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Travel

Taking Your Media with you

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We decided we needed to get out of the house a bit. So we went to Park City Utah for a week.

Road Trip!

Nicole skied, I wrote and attended an online event, and we watched our shows like we would have at home.

I’ve long been a huge fan of Plex. Been using it for years to manage our media library (TV and Movies). I gave up trying to let iTunes be a home media server, it just sucked over time, but that’s not the point here.

I had a spare AppleTV that will eventually be shipped to my mom, but since it was here, I took it with us.

Set up

What’s nice about AppleTV is that you can plug it in, click a few things, then hold your iPhone over it and boom, it is set up. Handy to be sure.

Within a few minutes I had Netflix and Plex installed. I was able to continue my binging of Person Of Interest, streaming it from my home network media server in Denver, to Park City. Seamless, lag-less.

Do I wish the AppleTV wasn’t so “big”? only a little. I see people moaning about it not being a dongle like others, I honestly don’t care. It’s literally 3 inches square, I’ve got the space. If you don’t, I don’t know what to tell you.

Usage

As mentioned above, it was 100% seamless to watch an episode of Person of Interest the night before we left (It’s my current writing in the living room background show) and have Plex at the rental know what episode was next.

The one biggest issue was not the AppleTV at all, but the TV in the rental. At home I have a nice Sonos ARC soundbar with Atmos. The TV on the wall of the rental had nothing, just the pitiful little stereo speakers mounted inside it.

It took me a day of cranking the volume on the TV to its max to realize it sounded so bad because the TV was doing it’s best (and failing) to still produce sound at Atmos. Thankfully it was easy to tell Plex to play the shows or movies in stereo. It was like night and day sound-wise.

One of my biggest gripes with traveling generally is not having access to my media, short of whatever I’d load up on my iPad. I hate being in a hotel room and having to watch a show on my iPad because that’s where it is and the big screen in the room is useless.

Is lugging an AppleTV around ideal? sorta, it’s not that big, easy to set up and better than nothing.

Hope you enjoyed some pics from our trip. Park City was beautiful.

So, I went to Africa

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(I realized I wrote this up and never posted it)

Elephant, very close to us

And saw lots of elephants. Lots of lions, cheetahs, zebras (So many zebras), giraffes, wildbeests, warthogs, hyenas, and more.

This was one of those ‘once in a lifetime’ kind of trips. I’m always leery of that type of statement, often making fun of the people who say, “I went to Costa Rica and it was life-changing.” But honestly, it was one of those trips that open your eyes to things you likely only understood in the abstract.

Nicole and our friend Suman decided to climb Kilimanjaro (She summited!!). I was in no way interested in that, so Suman’s mom and sister and I joined them for post mountain safari and mini beach vacation on Zanzibar.

The three of us arrived a week after Nicole and Suman. That was the day they were heading back down the mountain so we’d see them the following day. It was cool to be there when they climbed out of the van at the lodge. Also, the lodge was dope and it was pretty cool to just hang out and get some writing done, to play with my loaner camera, etc.

Safari was truly awe-inspiring. It sounds goofy, but it’s gonna be hard to see a zoo the same way after this. Watching lions walk within a foot of the car and keep going, makes seeing them behind a fence not as appealing. Seeing a cheetah and her cubs eating their kill just ten feet away, fantastic. Also gross and full of flies, but awesome.

Lazy lion taking a nap

There’s no way to share all the pictures, I took over a thousand and that’s not the point of this post. Side note, I’m a fan of DSLRs now! Man i got some great shots that my iPhone couldn’t have done. I was bummed to give it back.

We spent the entire trip in Tanzania (Outside our layovers in Frankfurt and Addis Ababa) and if time and money had not been factors I’d have loved to visit other countries. There’s so much history and culture to explore.

Tanzania has only been free of the British since the 1960s. Let that sink in, barely 60 years of freedom.

Eastern Africa is home to tremendous archeological finds. Americans like to bask in our excellence, it’s so easy to forget that not only are we not native to this country, but also that we came from the same place as everyone else, and it wasn’t Europe.

I wish more Americans were lucky enough to be able to afford to leave our country and explore (though sometimes I’m glad to not see so many of us, LOL) the world. There’s so much to see, so many cultures to explore. Being a visitor in a country (to me) really helps drive home that we’re all struggling to do the same things; put food on the table, keep or get a roof over our heads, etc.

An art piece outside the East African Slavery museum

Learning about the East African slave trade was also eye-opening. If you’re able to visit Zanzibar, do it. I had no idea about the depth of the slave trade in that part of the continent.

Nicole and I and a lion
Yup, that’s a lion

This was by far our longest trip both in terms of how long we were away from home (3 weeks for Nicole) and how long it took to get there and back.

Since I forgot to post this, and am doing so now in November… We got home mid-late February… A few weeks later at most and things would have been a lot harder to get home I’m sure. As we moved through airports and spent hours killing time, the reports were beginning to trickle in around the virus. Addis Ababa had some seriously strict enforcement going on. This could have been a very different trip.

Our Lodge had lots of neighbors

Moving to a more iPad oriented life

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I’ve always loved the iPad. I’ve owned an iPad since the first one came out. Up until the last few years, despite Apple’s advertising, and die hard fan’s shoehorning, the iPad was mostly for consumption.

That’s not a dig.

It was an awesome RSS/Blog reader. I love relaxing on Sundays and reading the Washington Post (via app) and Colorado Sun (via browser) while holding my iPad in one hand and my coffee in the other. I love watching TV and movies on flights, reading comics, etc. It was perfect as a media consumption device.

Over the last couple of years things started to shift to more actual creation. The Apple Pencil (despite Steve’s insistence that Stylus = failure) opened a major door for creativity on the iPad. I know there were stylii before that, but meh. Now anyone could doodle, not just the more dedicated. And the more dedicated artists could create wonders.

Then we got got keyboard folio cases, whether Bluetooth or Smart Connector. Again there were solutions before that, like lugging around a full sized BT keyboard (No thanks, tried it, it sucked). Now writing on the iPad was a real thing. An easy, non hacky thing. It immediately made the iPad more useful, overnight.

My recent trips to Egypt and Tanzania were both iPad only trips. It was awesome. My bag wasn’t overloaded with a laptop, chargers, etc. In Egypt I took a much smaller bag, which fit in airplanes easier, was less burdensome to carry. I wrote a large chunk of a Space Rogues novel in Egypt floating down the Nile river with just my iPad and Apple folio keyboard. It was awesome. I also used the pencil to write in my digital journal (using GoodNotes, go get this app, it’s incredible). In Tanzania I took my regular backpack because I had a camera and a bunch of gear, and my iPad was negligible in size and weight.

I can’t imagine I’ll ever bring my laptop on a trip again, short of work specific travel.

Which brings us to now.

Now, I’m sitting in my living room, my MacBook Air (complete with shitty keyboard that works intermittently, thanks Apple) is in my office. I’m writing this on Sunday, and my laptop spent most of Saturday in my office as well.

IPad and keyboard

Adding trackpad support to iPadOS, plus this new keyboard folio, has come pretty damn close to removing my need for a laptop. It’s not perfect, and that’s fine, I don’t want the iPad to be a laptop replacement directly. If it were it’d be clunky and lame without a keyboard attached.

I picked up a Hyperdrive for connecting to monitors, SD cards, etc. I wished I had had it in Tanzania as my goal was to offload the SD card each day, but I quickly realized my iPad didn’t that that much storage, so I was left hoping nothing happened to the SD card/camera.

My goal However is to start doing more work on my iPad. I’ve already proven I can write novels on it, now I want to see if I can do 360|Conferences work on it. Sadly I doubt I can run a virtual conference from the iPad, not that the MacBook Air is much better equipped for that. Thankfully I have an eGPU to plug the laptop in to. It’s entirely possible, when it comes time to replace the MacBook Air (likely sooner than normal thanks to the keyboard) I’ll move to a Mac Mini solution, and when mobile, it’ll be all iPad.

I told a friend it felt weird to be so excited about a keyboard (a not cheap one at that), but we both agreed it really was a bit of a game changer for the iPad. And it is.

I Made a Lightsaber

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So my friend Jeffry organized a “guy’s trip” to Disney World. This was my first ever guy’s trip and it set a high bar.

The main goal of the trip was Galaxy’s Edge, or as I call it, “Star Wars Land”

It was a blast. Disney has truly outdone themselves. Everything about Batuu is immersive. Dollars aren’t accepted, you have to pay in Imperial Credits. The denizens all have back stories, the characters don’t stand in one place for photo ops. Storm troopers patrol the small outpost stopping visitors randomly. Rey and Chewie walk around going about their business.

I’m not going into a full review of Galaxy’s Edge, they’re all over the internet, just Duck Duck Go-it. When the idea for this trip formed, I was in. “I don’t care what else we do, where we go, etc. I want a lightsaber.”

The entire process is truly amazing. Before you check in you get a ‘menu’ of the four main lightsaber styles. There are a few file cabinets with the parts in them so you can touch them and get a feel for them. They’re secured in the drawers so you only really get to rub your hands on them, but whatever.

Once you’ve selected you pay, buy your add-ons (you know you need a stand, and a belt clip!) and you’re given a pin that matches your selected design. That’s how the junk collectors know which tray to hand you.

Once you go inside, it’s amazing. You’re walked through the story and the construction process. There’s an amazing ceremony where you ignite your blade for the first time, it’s pretty awesome.

I chose Power and Control, mostly for aesthetic reasons. The Blue Kyber crystal called to me, so I’m a bit of an outlier in that Power and Control is more a sith thing, but whatever, I’ve never been a follower!

One more bit about Galaxy’s Edge, stay until the end of the day! We lucked out and there were extended hours the day we went, and by the end of the day, it was mostly empty. During the day getting near the Falcon is tough, at least without hundreds of people around you. At night, we all took pictures without a soul in the way.

Getting together with friends I haven’t seen in years, and Dave, the brother of a friend, was really awesome. Tom and I hang out at least once a year usually. I haven’t gotten to hang with Jeffry in at least ten years. The bar for future guy’s trips is hella high.

Apple Carplay is so close

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For my birthday i got a Pioneer head unit that brought carplay to my car.

It’s nice, it really is, but there’s much room for improvement. SO. MUCH. In fact this post was started months ago and now having lived through a few OS releases, my opinion is less.

I’m beginning to wonder if CarPlay is an AppleTV like hobby that will live on in a meh state for years.

What’s awesome:

better siri integration. I was already happy with shouting “Hey siri” over the radio, sometimes two or three times. Now there’s a dedicated mic that listens way better than the mic on the phone where ever the phone might be, and can silence the radio, pause podcasts and streaming music, it’s definitely better.

Pandora, iheartradio, and other sources of music. This isn’t carplay exclusive, but for me, the car was too old for anything more than taking calls over Bluetooth, so now I’m not limited to radio, and it’s liberating! Now if only the apps worked. I upgraded my TuneIn account then promptly wasted 7 months of paying when TuneIn vanished from CarPlay. It’s back, but pretty much sucks. I can’t access favorites, so have to listen to a station on device, so it’s in the “recents” list. iheartradio and Pandora both work much better.

Podcasts and audiobooks. Also not exactly exclusive to carplay, but i detest dongles and other extraneous connectors, so i never had access to either in the car, until now. I’ve removed (thanks to iOS 10.something) the audiobooks app because I prefer to read books, not listen to them, but my podcast consumption has increased now thanks to CarPlay. Our next cross country road trip will be tremendously more entertaining and informative.

img_0429Maps (also a what’s not awesome). The view isn’t very rich, and well apple maps is kind of meh, but nav is nice and the directions and such are adequate.

What’s not awesome:

Maps. Why on earth Apple Devs think this makes sense is lost on me. About 50% of the time, the maps app launches with the “follow me” option off, so the next time I glance at the screen, my arrow is nowhere to be seen. THere are so many seemingly obvious solutions to this.

  1. default always to “in CarPlay, set to track user”
  2. whenever the car starts moving, flip back to “track user” mode.

I get that sometimes you want to pan the map around, but when driving, I feel like it’s a safe bet I want to see the map following me.

Well in this case, being limited to maps. I love Waze. I’ve been using it since it launched. It’s a great app, crowdsourced data is amazing (especially road hazards and police). Apple pulls waze data in, but not all of it, mostly just traffic/congestion data.

Apparently waze doesn’t care about losing carplay users, since when asked about carplay, this was the response.

Well it was fun, but I’m not going to use an app when now my head unit can take care of it. Heck the iPhone mount on the dash is already gone. Thanks for all the fish Waze.

Apps, or lack thereof. There’s just not many, and that’s a bummer. I don’t want angry birds, but it’s a shame apple isn’t encouraging communication, music, etc apps to all roll a carplay add on in. Dash would be a great example of an app that would make sense on CarPlay. Nowhere to to be seen.

I know carplay is still relatively young, most makers are only now in model year ’16/’17 including OEM support, but I worry Apple will do what they often do with things that require third parrot support; build it, expect others to just adopt it, and watch it flounder.

Carplay is ok right now, not amazing, not terrible. I like my new headhunt (Thanks Tom!) but there’s so much more potential. If someone were to ask me if the upgrade was worth it, my answer right now would be, “not really”. A new car with CarPlay, sure, but going to the trouble of an aftermarket upgrade, I’d wait unless the head unit is cheap.

It definitely did give my car new life. I can connect over bluetooth (not at the same time as being wired) and play music, make calls, etc. More than one person can connect, which is nice, but for the costs involved, the gains aren’t that amazing.

Event Consulting

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I just wrapped up RWDevCon, which by all measures was a huge success. Kudos to Ray Wenderlich and his amazing team.

I handled logistics, and Ray’s team put together an amazing two days of tutorial based content.

For my part, things went well I think. Nothing too crazy came up with the hotel, the other group didn’t interfere with us at all. We didn’t run out of food, or have a projector crap out :) All win’s

This was my first “conference consulting” gig. I really enjoyed it and think I gave great value to the client (Ray).

I’m really excited to help make other events in the community awesome!

Also, I’m happy to announce that I’ve joined the AltConf 2015 team, so that’s gonna rock! I’ve sponsored, and volunteered in the past and this year I get to have a more direct role, which I love.

See you at AltConf! Or any of my 360|Conferences events; 360|intersect, 360|iDev or [360|iDev min] :)

 

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