Kibbles & Bytes Blog

We decided to surprise our co-worker Tony with a giant creemee from our local creemee stand. It was already melting when we ran…

It’s hard to believe that this is Labor Day weekend. I love the 3-day weekend but the end of summer is upon us. Tony just came up from the warehouse to report that there were “ducks on the pond” – yet another sign of fall.

Small Dog Electronics will be closed on Labor Day to allow our employees to enjoy this last summer weekend and celebrate the holiday. I hope you have a wonderful weekend and thank you so much for spreading the word about Small Dog Electronics and reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,
_Don, Kali, Ed and Matt_

“UPDATED! Save from $500 – $1000 on two new 17-inch MacBook Pro models! From $1999.99. Click here to see them all!”:http://www.smalldog.com/category/x/x/x/Apple|MacBook_Pro|17in

“MacBook Pro 17in 2.4GHz, 2GB RAM, 160GB RAM, Superdrive, FREE 3-day express shipping – $1999.99”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag18316/at_tt

“MacBook Pro 17in 2.6GHz Core 2 Duo 2GB/200@7200rpm/Superdrive/Glossy Screen, FREE 3-day express shipping – $2099.99”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag18314/at_kb

“MacBook Pro 17in 2.4GHz, 2GB, 160GB, 3-Year AppleCare Plan, FREE Canon Printer/Copier/Scanner – $2329.99”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag18323/at_kb

“See our most popular Mac to School bundles and gear by clicking here. Save up to $390!”:http://www.smalldog.com/mactoschool

“Free shipping on every MacBook with a 4GB RAM upgrade! Or, get a FREE Canon Pixma MP470 Printer/Copier/Scanner when you buy any MacBook with AppleCare!”:http://www.smalldog.com/category/x/x/x/Apple|MacBook

“Save up to $400 on iMac bundles. Purchase any in-stock iMac with AppleCare and get a FREE Canon Pixma MP470 Printer/Copier/Scanner! Upgrade to 4GB of RAM for only $100 more!”:http://www.smalldog.com/category/x/x/x/Apple|iMac

“Special iMac with bluetooth keyboard and mouse bundle: iMac 20in Intel 2.0GHz 4GB RAM, 250GB hard drive, Bluetooth Keyboard and Mouse, Free shipping -$1189.99”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag18252/at_kb

“Mophie Juice Pack external battery for iPod Touch – up to 24 hours of battery life, free shipping – $99.99”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag18324/at_kb

Get a 17″ MacBook Pro for (almost) the price of a 15″! With a rich, glossy screen, a 2.6GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB RAM and a 200GB@7200rpm hard drive, it could very well be your desktop!

An amazing price on an amazing portable Mac. The power, speed, and performance of a desktop machine, ready to go wherever you go. Starting at only $2099.99!

“BUY NOW”:http://www.smalldog.com/product/72012

Since I bought a MacBook Air from our first delivery of them earlier this year, I’ve grown more and more attached to it. I take it with me when I travel, and it serves as my main home computer. Combined with the AirPort Disk functionality of the newest AirPort Extreme Base Station, the MacBook Air’s relatively puny hard drive isn’t a problem.

I have two quibbles with the Air, though. Firstly, it’s so light and whenever I keep it in my backpack, I forget it’s there; I sometimes toss the bag into the car or into a corner of the office. Thankfully, no damage has come from this! My second quibble is with the battery. Apple advertises a five hour battery life for this machine, but I’m hard pressed to squeeze two hours from it unless I employ some extreme power conservation. Also, the battery takes a very long time to charge. In an airport, between flights, I could charge the MacBook Pro quickly and efficiently for the next flight; with the Air, no such luck. It takes an excruciatingly long time to charge the thing.

QuickerTek announced an external battery pack for the Air that is supposed to give a total of 16 hours of battery life! “Check it out here”:http://www.smalldog.com/product/71826.

Here’s my list of battery saving tips:

* Lower the display brightness all the way down. Doing this will generally double the estimated remaining battery life if you were set to full brightness beforehand.
* Disable keyboard backlighting.
* Ensure that Energy Saver is set to spin down hard disks when possible.
* Put your computer to sleep whenever you’re not actively using it, like when you’re on the phone, in the bathroom, or walking the dog.
* Eject optical disks. They spin almost all the time, taking power, even when they’re not in active use.
* Have lots of RAM installed. This helps prevent excessive virtual memory use (virtual memory is hard drive space that’s turned into “virtual” RAM. When the computer needs more RAM than is physically installed, it’ll dip into virtual memory reserves, and cause the hard drive to work more than it really has to.
* Consider using Activity Monitor to kill the dock process, which owns Dashboard. If you’ve invoked Dashboard, killing the Dock will free up all the memory it used. Consider disabling Spotlight as well.
* If you’re on the road, odds are you don’t have your Time Machine disk with you. Turn Time Machine off while you’re traveling.
Use your iPod for music, not the computer; don’t charge your iPod unless absolutely necessary.
* Turn off auto-save features in your word processor. This feature spins up the hard drive all the time, consuming lots of power.
* Don’t keep unused Applications running in the background.
* If you use Quicksilver (and you should, by the way: http://quicksilver.blacktree.com), ensure that it does not re-catalogue, which is hard drive- and procesor-intensive. Set it to rescan every 24 hours.
* Turn off Bluetooth and AirPort unless they’re actually needed.
* Mute the sound.

It’s not always practical to use your laptop is such a minimal way, but following these guidelines my MacBook Air will ALMOST last for five hours on a single charge.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how I was going to try out cell tower-based broadband internet at our family’s lake house (a place where you can’t get a good cup of coffee, let alone internet service). Well, it worked great. Here are some details of the experiment:

My equipment:
– Verizon Wireless V640 ExpressCard (not sold by Verizon anymore, but the equivalent looks to be the V740 ExpressCard); this fits in either a MacBook Pro or the router below
– Cradlepoint MBR1000 Wireless Router (802.11n)

The location:
– Broadband and V Cast access, as indicated by “Verizon’s Coverage Locator”:http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/CoverageLocatorController?requesttype=NEWREQUEST&lid=//global//plans//coverage+maps; this type of coverage is sometimes referred to as “EVDO”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution-Data_Optimized

My findings:
– On most days, the speed was comparable to DSL (somewhere around 1Mbps is my guess, but don’t quote me on that. DSL speeds range between 128kbps and 1.5Mbps); however, there were times that pages would not load for 2-3 minutes.
– The Cradlepoint router needed to be placed where the cell strength was the best (logical); this meant that there were places through several walls that received a diminished wireless signal.
– All Macs were able to connect to the router with no problem (we had three different ones, which had 10.4 or 10.5).
– PCs were able to connect as well, save for one that had trouble due to Dell’s proprietary network “wizard.”
– As many as six computers were on at the same time without issue, though there were a couple of times the PCs got a “connection timed out” message; we’re not sure why that was, but guessed that the bandwidth was being tested.(?)

How to buy:
– The ExpressCards are available through various cell service providers; you’ll want to check with yours to see what the coverage is like beforehand. MacBook Pros use a ExpressCard 34 slot. “Read more about ExpressCards”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExpressCard. These are generally between $49 and $129, but may be heavily discounted with a new service plan, so you may want to check with your provider.
– The Cradlepoint MBR1000 Wireless Router is available from “3G Wireless”:http://3gstore.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=35&products_id=765. The current price (at the time of writing) is $239.99.
– We offer two Linksys models for special order at $139.99–one for Sprint and one for Verizon. It should be noted that these use 802.11g rather than 802.11n, and that it includes a PC Card slot (the slot used by PowerBook G4s). PC Cards are available from you cell provider as well. “Find them here”:http://www.smalldog.com/search/?find=linksys+wireless-g.

Overall, we were extremely pleased. Many thanks again to Jason for lending his equipment to me for the weekend! Feel free to email me with any questions, or to share any experiences you may have had with a similar setup.

Safari has some innovative privacy features. First, it’s possible to easily erase Safari’s entire browsing history by clicking on History > Clear History. Safari can also be reset by clicking on Safari > Reset Safari. In Safari 3, it’s possible to choose individual features to reset in Safari, such as “Clear Google Searches,” or “Empty the cache.” These are useful options, but what if you only want to remove one or two webpages from your browsing history?

I know what you’re probably thinking. “What kind of creep needs to hide their web browsing history?” Besides looking at naughty images, there actually are good reasons for removing a webpage from your browsing history. Maybe you’re researching a medical condition you’d like to keep private. Perhaps you’re gift shopping and don’t want someone to ruin their birthday surprise. Or more likely, you opened a page with questionable content by accident, and you’d like to remove it from your history.

Fortunately, it’s very easy to do this. In Safari, click on History > Show All History. Alternately, you can click on the bookmark icon in Safari’s upper left corner, under the back / forward arrows and browse down the list to the “History” header.

Once you’re looking at the list of web pages you’ve viewed, you can simply go down the list, click once on the page title, then click delete. The individual page will be removed from Safari’s history.

Note that you can choose to Browse Privately with Safari so you don’t need to go back and purge your history. Simply launch Safari, then click Safari > Private Browsing. In this mode, Safari won’t save any cookies, passwords, or pages viewed.

_Dear Friends,_

Welcome to a big change in Kibbles & Bytes, the first HTML version of our flagship weekly newsletter. We have been working on this for some time and I am pleased to bring you our enhanced newsletter. This will allow us to provide easier navigation, easier to read text and of course, the ability to send pictures as well. There is a link to the plain text version of Kibbles & Bytes at the top for those that would prefer the “classic” version. As always, we would greatly appreciate your feedback on the style and content in addition to your suggestions for content and improvements!

School has started and I’ve noticed that many of the maple trees are already turning color. Grace, Emily, Tony and I took a ride on Sunday on an important mission: ride to Maine and eat a lobster. We all noticed that the fall foliage seems to be starting and will be early this year. The big maple by my garage is bright red. If you are planning to come to New England for the colors, I’d come early! I stopped at a farm on the way home to get some sweet corn, and when the farmer saw my Cubs hat and shirt (he was clearly a Red Sox fan), we joked around about baseball as I selected some good ears. The Cubs have the best record in baseball at the end of August, and their best record since the last time they went to the world series in 1945.

If you are looking for a new MacBook Pro, I encourage you to check out the values that we have on a couple of models of the 17-inch MacBook Pro. These are the best prices we have ever had for a large screen laptop. We also have great bargains on iMacs and MacBooks running right now. Apple’s market share keeps skyrocketing and while you might think that it’s the iPod and iPhone driving Apple’s business these days, the little-known secret is that it is the Mac that is driving the business. There were a couple of data points this week that point out just how much ground Apple is gaining. One research firm reported that Apple achieved a 10.4% market-share of the home market at the end of the first quarter this year, compared to a 5.4% market share at the end of the first quarter of 2006. Another industry research group reported that Mac use in businesses rose from 1.1% in October 2006 to 4.5% in June of this year. Keep in mind that every 1% of market share gained is millions of dollars in sales!