Apple iPhone 6 Plus Apple Watch

Apple had its event launching iPhone and Apple Watch. I had to rely on the live blog to get most of it live, as my Apple TV and iPad refused to show me anything watchable:-( But I was going to talk about the launch.

The iPhone did not have anything earth shattering as I was afraid. But  having waited with my 4S until its life's end (When Apple stops giving you the OS upgrade, its almost time for you to move on if you ask me:-) it was still something to hear about. A better battery life, they said, and that is good! My reading is, this is the lull before the storm, OS 8 going to bring you! The fun will start when people start using the iOS 8 features to integrate many things into the Apple environment. Then, the speed and performance enhancement other wise just a matter of statistics now will be interesting!

Watch did not disappoint. It did not thrill me yet either! A remote on my wrist is great to have, and that is done quite well by Apple. The covering of watch face to silence the phone and the tap gesture to guide you on a walk is a nice one, will be greatly appreciated by people with special needs and others too!

Once again, in itself, Apple Watch and iPhone 6 does not excite me the way some of the other launches did in  past. But the prospect of these with new iOS 8 is really interesting.

Lets see what the future has in store!

Update:I heard a news on HealthKit that its having some issues and the apps are pulled out the last minute due to that. I hope this will be sorted out quickly.
iOS8 seems to have brought song recognition! And it seems to be working great too. I am yet to update my OS so more on iOS 8 Later!

WD TV Live, Sonos and Music Heaven

My weekend project was to set the distributed music using Sonos and some NAS.
So I hooked my Sonos to my home network and it beautifully played music from the services available. But unfortunately the services it offered had hardly any regional music originals I would want to play. It had some radio stations which did not cater to my taste.

So I plugged in my Drobo on the Airport Extreme and renamed the hub to a single string name and made sure the disk share was fine as explained in here. The disk appeared in the Sonos Server settings and I was hopping with excitement! But that did not last too long.

The music on the Drobo never appeared in the Sonos application. Also the music streaming also became suddenly impaired. It kept on giving me timeout error(1000). I thought it must be because Sonos is busy building my index. So I waited for two days,  Nothing really happened. So I reset the Sonos and decided to start all over again.

This time after setting the Drobo share, I thought I should try the disk on the WD TV Live already connected up and available on the same network. Now the question was how do I access the disk on WD TV Live? Some writeup was talking about WDTV hub and I took a cue from it and created a share using wdtvlive as the name of server and the name shown in WD TV live as the disk name. No user name and password and it just connected up and said it will be indexing now. (This message did not appear when I connected my Drobo share.)

Sure enough, I left it running for the day and by evening all my music was available on the Sonos!
It tried to import some already created playlists but I could not find any useful ones I had. But no worries, I quickly searched up the name of artists and created the playlist for the quick start. (One point to note here, the search gives you multiple results for most of the artist searches depending if they are solo or duets etc. So you have to add each of those into your playlist if you have to have all of them under the same name.-You can do this to the other person in the artist list also so that the same set appears both places- And when you do it, you have to watch for the "more" shown on top right of the list  since by default under each category of search, Sonos displays only a limited set.)

Time well spent! My distributed music Proof of concept is in place!

An Update: Incidentally to watch the Apple event flawless, I had turned off the WD TV and without realizing that,  the next day morning I opened up Sonos player and played the song list and it started playing without a blink! Interesting. So looks like even when your WDTV is turned on by the remote, the file server functionality continue to be working for Sonos to treat it as a NAS!

Home automation integration

Picking from where I left off on HomeKit, I was reading up on smarthome hubs from different vendors including some from Belkin and Revolv and Smart things. What I was kind of drawn to was revolv as it looked more promising.

Revolv had its own game to integrate different workflows. People had reviewed it and gave it a hard time saying that the device do not integrate the applications which control each of the devices effectively. What some were expecting is that revolv will give you an all encompassing application which will allow you to access every feature of all the appliances it can interact with! That is not practical and I am happy Revolv is not trying to achieve it. Idea is to make sure the most common workflows that need to be integrated between devices are addressed and the piping is laid to connect them up. A T Joint or an LJoint is not supposed to give you a shower head:-)

I am not sure what the product gives, as I do not want to plunge using it and later  regret it. Being not in US, I have logistic issues procuring devices and later if I have to return it, it becomes a problem. There is not much information on the net to convince me for or against it.

I have plunged in  still with lesser guaranteed products and why am I holding off on this? Its because I have my eyes set on what Apple's Homekit has to offer!

Apple has all that it needs to give me this functionality by providing it all on the stack of HomeKit! Each individual appliances can come to table to shake hands on HomeKit and the workflow will work smoothly! This puts the onus on the appliances to make sure they act well on the interface than on a product like Revolv to tweak their code each time any one of the devices think different!

So I am betting my money on HomeKit. So wait, August Lock, wait, Hue lights, wait, dropcam. Till end of the year for the Homekit!

Roomba, Another pawn in the big plan!

After lot of debate and deliberation within, I have procured the Roomba 880 few days back. Some of the major concerns I have was sourcing components part of ongoing usage and practical performance of the product in Indian conditions.

When the first concern is yet to be fully addressed, my test run did not disappoint from  results perspective. My 6 year old could feel the difference, and so did my better half. Thats  a good sign.

It picked up a lot of stuff from under the cot, in a small room, it roamed around for a good 20 mins and stopped before it covered one strip beyond the foot board. I suspect that the algorithm got confused roaming around under the bed and bumping on to the foot board. A small issue, since I had to re point him to the strip which he is yet to take care of and he promptly set off to take care of it. Lesser problem than  what we have with the current maid!

So overall I am pretty happy with the splurge. I will be using it once a week. So will keep you folks posted with any new findings I do.

BTW, I liked the remote. You have to keep pressing the button to keep it moving in a direction, but, may be that's a good thing that you accidentally do not run him over wrong places.

Drobo and WD TV

Yesterday after a few days of contemplation, I decided to connect up my Drobo to the WD TV Live and check. I was shying away from the possibility of that not working together:-)

So hooked up the Drobo to the WD TV and plugged in the power and went to work in  the morning. Evening when I came back, I turned on the power and changed the channel of the TV to show up the WD Screen.

All good so far!

WD started indexing the contents almost immediately. I do not remember what format I had done to the file system on Drobo, but I have three bays of hard disks with more than 4 TB utilized. This happened at around 7:00PM

The indexing was going on when today morning I turned on the screen to WD. I could see some pictures and movies when the indexing was going on.

Hopefully,  evening when I go back home, the indexing will be done and I will have  the full browse view option for the media! Anyway, next step will be to hook up the Sonos and see how the audio from the Drobo can be played by Sonos, Wireless!

Update:7/3/2014
Yesterday evening also the indexing was continuing. But I had to restart the Drobo and the WD due to external factors. And after this, the Drobo is not being recognized! I am not sure if there is any issue with the Drobo since I could connect another USB stick and get it recognized. Now there are some pointers on the net how to tackle these kind of issues and I am hoping it will work!

Update:7/14/2014
As per the pointers I deleted the WD files and disabled Media scanning, now its recognizing the disk. So that is good news. I am yet to try playing the media from Sonos. Will have to try it.

Sonos and WD TV

Monday I got my shipment of Sonos and WD TV. 6 Sonos Play 1 speakers and one WD TV box. Thanks to my cousins bought it, carried it back here from states via Bangalore! It was really heavy and a hassle to carry when you are travelling. Kudos!

I opened the same day and started the setup. That is when surprisingly my Airport Extreme refused to accept connections, may be because the internet connection  was down(?!) and the Sonos needed a WiFi Connection  to try. I took just one speaker and the WD box and a pile of wires (Each Sonos Speaker came with a Network cable and a power cable) and moved to Sister's house next doors where I could try  the connection.

Plugged in the Sonos both to the power and the internet and used the downloaded Sonos app, and the Radio was playing right away! Nice clarity, very low Bass. (My nephew put on their Boss speakers next to it and played one of his Yanni collection and the drums were very subdued on the Sonos! Means, I did not impress him much!- Bummer!)

Then I moved to the WD setup. The WD also got connected to the WiFi easily,  the app was simple and useful, once again,  cool start. Went around on  some Picassa old pictures(Nice recall!) But some video I guess hung up the WD. May be it was trying to download the video and play as Apple TV does, but there was no indication of what was going on. May be the net was slow or unreliable too. Anyway, it did not allow me to exit or break off from the wait. I had to physically unplug! Not a very good thing! Hope it does not happen all the time!

Then wanted to play some more songs on Sonos and realized Airplay does not work out of the box. I have to connect my Airport Express to enable that! But I can always play the music provided I have Sonos app on the device. Audio streaming from any app will not work though.

The remote quickly disconnected when I moved away from the speakers. The WiFi did not help it to hold on. I hope with multi room Speaker setup, I will have a better experience with different Sonos holding on to the connection.

Another concern I had was how do I play all my music collection lying on an external HDD via Sonos? Will I have to have the Computer on to do this? From the reading I did, it looks like WD and Sonos combination will be the answer to it. WD exposes a connected HDD as a NAS drive. And Sonos can be configured to play from the NAS. Have I tried it yet? Nope. That will be the project for the week. If that works, I will have my distributed music project complete.

What is the backup plan? I will have to get a Sonos Bridge and connect up the WD directly to it and then use that to stream the music.

Continuity matters

Before I got my first Mac, I had noticed a feature in Mac OS where I can take the call from Mac instead of the phone, provided I have the bluetooth connection. But then iPhone happened and this feature disappeared from the OS. By the time I got my Mac, it was no where to be seen.

Then couple of vendors came with this as a tool and it did not quite work well for me. I ended up buying one of them and soon the guy closed shop! And it always been a thorn in the flesh for me.

The reason behind it was because I wanted to keep my phone some place and still be able to take my calls on any other device which ever is accessible to me.

It was very nice to know  that the feature is back and with a bang! Its called Continuity now. I am really looking forward to this.

The phone calls may finally end up in my Apple TV also if I choose to, provided I can route the calls as airplay/hand off into AppleTV and continue using my iOS device Mic. This will work well when you want to use the home theater as a big hand free call. A simple integration to Apple TV to popup caller ID on screen will be big plus!

Continuity does not stop at handing off calls. When you work on something on one device, and you move your location and context and you want to shift to another device, Continuity promise to make it a cake walk!

Even though not called in under the continuity umbrella, I feel that one other feature worth mentioning is the ability to airplay without connecting the Apple TV to the network! This makes a lot of sense since now I can play from any network I am in into Apple TV without switching to just be in the same network as Apple TV!

You can get the full feature details Here. I like the way Apple is letting you move between applications and devices quickly by bringing them closer. (Notification Center, Apps to share data)