Barkings! | The Small Dog Apple Blog

Everyone is buzzing about the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics starting tonight. Some people love to watch Alpine Skiing, Figure Skating or Snowboarding. This year the Olympic Games are being held right in our own backyard, plus we have a lot of contenders, so it’s especially exciting.

Cowbell2010 is your perfect new app for the iPhone or iPod touch. This new app is created by Rage Digital and it allows you to cheer for your home country while watching this year’s Winter Olympics.

Cowbell2010 also lets you follow hundreds of tweets from athletes all over the world. It has a real-time medal counter and even a “Live Wall” so you can share photos and text your experiences with all of your Facebook and other Cowbell2010 friends.

At only .99 cents, it’s a cool and affordable app to keep track of all of the Olympic excitement!

The past few months here at Small Dog we started carrying Flip Video Cameras. These small, lightweight and power cameras can record in HD and are as easy to use as… well… your Mac.

Here’s a cool modification you can make for your Flip Camera to create a wide-angle effect without having to buy an expensive lens. All you need is your Flip Camera, a Security Door Peep Hole ($10-20 at Home Depot or Lowes), a plastic film canister, a few rubber bands and a power drill with drill bit.

First, drill a hole in the plastic film canister to allow the security door peep hole to fit inside. You then attach the plastic canister with the Door viewer to the Flip camera with two rubber bands. This allows you to quickly put the wide-angle lens on or off without damaging the Flip camera.

This how to project is posted on www.instructables.com and you can read the full article here.

Have fun building this extra accessory for your Flip Camera!

Don’t have a Flip? Grab one here!

With the iPhone still not in Vermont, and patience running thin, some of us are giving up waiting before buying another phone. However, there are still many of us who want to ride it out and are waiting for AT&T to show itself in the Green Mountain state.

If you’re looking for an iPhone alternative, though (either permanent or temporary), there’s a service called Callwave. I found it about a year ago, and it is an online messaging center that offers several services, including Voicemail-To-Text for your computer (or iPhone if you have one). It organizes all of your voicemails, text messages and contacts on the web.

Forget the visual voicemail on the iPhone—Callwave works with any cell phone from any provider, which makes it extremely flexible. It allows you to see who called you, when they called, and how long their message was through your computer. In addition, Callwave converts them into a text format. Callwave also has an option to send free text massages to any cell phone on any service.

Until the iPhone gets to Vermont, Callwave is a great solution. Check out their website for more features and information!

Tags: callwave, iphone, message, phone, service, text, voicemail

Within the past year, I have bought two LaCie Quadra hard drives totaling close to 800GBs. I never would have thought I’d fill them up in a few years, let alone one! To save my files when I travel and give me extra space, I have been thinking about getting a portable, bus-powered hard drive to bring along with me in my computer bag.

At Small Dog we recently started carrying Iomega hard drives, and I decided to try one out. I wanted to carry all of my media collection with me as well as having some extra storage. I chose the 250GB Iomega eGo portable hard drive. With a reasonable $129.99 price tag it’s a great overall portable hard drive. It has USB 2.0 and FireWire 400 connectivity that allow transfer rates up to 480 Mbits/s and includes a 8MB memory cache.

The compact design and sleek shape make it perfect for travel, without being too bulky. The bright color and chrome metal ends are slick as well as functional. In addition, Iomega added the new Drop Guard™ feature that provides extra durability against unintended drops!

Overall, I have been impressed with this hard drive and would recommend it to anyone looking for a portable hard drive with a lot of storage.

Buy it here!

Tags: drop guard, ego, firewire, hard drive, iomega, usb

Recently with the help of David Boyd, I have figured out how to not only download custom Leopard docks but also create my own dock graphics. The day after the big release of Leopard in the Burlington store we noticed something funny with the 20in iMac. The dock wasn’t the traditional silver color, but was now a see through black graphic. I searched everywhere online the next few days and couldn’t find anything about changing different colors.

Last Saturday I asked on of my co-workers, David Boyd, if he knew how to change the appearance of the dock to different colors and graphics. Of course he said without hesitation, “Oh yeah, just check out leoparddocks.com.”
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing: there were all sorts of different docks to download and easy steps to change it. I downloaded a few of them and switched my dock to the transparent black one I had seen on the iMac after the Leopard release.

I noticed that the files you could download were only semi-transparent PNG files. A PNG file, or Portable Network Graphic, is used as a replacement for a GIF file and employs lossless data compression. This file format is easily created in Adobe Photoshop CS3, and I have been creating them for school files since high school. I started on a design I thought fellow Small Doggers and their customers would like. I created the dock graphic, indicators and re-sizing bar. Check it out and tell me what you think!

Tags: dock, leopard, small dog