family vacation | At Home with Tech

March 6, 2022

How to Pack your Streaming Apps for your Next Vacation Movie Night

After a fun vacation day on the slopes, my family settled in for a movie on our hotel room TV. Here’s how we did that using my existing Apple ecosystem.

I recently returned from a little skiing vacation with my family at Mount Bousquet in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. We hadn’t been on the slopes for a couple years due to the pandemic, so it felt great to practice some downhill again. (That’s our son having fun on a snowboard in my above photo.)

Pack your Apple TV for your Next Vacation
During our time in the hotel room, I tried using a particularly useful vacation tech trick I’d learned a while back. I had brought our Apple TV puck with us with the intent to jack it into the hotel’s WiFi network. This would allow me to access our entire arsenal of streaming apps and create movie nights using the room’s big TV screen. (Doing this effectively sidesteps having to purchase anything additional from a hotel as long as the base-level WiFi can handle streaming.)

Sadly, the streaming apps on my Apple TV didn’t work this time, because the hotel’s WiFi required a multiple-step login process, which the Apple TV couldn’t access beyond the password step.

Fortunately, I had also packed a lightning to HDMI adapter for my iPhone. (It’s always good to have a backup plan, when vacation movie night hangs in the balance.)

Apple Lightning Digital AV Adapter

Using this dongle, I was able to substitute in my iPhone as the streaming source and connect it directly to our hotel room’s HDTV via its HDMI cable. Then, my iPhone effortlessly served up the Disney movies we wanted via its Disney+ app.

Tech Ethics
You could say my streaming strategy unfairly took advantage of the hotel’s WiFi network, possibly slowing down WiFi speeds for others. But my iPhone ended up tethering to its cellular connection using its AT&T wireless data plan. So I don’t have to debate tech ethics here (not this time).

I pay for unlimited data on my AT&T account. So, in a sense, I’m already paying full price for my movie tickets while streaming. That said, I’m very happy not to be concerned about blowing through any data limits while on vacation!

Ensuring that Screen Time = Family Time
And why all my effort to project a movie onto a hotel room’s TV? Can’t an iPad or iPhone screen suffice during vacation? Not for me and my family. If you’re also a parent with kids, I imagine you might agree that screen time is a complicated topic.

The last thing I want to do is generate more opportunity for little eyeballs to stare at little screens, separate from the larger family focus.

If there is to be movie screen time on vacation, it’s great when it’s part of a larger family activity…experienced together.

Vacation Tech Joy
When bringing extra tech with you to create your family movie nights on vacation, please don’t forget to pack up all of the pieces before you leave. (Adapters have a way of disappearing if you’re not careful.)

And do put the hotel TV cabling back together. The next family may just want to turn on the TV without ‘Frankensteining’ together their own mini movie theater.

Nevertheless, I do enjoy screaming “It’s alive!” whenever I get my vacation TVs to work. A little tech joy always adds to my overall vacation experience.

In fact, I highly recommend it.

August 22, 2021

Our Trip to Mystic Seaport

The Charles W. Morgan, America’s oldest commercial ship still in existence, undergoes maintenance at Mystic Seaport Museum.

I just drove my family up to Mystic Seaport Museum and met up with two other families to explore the historic ships and experience the recreated fishing village. It was a fantastic Connecticut day trip and a fitting conclusion to our eleven-year-old son’s summer vacation.

Fire Fighter
Though the big attraction at the museum is the Charles W. Morgan, the last wooden whaleship in the world, my favorite part of the day was our small guided tour of Fire Fighter, the first diesel-electric fireboat. It was built in 1938 to protect New York City’s harbor and had the distinction as the most powerful fireboat in the world for many years. A National Historic Landmark, it was decommissioned in 2010.

As I walked through Fire Fighter, I felt like I had been transported back in time. The vessel is operational and still very much alive. My experience was quite visceral and entirely different from other museum ships I’ve visited.

The Pull of History
Mystic, Connecticut is, of course, also home to Mystic Aquarium. My family and I checked that fabulous day trip off our list a few years back. On the way out, we briefly stopped by Mystic Seaport and peered past the gates. I felt the strong currents of history beckoning us to return.

I’m so glad we finally did.

August 15, 2021

Use Apple Watch’s Haptic Feedback to Nourish your Creative Self

If you want to use early mornings during vacation days to nurture the buds of your creativity, you have to be awake. Here’s one way to ensure that happens by using your Apple Watch.

I’ve been asked where I find the time to write this weekly blog. My secret is I work on it during my ‘magic hour.’ That’s the sixty minutes or so in the mornings before the rest of my family wakes up. Not only is it exclusively my own, interrupted time, but my brain is fresh and clear. Most importantly, my creative self is fully active, and my writing just flows.

My magic hour begins at 5:30am with my cup of Joe, and I have a date with myself every morning that I never break. It’s my most productive time of the entire day, and I use it for any number of computer-based projects, including my writing.

Vacation Planning
When my family and I go on vacation, yes, I still take my intentions for my morning creative time with me. But our schedule does shift a bit, and everyone sleeps a little later, myself included. I could easily sleep away that ‘me time,’ but as long as I recalibrate when I wake up in relationship to everyone else, I don’t lose my magic hour.

The challenge is ensuring I get up, and that can be difficult when I want to wake up later than when my internal clock tells me to. That’s because when I sleep in, there’s no way to know exactly when I’ll complete my next sleep cycle.

Setting a wake-up alarm on my iPhone is, of course, the obvious solution. But when my family is sleeping in the same hotel room, an alarm is going to wake everyone up. Even the light buzzing sounds of a vibrating alarm on my iPhone could wake up my son. (He can be a light sleeper right before the sun rises.)

So how do I get just myself up to greet my magic hour while on vacation?

I use the silent alarm with haptic feedback on my Apple Watch.

Happy with Haptic Feedback
For those who don’t yet happily live in the world of haptic technology, it’s simply my Apple Watch vibrating on my wrist to silently communicate with me. Sometimes it taps a couple of times to indicate I’ve received a text. A more insistent vibration sequence happens when I get a call. And yes, there’s an alarm vibration which will wake me up.

It’s brilliant.

So, that’s the way I start my mornings on vacation exactly when I want without disturbing the rest of my family.

Don’t Forget to Recharge
The only issue with my silent alarm plan is I need to wear my Apple Watch throughout the night. And that’s the time I would normally be charging it up. So I can’t forget to time shift that important refueling.

The good news is it doesn’t take too long. I can usually get back to 100% during breakfast, before we all leave for our day of fun.

Always Feed your Creative Self on Vacation
I know vacations are supposed to offer a break from your daily routine. But for me, I like to bring my magic hour with me wherever I go. And a scheduled tactile reminder, courtesy of my Apple Watch, is all it takes to ensure I begin my vacation mornings exactly the way I want.

Tag: family vacation

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