Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Amazon Kindle Fire, now available


Yesterday Amazon released it's first color tablet. This tablet not only is a great price at $199 it also performs very well. I was able to spend a few minutes with it and it ran very smooth. It is really easy to navigate and has a beautiful display.With all the different content that Amazon offers it will surely be well known in the tablet market.

Joshua Topolsky from The Verge went to the streets to find out what Union Square knew about the Kindle Fire.


With the Kindle Fire you have access to the Amazon App Store, Kindle books, music, and Amazon Movies. The App Store has relatively few apps but it should become very populated with apps as the Fire becomes more popular. Go ahead and order yours now!

Thursday, November 10, 2011

How to use and enable Home Sharing


Home Sharing is what Apple offers to help all your device work with each other while all connected to the same network and Apple ID. Apple allows you to enable Home Sharing on up to five different computers. When it is enabled on your computers you can drag and drop your songs between different computers in iTunes and stream music and videos from other devices on the network.

Some of the major benefits of Home Sharing come if you have an iPad, iPod touch, or iPhone. When you enable it you are able to browse your entire music and video collection on your device and play them without syncing the content to the device. This also works on the Apple TV 2 and that is how you can stream all your content to the TV without the box having a hard drive.

Check out the video above to see how this is done.

Saturday, November 5, 2011

iPad 2 + Apple TV = Best baby monitor ever


Recently I have found many different uses for the iPad 2 Mirroring to the Apple TV. In this use case scenario I used my iPad 2 and Apple TV together to create a baby monitor.

I wanted my baby to get a good nap while we were having a Halloween party so I put her in a back room so that our conversation would not wake her up. Once I got her to sleep the first thing I did on the iPad was go to Settings -> Auto-Lock and then changed the Auto-Lock to never.



Next I turned the brightness all the way down since no one was actually going to look at the iPad so I could save on battery life. Then I turned on mirroring to the Apple TV, opened the camera app, and set up the iPad on a table and propped it up using my Smart Cover.

When I went into the front room we could all see the screen and watch her and we could see when she wakes up and starts moving. In the picture above I had the iPad on camera mode and not video so that is why there are lines, we were also not hearing her. Later I tried it on video and still no sound would come through the TV. I have not yet found a way to send the sound to the TV with the video camera app.

When she went down for another nap it was too dark for us to see her so I found a decibal reading app called Decibel Ultra that allows for us to see if she was actually making any sound.

This is just one new way I have been using Air Play Mirroring, what uses have you found for it?