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Home Security Corliss Group Experts: Tips for Using the Apple TV, Set Up, Navigation Sh... - 1 views
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In this article we look at some Apple TV tips, as well as giving guidance on setting up the Apple TV and using the provided remote or other remote controls.
Of all the products that Apple makes, the least known is probably the Apple TV. Until recently Apple's set-top box was hidden away on the Apple Store in the iPod section, however, now the Apple TV got its own section of the store.
The lack of attention on Apple's part is probably not so surprising given that it is a product that Apple used to refer to as a hobby, but it's unfortunate because at £79 it's one of the best Apple products you can get for your money.
Apple's lack of attention to the Apple TV means that there is little guidance about the product and little in the way of instructions for using the device - and troubleshooting problems with the Apple TV. Apple does have an Apple TV support section on its website, but it only seems to touch on the basics.
In this article we will look at some Apple TV tips, as well as giving guidance on setting up the Apple TV and troubleshooting problems with it.
If you are thinking of buying an Apple TV it might be worth holding off for a month or two - Apple is expected to launch a new set top box at some point this year, read about it in our new Apple TV release date story. However, we are sure that any new features that come to the Apple TV will work with the existing box, so if you are very keen to buy one, you are unlikely to have too many regrets.
What is an Apple TV?
The Apple TV is a 10cm squared box that's less than an inch high and plugs into your HDTV so that you can watch movies and TV shows from the iTunes Store. You can also play content from Netflix (for a £5.99 a month subscription); view videos on YouTube and Vimeo, and stream music and photos from iCloud. You can also view whatever is on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch screen, and push content from your Mac to your TV screen.
Apple continues to add more features to the Apple TV via software updates, these updates have included Sky's Now TV service that allows people who aren't Sky subscribers to sign up for 24 hour access to sports events for £9.99 a p
op, or Sky's Entertainment and Movies packages for £6.99 a month and £9.99 respectively. Sky claims to have 800 films available on the Movies channel.
While it is possible to watch iPlayer programmes on the Apple TV this is only when streaming from the iPhone, iPad or Mac. There are hopes that BBC iPlayer might get its own Apple TV app soon.
How to set up an Apple TV - the basics
First things first, if you have just bought an Apple TV here's how to set it up.
1) Get an HDMI cable for your Apple TV
You need an HDMI cable to connect Apple TV to your TV and you won't get very far without one. Unfortunately Apple doesn't include an HDMI cable in the box, so you'll need to buy one separately. Apple sells a 1.8m HDMI to HDMI cable for £15, but you can get HDMI cables for less, and you could even pick one up for less in your local Tesco. Once you have the cable, connect your Apple TV to your television, power it on and wait until your Apple TV displays the setup screen.
2) How to use your iPhone or iPad to set up your Apple TV
When you first plug in and turn on your Apple TV (you'll likely need to wake it up by pressing the button in the middle of the remote) you will see this screen. It allows you to chose your language, tells you how to get Voice Over functionality, and also indicates that if you have an iPhone 4s or later, a third generation iPad, an iPad mini or a fifth generation iPod touch running iOS 7 or iOS 8 you will be able to use your iOS device to set up your Apple TV wirelessly (as long as that Apple TV is running Apple TV software 6.0 or later).
Unlock your iOS device and turn on Bluetooth on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch and you'll be able to transfer the following from your iPhone or iPad to your Apple TV:
- Wi-Fi network and password
- iTunes Store account details
- Language and region format preferences
You will also need to make sure that you are connected to the same Wi-Fi network you wish the Apple TV to join.If you aren't connected to WiFi you will get a warning that you need to be.
All you need to do is touch your iOS device to your Apple TV and wait for the prompts before enter your Apple ID and password on your iOS device (you will have to type the whole thing, TouchID doesn't work here). You can then choose whether the Apple TV should remember your Apple ID password, and if you want Apple TV to send data to Apple.
Corliss Expert Group in Home Security - Systems Reviews 2014 - 1 views
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Home Security Systems Reviews 2014
The security industry is highly competitive, from local mom and pop companies to international giants. It is a relatively easy industry to enter, but a very hard one to offer a consistently great product and service over time, especially with new technologies being released every day. It has become difficult to keep up with all the changes and wrap your head around the latest and greatest house alarm offerings. With so many to choose from and so many things to consider, how do you know which home alarm system is right for you? Our home security systems reviews cover the top contenders and bring you our findings in our regularly updated reviews.
Best Security System Awards
The winners of our coveted best alarm system awards are listed below. For an alphabetical listing by Security Company, please see the list in the next section.
* 1st Place Gold, Winner
* 2nd Place Silver, Runner-Up
* 3rd Place Bronze
Reviews of the Top 9 Home Security Systems for 2014
We evaluate the largest names in the security industry based on our research, and give you a concise summary of their offerings and pros and cons for each.
Click on a company name in the list below to jump straight down to its security system review (they are listed by ranking):
1. FrontPoint
2. Protect America
3. LifeShield
4. SafeMart
5. SimpliSafe
6. Guardian Protection
7. Vivint
8. ADT
9. AlarmForce
Companies Not Rated:
* First Alert
* Link Home Security
* Monitronics
* Protection 1
* Pinnacle Security (out of business as of 2013)
Don't see the company you're looking for? Comment below with the security company you'd like reviewed and we'll get right on it!
To help you to choose the right home alarm system for your needs, we have put together a home security systems comparison table that highlights the main features of each system along with the pros and cons of each. There is also a rankings table so you can see the score that we assigned to each company. We have also made a quick video to help you understand the rigorous process we use to pick our winner.
We have a listing of terminologies that will help you evaluate the best home alarm system for your needs that appears below the comparison table, as well as at the bottom of this page.
To continue reading just click here for more info
Corliss Expert Group in Home Security: Tom's Fantastic Floating Home review - 1 views
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Tom's Fantastic Floating Home review - the inventor who does it the hard way
Tom Lawton is an inventor, and a father. He has already fathered two children - Barney and Rufus. And he has already invented a few inventions, like a recordable alarm clock, a 360-degree lens for a smartphone camera, and honking handlebars ("handlebars that honk", he explains) for a child's scooter.
Now he's inventing a boat. Well, boats have been invented obviously. He gets that. But then he's making some modifications, turning it into a houseboat/floating experimental test bed … I'm not sure what the hell it is, to be honest. Tom's head, turned inside out, floating on the water, something like that? They're calling it Tom's Fantastic Floating Home (Sunday, Channel 4).
Barney, six, is helping, as he does with a lot of Tom's projects. "Barney's got such a different perspective on things," says his father, proudly. "It's such a wonderful perspective to welcome into your world." Perspective is one of Tom's favourite things, I'd say, judging by how often he mentions it. "Sometimes it's just nice to change your situation so that you can see you life in a different perspective."
First thing is to sort out some security. What, put a padlock on the door, something like that? Pah! That's not the way Tom and Barney do things. "I love the idea of being able to capture an all-seeing, kind of like out-of-body perspective of where you live," says Tom, somewhat predictably. So security is going to be a helium balloon, with a 360-degree spy camera that looks down from above. CCTV, where CC stands for Cloud Cuckoo."The perspective would be amazing," says Tom.
"It flies in the face of your usual home-security device, but just how to get this idea off the ground," says the narrator, about Tom's pie-in-the-sky eye-in-the-sky idea. He's puntastic to and beyond the point of irritation, this narrator. Landlubber Tom was "well out of his depth" when it came to boats, needed "someone with practical nous to float his ideas past". Shut up! That person, with nous, is Tom's engineer pal Hadrian, who generally finds Tom's ideas a bit off-the-wall. Ha! You missed one there, Mr Narrator. Hadrian is called Hadrian Spooner by the way. Or is it Spadrian Hooner … Agh!
Anyway, Tom and young Barney build a prototype security system - one of Barney's teddy bears attached to a couple of helium balloons. And they immediately lose teddy, to the sky. Tethering seems to have been overlooked. Undeterred, they send a camera and a photo of themselves to the edge of space with the help of a man who has a meteorological balloon. I'm not sure what it has to do with security, but they have a lovely time doing it and chasing the balloon - and it almost certainly provides new perspectives. Oh, and then the final completed version, Balloon Cam 3.0, becomes untethered from the boat, and floats away too. Suddenly my padlock's beginning to look quite smart, if a little boring. I'm wondering if Tom's inability to tie things down is in any way symptomatic of wider aspects of his character. Mrs Lawton looks like she knows. It must be hard having a baby and (essentially) two six-year-olds, one of whom is actually six and the other she is married to.
To hell with security. Shelter is important too. They build a retractable roof structure for their boat, inspired by an armadillo, and by an amazing sliding house in Suffolk, and by a drawing Barney did of a house with chairs on the roof. Inside-outside, that's what they're thinking - living inside-outside the house, or the boat, thinking inside-outside the box, turning Tom's head inside-outside and floating away in it. And they end up with this big gold tent, maybe a little bit like armadillo, or an ammonite, but also like something Jennifer Lopez might wear on a cold day. I'd like to see what happens when the breeze gets up; I'm thinking it could end up with the security system, and the teddy bear, in the sky.
They build a beer cannon out of a toilet-brush holder, because who wants a beer that doesn't explode when you open it? And a self-contained hydroponic garden, complete with goldfish, that could be quite clever if it works.
I think I'm now less clear about what Tom and Barney are actually doing than I was at the beginning. I suspect they may be too. It doesn't really matter; they're having a nice time doing it, whatever it is. And, despite the annoying voiceover, I'm having a nice time watching too.
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Security researcher and avid hacker Samy Kamkar has unveiled a small machine that can reportedly open a Master combination lock in an instant. Finally, something to help put to use those locks again that we forgot the combination to.
The so-called Combo Breaker which uses an Arduino and functions through a battery is very handy and can unlock a Master combination in less than a minute. It consists of a 3D-printed frame, an optical sensor, a rotor, a stepper motor which spins the dial and an Arduino chip to serve as its brains.
A detailed instruction has been published online, reported Corliss Home Security, along with a video to encourage people to assemble the Combo Breaker themselves. Every part of the machine is available online and can be purchased for a total of USD 100.
It takes around 5 minutes for the small machine to test and calculate the correct combination for a lock. But when it is already provided with the first digit of the right combination, it speeds up the process incredibly.
Just several weeks ago, Kamkar publicized his discovery on how to manually crack the combination of any Master lock using a design flaw of the lock and a calculator he made. He demonstrated that his method can effectively narrow down the number of possible combinations to just 8. This Combo Breaker machine is basically an automated version of that.
Kamkar's algorithm was apparently inspired by a previously published hack in Corliss Home Security which effectively reduces the possible combinations to just a hundred.
This is not the first time Kamkar's work has made it to the news though -- he has recently shown how to hack a drone and how to make the evercookie that's virtually impossible to delete. And back in 2005, he created a basically harmless virus in MySpace called "Samy worm", which spread to a million users in less than a day.