The End of 2011: Saying Goodbye to Steve Jobs

I have been thinking on whether or not I’d share with you my feelings on the loss of Steve Jobs. As a huge Mac and Apple fan since forever (and a vocal one to be sure), I felt it was my duty to chime in with something. It is fitting that I learned of Steve Jobs passing, via twitter, on my iPhone 4, a device I wouldn’t have and love if it were not for the tenacious determination and genius of Mr. Steve Jobs.

I have been a long time Mac fanatic, and cannot even begin to express how my life, both as a professional and personally, has been impacted by the tools and vision brought to the world by Apple. I don’t think I’d have become half the rocket scientist I am now, if I hadn’t been lucky enough to join a group here at NASA that was heavily focused on using Macs to think different. It is no small coincidence that the man who is now my husband was also the one who led the charge in that branch to move entirely to Macs. Our kids are as comfortable using iOS devices as I was using a pen and paper when I was growing up. We have more functioning Macs and Apple devices in our house then we have people in our family.

Thank you Apple and thank you Steve Jobs, for giving me the tools to become better than I thought I could be. Not to mention, giving my children a future where technology is something intuitive.

You will be missed, but never forgotten.

RIP
RSM

Setting up the Apple TV: Part 2, Airplay

Continuing the posts on how we are getting along with out AppleTV, this article will focus on one of its functions: Airplay. We have been using the predecessor to Airplay, called AirTunes when it was audio only, for a while now to stream music from my husband’s iMac to our surround sound system. AirTunes streaming is accomplished by adding up an Apple Airport Express to your wireless network. Once you set up the Express, you will see it as one of the destination options in iTunes music output. You can choose either Computer, the Airport Express network name, or both.

Airplay operates very similarly. You must be running iOS 4.2 or later (in the case of our setup, all of our iPhones, iPads and the Apple TV have been updated to run the latest version of their iOS that they can run. Both the iPhone 4 and iPads (both 1st and 2nd gen) are running iOS 5. I actually don’t know what version the Apple TV is running. Sounds like an area for more research.

Here is what I did last night to display the screen of my iPad2 onto the HDTV using Apple TV and Airplay.
1. Turn on the Apple TV.
2. Switch the input on the HDTV so that it’s using the output from the Apple TV.
3. Go to your iPad, iPhone, etc. and double tap the home button. This brings up the mini-doc display of all apps that are running. Swipe to the right, pulling back on the controls (sound, etc).
4. You will see the Airplay icon which looks like a rectangle with a small triangle on the bottom. The icon sort of looks like an HD tv with the triangle pointing at it.
5. Choose where you want to display your iPad (or iPhone) display. In this case I chose the network name we gave the Apple TV when we set it up. You can choose to mirror the display at this time by sliding a button to “on”.

That was it. With that, because I checked the button for mirroring to on, the display of the iPad was mirrored onto the HD TV. The aspect ratio of the iPad isn’t as big as the HD aspect, so the image was a much smaller near square in the center of the large rectangular display of the television. What displayed was exactly the screen of the iPad. My daughter immediately grabbed the iPad2 out of my hands and began playing any and all of her games. She was delighted when Where’s my Water was up there, larger than life.

What I really wanted to try was streaming video via the ABC player to the television. I needed to catch up on Once Upon a Time, but I’m not willing to purchase all of the episodes. I’ll most likely buy the complete season on DVD when it comes out. I’d been watching it via the ABC player on the iPad2 at night on my own, but I wanted to share it with my husband.

It worked without a hitch with two exceptions. First, because this was mirroring, the image didn’t fill the entire HD TV screen. Next time I will not turn mirroring on, which should adjust the aspect ratio on the television itself. Mirroring definitely doesn’t take advantage of this hugeness that is the TV. Second, I did notice that there was just a fraction of a delay in the image rendering on the television over what the iPad display was showing. I don’t know if this is our home’s wireless network (we are still running a snow Airport Base Station), or the slowness of our cable internet (we live out in the sticks and are served by a small town cable provider) or some affectation of AirPlay itself. I will have to do more research to see which, if any, might be the cause.

I was pleasantly surprised (although I shouldn’t have been) with how seamlessly the AirPlay worked. I already knew that AirTunes worked well, so I should have anticipated this to work just as well.

All in all, so far the Apple TV has been a fairly good deal. Priced at $99, it was definitely worth taking a chance on just to test it out. I’m looking forward to continuing setting up our brave new HD entertainment center, and I think the Apple TV was a good addition.

Part 3: Streaming via iTunes Home Sharing will be coming up soon.
RSM.

Setting up the Apple TV: Part 1, installation

I am still amazed that the 2nd Generation Apple TV my husband and I ordered as our Christmas present to each other arrived at our house less than 24 hours after we’d ordered it. It was a last minute decision, the day before Christmas Eve, and we pretty much expected it to arrive after the holiday. Low and behold, I received an email before even going to bed that night that it has shipped. The Fed Ex truck came to our house by lunch time the next day. That is service. I don’t know where Apple shipped it from, but with two Apple stores in my area (one on each side of town) perhaps Apple uses the stores to do mail orders as well.

That having been said, I was also amazed at how tiny the Apple TV actually is. I expected a box about the size of the original Airport base station, but what came in side the package was tiny. The packaging is thinner than the box the iPhone4 comes in, and only slightly wider. This thing is tiny.

We opened it, and gently pealed off the black tape that covered all of the ports to protect them in shipping. As always, Apple packages their gadgets with much love and care. I have never opened electronics more beautifully packaged than my Apple products.

From the time we opened the cardboard box, through unwrapping and unpackaging the the Apple TV itself, to hooking it up to the HDTV via an HDMI cable, the whole installation took minutes. While I did go to Apple’s site to fine the Apple TV manual (they stopped putting manuals in the boxes with the products years ago), I didn’t read it (yet). Putting a link in this article is as much for my future use as for the reader.

A word of caution to those purchasing the Apple TV, Apple does not include an HDMI cable in the box, so if you don’t already have one, you will need to purchase one. The only things that come in the box are the Apple TV itself, a power cord, and a tiny Apple remote. My husband had already purchased one at the time of ordering the HD TV itself. Cables have a huge markup, so as much as I love Apple, I wouldn’t recommend buying the HDMI cable from them directly.

The only additional setup set was to go into the HDTV’s inputs selector, turn on the power on the Apple TV and program into the HDTVs system that the HDMI input was coming from the Apple TV.

That’s the installation. Next up will be the setup to get content through the Apple TV onto the TV. I’ve tried both streaming via iTunes from my MacBook, as well as Airplay from both my iPad2 and my iPhone4. Spoiling the end of the story, they all just worked.

Enjoy.
RSM.

Adventures in HD TV land

Our family has finally joined the rest of most families in America who have already upgraded their living rooms with an HD TV. My mother in law treated us to the Panasonic HD TV that my Rocket Scientist husband spent many many hours researching, as our Christmas present this year. We ordered in on Black Friday via Amazon and have already opened it and hooked it up to our DVR. Now, the adventure begins.

I am not opposed to having a huge TV but I must admit that I am still taken aback by how really large it is. I almost don’t want to sit in the TV room with it to watch it. I’ve spent most of my viewing time doing so from the kitchen which overlooks the TV room. That distance seems to take the edge off the hugeness factor. Perhaps I am just getting old.

Now that we have it, we are taking the baby steps to hook it up and create the entertainment center around it. Physically it’s sitting atop our entertainment unit until the new one we ordered from Amish country is finished. That’s what’s in the photo associated with this article and the juxtaposition of how large this TV is with how very quaint our old TV is makes me laugh.

Stepping back, just what TV did we purchase. We bought the Panasonic VIERA® 50″ Class S30 Series. It is pretty, and I have always been a fan of Panasonic’s electronics.

Next up, how to get movies and content onto this device. To first order, we have it hooked via component video to our DVR with it’s small selection of digital HD channels. Most of our stations do not have an HD option, so the large format adds a bit of grainyess to the image.

To start, I ordered an Apple TV this morning as a Christmas present from the husband and I to each other. An informal poll of four folks around work over the last two weeks who all have Apple TVs yielded 100% satisfaction results. Since the Apple TV is about the only product by Apple that we don’t own, it’s about time we did. Having typed all this, just watch as Apple releases something new in the Apple TV area the first two months of 2012.

I will report back on how we set the HD TV and the Apple TV up in a subsequent post. I’m curious to see how the streaming between my iPad, iPhone, and MacBook iTunes account and the Apple TV works.

Enjoy
RSM.

Reflections on the end of the 2011

Today is the first day of winter, Yule in the Pagan calendar, and the start of the lengthening of our days. Seems like a perfect time to post a little bit here to the blog that I have neglected for a couple of months now. I apologize to those few readers who have stopped by this last week to see what I might have posted.

This has been an interesting year. I spent a major part of it in a detail position as a branch chief. That’s Rocket Scientist speak for serving temporarily in a promotion as a manager. Because it was only a detail and not a full blown promotion, I had all the responsibility for my people but no real power to make decisions or cause things to happen. It was a good run, though, and I was able to learn whether I liked being a manager (I did). In spite of the limited “power,” I was able to help my branch stay afloat in the chaos that is where I work. My own branch chief has been called higher up to help fill other needs. I don’t know when she will return, and I am grateful that she asked that I serve in her place.

The bad part of spending time being a manager was that I internalized a lot of stress, so much so that my hair started to fall out. If you know me, you know this is huge. I’ve had hair almost down to the small of my back for most of my adult life. A month ago, I had my husband cut 8 inches off because it looked so thin. Eight inches because that is the minimum needed to donate. I think I’ve come to terms with it (losing the hair) but have yet to fully relax and unwind.

At the end of the year, as I look toward a new year with a fresh start, my promise to myself is to work harder on that. Work harder on relaxing. In the coming year, I may or may not be able to get into management. There is so much up in the air at work. I do know I liked it but I also know that I let things get to me. Lesson learned. Relaxation is key to well being. To be the best I can be, I must be kind to myself. Those are things I already knew but was caught by surprise how little I actually put them into practice.

My wish to all of you reading this is to also be kind to yourselves. In everything you do, go ahead and do your very best. That’s all that you can ask. After that, accept the outcome however it falls. If you’ve done your best, you have nothing to worry about and nothing to be ashamed of. Worry will make your hair fall out. I am proof of that.

Thankfully, I have a loving family and super awesome kids to focus on. That’s what I’ve been doing, and it is helping. They are the light of my life, and my main reason for being.

Merry Christmas to those who celebrate, whether it’s for Baby Jesus or Santa. Happy Hanukkah to those who are celebrating the festival of lights. Happy Yule to my pagan friends. And best wishes for the new year to everyone.

All my best.
RSM.