• Alexa,  Home Automation

    Connect Amazon Echo To An iHeartRadio Account

    The Amazon Echo can’t control a FireTV. I guess they’re different groups at Amazon. And not all the music you want is available on Amazon Prime. Royalties, contracts, etc being what they are, sometimes Amazon can’t find something you want. But, even if an artist or song isn’t available, you can often hook into a channel that fills the void on iHeartRadio. So, let’s connect the two. To get started, you’ll want to log into http://alexa.amazon.com. Then, click on Music & Books and then scroll down to the listing for iHeartRadio and click on the logo. If you haven’t linked an account, you’ll only have the option to “Link your account now”…

  • Alexa,  Home Automation

    Connect Amazon Echo (Alexa) to IFTTT

    IFTTT makes the possibilities practically endless for what you can do with an Amazon Echo running Alexa. IFTTT provides workflows that connect Alexa to many of the most popular cloud services on the Internet. For example, Alexa can make a spreadsheet of all the songs you listen to using your Prime account, Email you a shopping list, sync To-Dos to Evernote, find your phone, set reminders on your phone, extend Alexa to manage your TV using Harmony, run Wink shortcuts, print files, manage a Wemo bulb (Belkin), control otherwise unsupported thermostats, control items within apps (e.g. make all your Hue lights a given color), time things (e.g. turn on the air conditioning for an…

  • Mac OS X,  public speaking

    Keynote & iPhone

    For those that have not yet used it, the App Store has a little application called Keynote Remote, which can be used to control a slide deck that you’re going through. Once you’ve installed the application on your iPhone simply open it and click on the New Keynote Link… dialog (also in the Settings pane of the app on the iPhone). You’ll see a Passcode. Open Keynote, from the Keynote menu, click Properties, then click on the Remote icon in the Keynote Preferences toolbar. Then click on the check box to Enable iPhone and iPod touch Remotes, click on the remote you will be pairing to your Keynote installation and…

  • personal,  sites,  Social Networking

    Microsoft Blogging

    Once upon a time, in a land far away, there was a team of Microsoft employees. They operated in a black box, a silo of noncommunication. In order to learn what was in the new products they were developing you had to wait until they were released. There were no seeds, the prerelease software distributed to partners was codenamed with words like longhorn and the developers, if they spoke out of turn were publicly flogged with cat-o-nine-tails made of rusty old x86 hardware, known as flogware. But then something happened. Microsoft, to whatever degree, embraced a world of openness. The developers for various teams were suddenly encouraged to blog, speak…