Kibbles & Bytes Blog

  • Griffin Smart Talk

    For those who haven’t taken the plunge into the wonderful world of the iPhone and are still “stuck back in the stone age”…

  • Making the Move To Mac Even Easier!

    It’s no surprise that a large portion of people currently purchasing Macs are former PC users; we call them “Switchers.” One of the…

  • Repair of the Week

    The MacBook Air and new unibody MacBooks and MacBook Pros have been incredibly reliable. Very few are returned or exchanged for being dead on arrival–I’d say less than one percent. I expect that some of the product we ship won’t work right out of the box, but I also expect that the failure rate out of the box would be a tiny fraction of the number sold. I’m confident the new 17″ MacBook Pro will show an equally low failure rate.

    The repair of the week involves a 15″ unibody MacBook Pro that lacked AirPort function. In all Apple laptops to date, the AirPort card has been a part that can be ordered individually. But in the unibody laptops, the AirPort card is located in the display module, which can be ordered only as a “kit” that includes the screen, screen enclosure, bezel, iSight, inverter board, and AirPort/Bluetooth card.

    I installed the display module, reassembled the computer, and found that, while AirPort was working, signal strength was poor in my office where I usually enjoy a full signal. The new MacBooks are designed for serviceability, so I removed the bottom case and re-seated the camera/AirPort/Bluetooth cable. Success!

  • Tip of the Week

    I use Google dozens of times every single day, and not just at work; sometimes, though, finding the relevant bit buried in an article or web page can slow down your quest for the information you crave.

    Safari and Firefox both include a Find function that’s invoked by pressing Command-F. After landing on a page Google found for you, press Command-F and again type the most important word from your Google search. The web browser will immediately scroll to the word you searched for, making skimming through irrelevant text a thing of the past.

    You can press Command-G to find the next instance of your search word on that web page, and if you get overzealous using this “find again” keyboard shortcut, you can press Shift-Command-G to go to the previous instance.

    I have to dig deep to remember the time when I went to the local library to sift through a card catalog in search of a pile of books that might contain the information I needed. While I can’t remember the first thing I searched for on the internet, I do remember that my first web search happened after a morning hockey practice in my middle school advisor’s office sometime around 1996 or 1997. While I can picture the wallpaper in the room, I can’t remember which search engine I used.

    What was the first thing you searched for? I’d love to publish a few of your experiences in a future Tech Tails!

    __Image credit: Wikipedia__

  • Making the Move To Mac Even Easier

    It’s no surprise that a large portion of people currently purchasing Macs are former PC users; we call them “Switchers.” One of the most common concerns for a Switcher is how to move his or her emails, address book and calendar items from Outlook to a new machine. While there are several tips and tricks on how to do this, I wanted to showcase one of my favorite Switcher applications, “O2M”:http://www.littlemachines.com.

    I was first turned on to O2M when it went by it’s former name, Outlook2Mac. It’s a great little app by Little Machines that will convert all of your Outlook data to a format that your Mac will read for the low price of $10. While there are some free ways to do this, they are cumbersome; O2M does a clean and simple job and outputs to a format that can easily be read by Address Book, Mail, iCal, Entourage, and several other third-party mail programs on the Mac.

    It’s important to note that O2M is made to export information from the full version of Microsoft Outlook, so if you have Outlook Express you’re out of luck. To get the application, simply download it in your Windows PC from “Little Machine’s website”:http://www.littlemachines.com/ and run it on your PC. The program’s clean interface allows you to chose which type of files you’d like exported, what format you’d like them exported as and then it does the rest for you! You can then use either a USB Key/Flash Drive or external hard drive to transfer the exported data to your Mac. Enjoy!

  • Happy Tuesday,

    Every quarter or so, the Small Dog management team meets at Geoff’s house for a day to take an honest look at how things are done and come up with new offerings and refine what’s already offered. We leave each time on the same page, eager to make great ideas reality. We’ll keep you up to date as things happen on our blog and in our newsletters.

    Our goal is to create a peerless experience for all of our customers. We e-mail each and every one of you after a purchase with a customer satisfaction survey where you can ask to be contacted for any reason. We read each one and will bend over backwards to make sure you’re happy. I hope you’ll get in touch with us with suggestions, complaints, and compliments; these can be sent to suggestions@smalldog.com.

    As always, thanks for reading and keep in touch.

    Matt
    matt@smalldog.com

  • Well, we did get the snow I was hoping for this weekend, thankfully. There are up to 8″ of new snow in some areas of the valley–perfect for a weekend at the slopes with my family!

    I hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s issue of Kibbles & Bytes. Don will be back next week and we’ll return to our regular programming!

    Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,
    _Kali and Ed_

  • SPECIALS | 02/20/09 – 02/27/09

    View specials while on-hand supplies last. Please note that some specials may not be available in our retail stores; check for availability.

    See all specials on our “Specials Page.”:http://www.smalldog.com/specials

  • Fair (and Unfair) Use of Images From the Internet

    Recently there’s been a fair amount of controversy over the use of uncredited images sourced from the Internet. Shepard Fairey’s use of an AP photo to create the now-iconic Obama “Hope”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FaireyICAHope.jpg poster has especially been in the news. Fairey’s appropriation of the image was intentional, and he altered the photo so much that it effectively became an all-new image. Still, this does bring up the question of what is considered fair use of images sourced from the web.

    At Small Dog we recently made the mistake of using an image without attribution in our Tech Tails newsletter. It was “a photo of a tasty glass of Shed beer on Flickr,”:http://flickr.com/photos/found_drama/1430102242/ from Flickr / Twitter user “Found_drama.”:http://blog.founddrama.net/ We wanted to acknowledge the importance of this issue, and of course, to apologize to “Found_drama”:http://blog.founddrama.net/ for using his image without attribution!

    In this case, the rights of image owner were very clear. He used a Creative Commons copyright license that allowed for sharing, remixing, and sharing the work (under the same license) as long as it was for noncommercial use and had attribution. You can read the specific license “by clicking here.”:http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/deed.en

    You’ve probably seen Creative Commons-tagged images and documents while surfing the web. “Creative Commons”:http://creativecommons.org/ is an excellent (and free) service that lets “authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from All Rights Reserved to Some Rights Reserved.”

    It’s very easy to read CC licenses to determine if you can use someone else’s image or other work in your own projects. But how do you determine if you can use images that don’t have CC license, or any other obvious trademark or copyright? After all, it’s exceedingly easy to find, copy, manipulate, and share digital images.

    At Small Dog, most of our images are sourced from our own photos, directly from companies like Apple (with copyright provisions as part of our reseller agreement), stock photo libraries such as iStockphoto, and from boxed stock photos like Adobe Stock Photos and the Big Box of Art. We tend to get a lot of photos directly from the manufacturers of the gear we sell. Sometimes, we also use other people’s photos with attribution.

    In most cases, it’s wise to assume photos and images you find online are, indeed, protected by copyright. “Click here to read a good article about this subject, including Fair Use of images and information.”:http://www.umuc.edu/library/copy.shtml

    You can also read about Fair Use on “Wikipedia by clicking here.”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use