds of diagnostic parts in stock, but it’s just not possible for us to keep a million-dollar service part inventory!

    With this in mind, this week’s repair is a MacBook that presented with the all-too-familiar flashing question mark when it was powered on. This generally means hard drive failure, file system corruption, or an operating system in disarray. However, this case didn’t follow normal patterns: the sick MacBook’s hard drive booted another MacBook just fine. The decision was made to send this repair to Apple for repair. All mail-in repairs are sent in via FedEx early morning overnight service and are almost always repaired the same day they’re received, and this was no exception. The MacBook came back with its hard drive and, inexplicably, its SuperDrive replaced. It did boot right up when we tested it, so the customer was contacted and the machine picked up shortly after.

    Two days later, the computer came back with the same flashing question mark problem as before. Out it went again, and it came back with the hard drive, optical drive, logic board, and hard drive interconnect cable replaced. It turned out that the serial-ATA bus on the main logic board was to blame for the failure, and, despite repeated trips to Apple, the MacBook is in perfect working order once again.