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Gear

Products used by Amber Coast Hovawarts

Some people have asked about items we use for breeding, or to construct our website. Some of it's useful for new families or for people working their own website. Other things are technical gear only geeks would love (or as my brother said, get that dork stuff off your front page!). So here's a place for all of that. We buy most of our items from amazon.com because we've been impressed with their great selection, fantastic service (proven to us on multiple occasions!) and great prices. If you find things on amazon.com you like and use the links on this page (including the one above) it will help to support this site page and won't cost you anything.

Updated June 7, 2010.

Leashes

I like the Planet Dog Cozy Hemp Collar ... we have the large size but I think the medium would probably work best for most Hovis, even ones as large as Tango (~80 lbs). I'm going to try the Planet Dog Natural Hemp Leash to go with it.

Treats

For clicker training I'm going to try the Pro-Treat Beef Liver, Freeze Dried Dog Treats .

Web Site Production

Software

I'm using Dreamweaver CS5 and the rest of Adobe Creative Suite 5 including Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 for video production. I use Lightroom 2 (I just installed Lightroom 3 beta 2) for pictures and sometimes Photoshop CS5. In time I'll see if I can add some of modern features to this site including integration with things like word press.

Workstation

We have liked Macs such as the Apple Mac Book Pro but I'm moving to Windows for Adobe stuff. There are a few reasons for this ... my old workstation is really slowing me down and we don't have the time to spare so we need an upgrade. As of May 2010, the Mac Pro hasn't been updated for 447 days and is not using the newer, much faster and more power efficient CPUs. Also I can upgrade my workstation for a fraction of the cost of a Mac Pro and the "Adobe Experience" will be about the same, including color managed workflow, which is all I really care about. For instance, an upgrade with an Intel Core i7 980X, ASUS P6X58D Premium Motherboard, 12GB Corsair PC3-12800 DDR3 Memory, and Intel 80 GB Solid State Drive would be about half of the cost a similarly configured but less powerful Apple machine (granted I'm reusing some components I already have on hand). Working primarily on a 2x 600GB VELOCIRAPTOR RAID-0 is something else I'm considering.

Windows is a pain to maintain, is not as well designed overall, and is much more likely to be infected with malware but for almost everything other than Adobe tasks we use Linux (possibly in a VMware Workstation virtual machine), which is a pretty safe way to go.

On another level, while I greatly admire the design and user experience of Apple products, I've been becoming more and more concerned that as the new platforms such as the iPad prevent the owner from running any but Apple approved software. As the closed, vertically integrated Apple platform becomes more important Apple becomes more powerful and influential. I agree with the Free Software Foundation that it is bad for freedom.

Storage

We've got a server with 4 x 1.5 TB drives for storage and I'm investigating moving our backup to an external TR5UT 5 Bay SATA Hardware RAID 5 Enclosure. It's half the cost of a Drobo and does not use a proprietary RAID scheme (or encrypted logs). It seems straightforward to use and seems to have a lot of positive reports.