All Apple All Day

A few months ago, I wrote about the Redmere High Speed HDMI cables that are available at Monoprice. They're unbelievably thin... about the same size and flexibility as your iPhone charging cable. Last week, I finally got around to ordering four 15-foot cables. And literally the next day, I got an email about the NEW and IMPROVED Redmere HDMI cables! Good thing I hadn't opened the old ones.

This post starts with a rather embarrassing story.  Last summer, we were invited to a Friday evening happy hour at our neighbors' house.  (That isn't the embarrassing part.)

We had a bit of a crisis in the AAAD household last week.  It snowed in the Chicago suburbs (a little bit, and very unexpectedly), and our second-grader would not be allowed out for recess without snow pants . 

I'm a huge fan of the Nest Thermostat.  I'd been looking for a thermostat that could be controlled via iOS for a long time, but the Nest was just so far ahead of the competition in terms of design.  The use of brushed metal instead of plastic... the integrated LED... the "solid" feel to the spinning wheel, with just the right amount of resistance... it's just a beautiful piece of technology.  So when I learned that Nest was releasing an API, and had its eye on the entire home automation ecoystem, I was excited.  But how much is all of this going to cost?

We moved into our new house in June of 2012. And about a year after we'd moved in, we finally got around to the dining room. Not that there was anything really WRONG with it - it was just a bit more traditional than we'd prefer... we'd like to take our house from "transitional" back toward "craftsman". (Without spending much money, of course.)

AAAD readers may remember all of the troubles we were having with our First Alert smoke & carbon monoxide alarms last spring.  A visit from the fire department confirmed that we weren't actually having a CO leak - it was just a (constant) false alarm, due to the detector going bad.  Ultimately, I was able to replace the faulty smoke detector with the exact same model, and life went on. But MAN, I'd like to be able to control these sensors with an iOS device.  Enter the Nest Protect smoke and carbon monoxide detector .  It's literally everything that I've wanted from a smoke detector system, and many things that I didn't know I needed until now. 

I hope that your summer went as well as ours at the AAAD residence.  I started a new job, which I absolutely love. It's a long commute, (and my AAAD output has dramatically dropped...) but it's challenging, exciting work, and we're starting to see major results.  As we head into the last 3 months of 2013, I figured I'd take a look back at what we've accomplished, and a look forward to where our major projects are headed:

Back in March, there were rumors that Apple was going to produce a "low-cost" iPhone for low-income markets.  Obviously, there was a lot of consternation about that - people wondered why Apple would ever produce an intentionally "worse" product, and why they wouldn't just sell the iPhone 5 for a bit less, the way they did with the iPhone 3G and 3GS and 4 and 4S?   Well, except here... AAAD  CALLED IT .  (Please indulge me a little bit...)

It's KEYNOTE DAY! I know that we're getting new iPhones. (Let's see if my predictions from March   - iPhone 5S, "low cost iPhone" to entirely replace the iPhone 5 - were correct! I'm liking my odds.) But what else will we see today? Maybe a spec bump for AppleTV?

I'm obviously a huge Apple fan. And as a huge Apple fan, I swooned when Steve introduced the Time Capsule. " A router that also automatically backs up my entire hard drive - wirelessly?! Sign me up!" But over time, it seems that the central selling point -  a router and backup drive in one!  - was less of a selling point and more of an obstacle.