All Apple All Day

In my last post, I raved about the DirecTV HR34 media center box. You have to pay $99 for it, but it's more or less a perfect set-top box. (UPDATE 1/14/12: The HR34 has been re-named the "Genie", and is has been free to new customers for a couple of months. Get it immediately.) When it's paired with an iPad and the DirecTV app.... well, you kind of have to see it to believe it.

There's been quite a bit of chatter about the HR34's growing pains. Sluggish menus, old SD interface, missed recordings. Many of those issues have been addressed and fixed throughout 2012. I was still a bit nervous as our tech left after yesterday's install. Well, consider me impressed. This is, without a doubt, the best set-top box I have ever used. It's a leap forward, in the way that the TiVo Series 3 was a leap forward in its day. It can record 5 HD channels while playing a sixth - with no limitations. Whole home DVR. Beautiful on-screen GUI, with snappy scrolling. Massive (expandable?) storage. It has YouTube, Pandora, and a slew of DirecTV-centric presentation goodies (All MLB games + a scoreboard? Sure. Weather? Twitter? No problem.) For $99, this is money very well spent. For DirecTV, this is an all-too-rare move by a market leader to not only stay ahead of the competition, but to exponentially outpace them. (UPDATE: And now, the HR34 "Ge

After two and a half months of WOW UltraTV, we finally gave up. The internet service has been rock-solid, but the phone service won't connect to our ADT system, and the TV service just isn't ready for prime time. (Literally. We are constantly losing all high-def channels at the worst possible times, including yesterday during Breaking Bad.) When you factor in that our WOW bundle cost in excess of $160/month, making the decision to unbundle was pretty easy. We're going with DirecTV, AT&T for their barebones landline, and - for the moment - keeping WOW for internet. More on that later. With DirecTV, we'll be going with the Choice Xtra bundle. At the outset, we're going to be saving an absolute ton of money - TV is going to be about $50/month to start - meaning our "unbundle" will be about $40 cheaper than our bundle.

Last year, I upgraded our AV Receiver, because I came to understand that an ARC (Audio Return Channel) HDMI connection was absolutely necessary. It still is, and the stereo wasn't that expensive, especially considering that I was able to sell the old one for a decent amount. But now Sony has gone and done it - AirPlay directly integrated into a reciever . It would seem that if I'm building an Apple-enabled home, this would be required, right? Well, I'll look into it. Right now, the stereo system DOES have AirPlay access, in that it has an AppleTV attached. And that isn't going anywhere - the AppleTV works so well with the iPad that it should be considered a required accessory. Would adding AirPlay to the stereo help out? Or would it be overkill/redundant? If, for instance, the stereo input would automatically change to AirPlay the moment I select the stereo on my iPhone, it might eliminate the step of having to change the TV/Stereo input to the AppleTV. Knowing

It's been SLOW going at the AAAD homestead. The home theatre project remains in a state of almost total inertia, despite Mrs. AAAD's insistence that the HDMI wires get buried and the LED gets wall-mounted immediately. I have an HDMI wire running from my TV, in front of the fireplace, and into the component rack. An HDMI wire that is being shared among multiple components . How did it come to this?! The reason? The former homestead (a Bucktown duplex up/down) has sprung a leak. Well, more accurately, the former homestead has sprung thousands of leaks and now needs a full roof & truss replacement. Which has turned a quick 3-day, $13K project into a 10-day, just-under-$30K project. Which is a bill that - even split between two owners - puts a damper on my enthusiasm for buying things like $600 in light switches. Of course - completely necessary. Those trusses looked awful, and literally crumbled when I touched them. I'm glad our upstairs neighbors didn't get a

Well, this just isn't working. We are having an incredibly difficult time with our WOW UltraTV setup - the security system doesn't like the phone, the TV menus are sluggish and unintuitive, and the internet... well, the internet is rock solid, so never mind that. But really, it's time to look into a different solution. Especially given that I'm spending $160 for a suboptimal bundle, and that there are no contracts. Over the weekend, we finished the most recent season of "Mad Men", which had been stored on our old TiVo Series 3. The difference between TiVo's interface and WOW's interface was night and day.... and it's not as though we're newbies with WOW. We've had it for 40 days now. And it's still every bit as tricky as it was on Day 3. You hit right-left-right to move deeper into menus? If you want to start a recorded program, you can't select the title and see shows.... you have to WAIT a bit, or else you're looking at

All projects were on hold as of Sunday afternoon - the brief but powerful storm that tore through Chicago's west suburbs uprooted trees and downed power lines all over our village, and it's taken a full 48 hours plus to restore power. As of 15 minutes ago, we were back in business! Now, time to spend my 4th of July holiday getting this DLNA server running!