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.