All Apple All Day

It's also Halloween Friday, and my costume isn't done yet. But that just means I'm making TWO stops on the way home tonight - it's Apple TV Day! Finally, Apple is giving us what we wanted - essentially, a more-powerful set-top box with the capacity to run games and apps.

Well, that happened more quickly than expected. (It was actually a few weeks ago.) Passing 300,000 and 400,000 in the same year is a pretty cool milestone. I expect that 2016 will be a bigger year for AAAD. We'll be taking on the DIY basement remodel AND our ethernet project simultaneously. And Apple will (probably) get HomeKit out of the theoretical and into the real-world. Thanks again to everyone who has stumbled across this website - it's fun to see how our house, and Apple, have changed over the years.

If you're a WOW! Internet subscriber, like me, you probably got some welcome news recently. They were increasing our internet speed! I was skeptical. But they really came through.

It's been slow-ish around AAAD lately - I apologize for that. As summer winds to a close, we've been moving full speed ahead on projects both inside and outside of our home. Not a whole lot of changes on the Apple front, however - but we're excited to get the new AppleTV on its release date during the week of October 26 .

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.

I really want to like Apple Music. But I haven't even started the free trial yet. I'm not even sure if I'll GET a free trial later, and I don't care. Apple Music doesn't work with Sonos, so Apple Music is a non-starter. But that may change soon.

In a recent AAAD post, we discussed the virtues of Harry's vs. Dollar Shave Club . Ultimately, I went with Harry's. And now.... I think I'm headed back to Gillette Fusion, even though they're three times the cost. Here's why. Design Harry's makes beautiful razors. There's no doubt about that. (I bought a "Winston", which is shiny, slick, chrome.) But there is a limit to the virtue of form over function. Especially when that function is as critical as swiping a razor blade over your face. The Harry's blade is, basically, a prettied up Gillette Mach 3. That blade was a game-changer - it looked different, it packed multiple blades, However, like the Mach 3, the Harry's Winston has a LOT of room between the top of the cartridge and the first blade. That's where the moisturizer strip goes. It makes things go smoothly! It also makes it difficult to, for instance, shave directly under your nose. The Fusion addressed thi

Even though there haven't been many AAAD updates, there have been all kinds of fun things happening in the AAAD household lately. 

We just got a visit from a really nice door-to-door Comcast sales guy. And he got me to try a 50 Mbps internet service at $39.99/mo. The catch? Comcast is literally incapable of installing internet service. AGAIN.

We all know that iCloud isn't perfect. In fact, it can be a confusing mess at times. For our family, iCloud Family Sharing has delivered on iCloud's promise.  Even though it was difficult to set up. 

WWDC had all kinds of new Apple stuff. iOS 9, OSX El Capitan, Apple Music to compete with Spotify. But HomeKit barely got a mention. Oh well. Here's the quick takeaway (leaving HomeKit for last):