All Apple All Day

The AppleTV 4 will be released soon, and with it, we'll finally have the AppleTV SDK and App Store that we've been hoping for. This means that there will be 3rd party applications - and that means that we'll have far less interest in jailbreaking the AppleTV 2 to run applications like Kodi. But.... I recently happened across an AppleTV 2, and since jailbroken devices seem to sell for more on eBay, I gave it a shot. Here's how it works.

For whatever reason, the garage has been a focal point for gadgets over the last couple of years.  And as of this weekend, we'll have LASER BEAMS guiding us to the perfect parking spot!  Talk about high-tech!  Over the last year, we've turned our existing "dumb" garage door into a fully-integrated garage door system.  And we aren't done yet!

It has been YEARS since Apple announced their HomeKit home automation protocol . And, unfortunately, as of September 2015, HomeKit remains, for the most part, vaporware. Best-case, Apple is taking their time to make sure that HomeKit is perfect before it hits the market. But this delay comes at a price - not only for Apple and HomeKit, but for home automation in general.

I've written about Sonos quite a bit around here . Paired with Spotify, it's close to perfect.  In fact, Sonos is SO good that Apple Music is a non-starter for me - no Sonos compatibility yet.  But it's coming, and when it does.... look out Spotify.  Because if Spotify and Sonos are great, Siri and Sonos will be amazing. 

The iMac is the center of our Apple system at home - it stores all of our music and photo libraries. When we're using Sonos, the music is controlled by the iPhone, and comes out of the Sonos speakers. So why does the iMac need to be involved? It's just a desktop computer in the office. Well, maybe it doesn't. We've been looking at home server options, and I think that the simplest answer may be the best - A Mac Mini.