All Apple All Day

Spotify is pretty great. But, if you're like me, you probably prefer to stream your music to somewhere other than your computer - such as a stereo, or a whole home intercom. Spotify has built-in AirPlay compatibility - IF you have a premium subscription. I don't. I DO, however, stream every other kind of music from my iMac or iPad using AirPlay - Sirius XM works great in that regard, and obviously iTunes was built for it. But not Spotify.... Until I learned this simple trick. Hold down the Mac option key, and click the volume control icon at the top of your Mac's screen. Now, you can see a list of output devices, and can see your AirPlay speakers. Click on one of them. Then just fire up Spotify, and AirPlay your music wherever you choose! NOTE: You'll be streaming EVERY sound that your Mac makes, so close the rest of your programs - if your kid has some Nick Jr. Flash game running in Safari, you'll hear that alongside your music, too. 

A few months ago, we moved to DirecTV, which has been fantastic. the HR34 DVR (now called the "Genie" in marketing material) is, two months in, still essentially perfect. We're finally finishing with WOW, switching our phone to AT&T - WOW never managed to make the VOIP work with our security system - and switching our net to Comcast for the time being. I recently purchased an Arris cable modem for $40 on eBay, which will pay for itself in about 5.5 months now that I'm not paying the $7 modem rental fees. WOW is currently charging us about $80 monthly for unlimited phone and 20 Mbps Internet. Under the new plan, we'll pay AT&T about $35 (plus, granted, 7 cents/min for long distance) and Comcast $30 (at first- they'll raise the price after 6 months or so). We'll get 30 Mbps instead of 20, and the combined price will be 65-70-ish, at least at the outset. But really, trying to save a little money is secondary. We just want a system that wo

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