This week I’ll be in Los Angeles for the Electronic Entertainment Expo, more commonly known as E3 and THE trade show for computer and video games played on gaming consoles, handheld devices, personal computers, and online put on by the Entertainment Software Association.
According to E3 Insider, E3 is an event where tens of thousands of attendees from all over the country and representing “leading computer and video game companies, business partners, media and industry analysts” will converge to experience the future of gaming, including new technologies.
I’ll be attending with AMD in my role as an AMD Tech Mom (#AMDTechMom) with Kris Cain from LittleTechGirl.com. Together Kris and I will be joining AMD’s E3 expert to walk the floor and play lots of games in order to report back on the latest in the gaming industry.
We’ll be attending press events, getting a sneak peek at the new AMD A-Series processors (did you know that AMD processors are in Xbox and Wii?), and also getting a VIP demo of the newest family title from PlayStation as PlayStation Family Ambassadors.
If you want to keep up with the latest news from E3:
Watch live feeds of press conferences. Monday’s lineup includes Microsoft (9:30 am PST), EA (1 pm PST), Ubisoft (3 pm PST), and Sony (6 pm PST). Nintendo will hold their press conference on Tuesday at 9 am PST.
Get summaries of major E3 highlights by subscribing via email. Just visit the E3 Insider site and click on the red button in the upper right hand corner.
As and AMD Tech Mom, AMD has covered my travel expenses for my trip to E3 and I am compensated for my participation in the program. All opinions are my own and based on personal experiences and do no reflect those of AMD.
Skype is an essential tool for my work but also my family. It allows me to collaborate with colleagues across distances and keep in touch with family living across the country through chat, calls, and video calls.
Being a Comcast customer, I’m excited about the recently announced partnership between Skype and Comcast that will allow me to make and receive Skype calls from my television. Friends, family, and colleagues can use Skype as they always do on their end but I can experience widescreen HD video from the comfort of my living room! No more crowding around the webcam in a computer!
If you’re a Comcast customer, here are some of the things that you’ll be able to do through Skype on Xfinity:
Make and receive Skype video and audio calls, or send instant messages via Skype on a television while watching their favorite TV show at the same time, and accept incoming calls during a TV show with the help of Caller ID.
Make and receive video and audio calls, or send instant messages via Skype on a compatible mobile phone or tablet.
Import friends to their address book from their Facebook, Outlook, Gmail and smartphone contact lists, find them on Skype and see when contacts are online and available to talk.
This service will be delivered through your HDTV through a Comcast adaptor box, a high-quality video camera, and a specially designed remote control that enables customers to text on Skype as well as control their television. The other calling party can use Skype as they normally would and will not need any special equipment.
Skype on Xfinity has launched in Boston and Seattle and I’m hoping that the DC Metro area will be among the first to be offered a trial of this new feature and look forward to sharing more information with you about the experience once I get to try it out!
For more information about the Skype and Comcast partnership, please visit the Comcast press page.
As a member of the Comcast Digital Ambassador Program, I receive Xfinity Triple Play in exchange for my involvement in the program. All opinions are my own. Images and logos courtesy of Comcast.
With Memorial Day behind us, summer has officially started. Whether you’re looking ahead to an anticipated summer vacation or having more unstructured free time as a family thanks to the break, selling on eBay can help you fund far off getaways or local activities.
A trip to Hawaii, sleep-away camp and a backpacking trip in the great outdoors may be the best part of summer, however vacations can put a big dent in summer budgets. Staycations can also start to add up! There are so many fun, but costly, activities right in your backyard. Amusement parks, backyard BBQs, summer sports and trips to the water parks add up, however selling household items on eBay can fund your summer fun.
I’m eyeing our family’s Little Tykes Log Cabin that is out in our yard. Having once been the highlight of many toddler play dates, it sits sadly under a tree. Every once and awhile someone climbs on top of it but no one goes in it anymore. It’s time to clean it up, list it, and say goodbye especially since I found that someone else is selling the same one as ours on eBay for $175!
Gnome and dirt not included!
Look around your house. What things from last summer will go unused this year?
Closet full of outgrown children’s clothes from last summer? Sell them as a lot of play clothes to pay for new outfits for warm weather.
Unused golf clubs or fishing rods? Recoup your money to help pay for this year’s travel expenses for your beach getaway or your new hobby.
An extra swimsuit that is new with tags but doesn’t fit this year? List it to fund this year’s swimsuit.
Camping gear collecting dust? Take a look at the Completed Listings to see what the same items have sold for before listing yours.
Giveaway: eBay wants to help your summer fun by providing a $100 gift card to purchase things you need for your upcoming vacation or staycation.
To enter: Leave a comment sharing a recent item you sold and how much money you made from the sale. You must include your eBay ID in order for your entry to be valid. Winner will be selected from all entries. Comments must be left by Wednesday, June 13.
For extra entries, complete the above and Tweet this: @TechSavvyMama provides @eBay tips on selling to fund summer fun & has a $100 GC #giveaway: http://bit.ly/KIAhnS You must leave a link to your tweet in your comment. (1 Tweet/day)
I am part of the eBay Parent Panel and am compensated for my participation in the program. All opinions about my eBay experience are my own. For complete giveaway rules, please visit my Official Sweepstakes Rules.
I’ve been a soccer mom and dive team mom but not a dance mom. Lifetime’s Dance Moms provides a voyeuristic look into the lives of some the dance moms and girls who work with dance instructor, Abby Lee Miller, from the Abby Lee Dance Company in Pittsburg.
About Dance Moms:
"Dance Moms" follows children’s early steps on the road to stardom and their mothers who are there for every rehearsal, performance and bow...all under Miller’s discerning eyes. Presenting a powerful cast of characters that has inspired water-cooler talk across the country, the show immerses itself in dance competition season, delivering a captivating and dramatic look at the cast’s intense pursuit of National Dance titles.
Centered on the devoted Miller, who instructs her young, talented students while also dealing with dedicated mothers who go to great lengths to help their children’s dreams come true, "Dance Moms" will continue to pose the tough questions many people have been asking since the show’s launch about the fast-growing and controversial sport of competitive dance.
"Dance Moms" uniquely captures the dynamic interplay among teacher, student and parent as Miller commits herself to bring out the best in her students – and their mothers – willing to dedicate themselves to be part of one of the best dance teams in the nation.
Dance Moms airs new episodes on LIFETIME, Tuesday, June 5th @ 9/8C.
The Sonos Play 3 streaming audio player gives you instant access to your digital music library and streaming internet audio settings from anywhere in your house.
I had a chance to try out the Sonos Play 3 streaming music system and was very impressed. Taking it out of the box, the Sonos Play 3 looks like a single bookshelf speaker. It has no screen, minimal lights, and pretty much looks like a "just a speaker." But hidden inside the unit is the future of home entertainment.
The Sonos unit pulls music from your home PCs and Macs, and also has the ability to stream internet radio and music from many of the popular online music services. This includes: Last.fm, Pandora, Rhapsody, SiriusXM, Spotify, iheartradio, and others.
Sonos dispenses with the things you already have: A hard drive full of music, an internet connection, and a smartphone or tablet to use as a remote. Does anyone really need ANOTHER remote in the house? No. Perfect, Sonos doesn't ship with one.
Sonos Play 3 comes in black or white
The Play 3 connects to your home internet connection via Ethernet, or the optional wireless Sonos Bridge. Once you have one Sonos unit in the house, they have the ability to communicate between themselves and form a wireless mesh network, extending their range. If you have multiple units, you can play the same thing around the entire house, or different soundtracks in each room. It's all controlled from "elsewhere", meaning a Mac, PC, Android or iPhone / iPad.
Controlling the unit from a mobile phone is a breeze. I downloaded the app on Android and was able to add songs to my queue, change radio stations, and browse my music easily. The Android App did a spectacular job of navigating through our enormous iTunes library. For example, when browsing by artist, it was fast and painless to scroll through a list of hundreds of band names to get to ones farther down in the alphabet. I wish my car stereo could handle it that well.
The Sonos Play 3 unit feels very solid and well built. The speakers put out great audio, including bass, which is hard to do in a small package. The Play 3 has 1 tweeter, 2 mid-range speakers, and 1 bass radiator. It's a single unit, with the left and right channels of audio coming from within the unit. For those that want to get fancy, you can purchase a 2nd Play 3 unit and set them up as a stereo pair for true separation of Left and Right channels.
Setup was pretty simple. I connected the unit to an Ethernet port and ran through the App on my Mac. I had some problems, which turned out to be entirely of my own doing, but customer support was very knowledgeable and helpful, even on Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. They had my problem solved in about 5 minutes of time. I also installed the App on a Windows 7 system without issue.
Connect Sonos via Ethernet or optional Sonos Bridge
To access your music on your computer (PC or Mac), it uses server message block (SMB) sharing. The installer guides you through it and it's quite painless. One thing that really threw me off was that the Sonos installer wanted to completely disable sleep on my computer. It said this was necessary to ensure interrupted playback. Many computers can wake from sleep automatically upon receiving traffic from the network, but the Sonos doesn't support using this method. Strange. If you want the Sonos to be ready to go anytime (to play music from your PC), your music library has to be available anytime. One way around this is to store your music on a network-attached storage drive. Not a bad idea.
My fear is that if I put my primary iTunes library on a network attached storage (NAS) drive, then I have no music locally on my computer itself, and it's harder to back up the iTunes library since Time Machine only backs up things connected directly to my computer. Hard drive space is cheap, so I could put a COPY of my iTunes library on the NAS, but then how do I auto-update it? It would require an automatic system like super-duper or other utility to do nightly or weekly dumps of iTunes to the NAS. This starts to seem complicated.
After thinking about it, I realize that maybe I'm thinking about it all wrong. Perhaps I should be thinking up in the cloud. Everything is in "the cloud" today. Sonos won't stream form Apple's iCloud service. But it does work with Spotify and a bunch of other previously named services. If you have a Spotify Premium account ($9.99 a month) then it will play music directly from Spotify's servers on the Internet. And Spotify can sync with your iTunes music library.
It is nice to have yet another way to access my music but one thing I'm constantly struggling with is finding new music that I like. Here's where Sonos' internet-based streaming features really shine. The Sonos unit directly links to hundreds of internet radio stations, both internet-based and regular FM radio stations with streaming services. Finding and adding stations was easy. With just a few clicks I was listening to some quality Internet radio. And songs I enjoyed!
Here's something neat you can do on Sonos: Channel surf between DC101, WFNX, C89.5, BBC Radio 1, and Live 105 seamlessly while cooking breakfast. That's DC101 in DC, WFNX in Boston, C89.5 in Seattle, Live 105 in San Francisco, and of course, London's BBC 1 in the UK. That's pretty cool to be able to do from a PC, and even better to be able to do from any room of the house.
In summary, the Sonos streaming music player provides you with high quality speakers and a great user interface for listening to your digital music collection or tapping into the Internet's vast assortment of streaming audio.
Pros:
High quality hardware
Great sound
Excellent interface
Cons:
Needs separate Bridge unit for wireless. Won't use your existing Wifi router.
If my review of the Sonos Play 3 has enticed you into purchasing one of your own,Target is offering a free Sonos Bridge ($49.99) with an in-store purchase of either a Sonos Play 3 or Sonos Play 5. This unadvertised offer is only good in store for Sonos 3 or 5 until June 9 making it a perfect Father's Day or graduation gift!
I received both the Sonos Play 3 and Sonos Bridge for review purposes and was compensated for my time in setting up the system and writing this review although all opinions are my own and based on personal experience with the products.
If you’re heading out of town for the long weekend or have an upcoming summer vacation on the horizon, chances are you’ve given a little thought to how to best secure your home.
Nothing feels more violating than having someone break into your house. While stuff is stuff and can be replaced, the physical clean up and emotional scars that come with feeling violated can take a long time to heal.
Over the past two years our usually quiet neighborhood has been subjected to violent break-ins around the holidays. Thieves waited and watched for occupants to leave for work and then kicked in front doors, ransacking the interiors of nearby houses. To say I was paranoid about leaving the house even for 5 minutes is an understatement.
My husband and I talked a lot about how we could protect ourselves and secure our home. Being mindful of cars on our street and randomizing our activity didn’t seem like enough. We took measures to reinforce deadbolts on doors, beef up security on windows, but knew our 4 year old adopted Yellow Labrador might not be the most reliable security system. A love of treats and affection are his weaknesses! My parents encouraged a home security system. It was an option we considered but I wanted more than what popular traditional companies offered. I wanted the technology to make my home smarter and safer. I wanted to be able to use an app to turn lights on and off, lock and unlock doors, program the thermostat from afar, and even monitor video cameras remotely. In other words, I wanted my home security system to be tech savvy by providing remote automation and allow me to see what was going on in my home on my terms rather than waiting to be notified after a security breach.
Little did I know that Alarm.com, the company that creates the innovative technology for home monitoring tools, is located in the DC Metro Area. They invited me to come see their products in action and immediately I recognized how their wide range of products could provide the home security, remote management, and wireless monitoring I wanted for our house.
Alarm.com provides the technology that allows homeowners to monitor everything that happens in their homes from keeping track of activity on entry doors, windows, liquor and medicine cabinets, safes, drawers, and more. While most home security systems rely on a phone line (that can be disabled by thieves or intruders) to notify authorities of a break in, Alarm.com works through a secure wireless network and you can monitor and secure your home through an easy to use web dashboard on any computer or on your mobile phone using the app for iOS (iPhone, iPad) or Android in real time. Ah, sweet tech savvy heaven!
After seeing Alarm.com’s technology infrastructure, the security measures their smart connected devices use to protect homes, the web dashboard, and ease of using the app, I was sold. I wanted everything they offered in the hopes to make me feel less paranoid.
Working with Alarm.com and our local ASG Security installer (Vivint and other companies also supply devices with Alarm.com technology), we were provided with a customized package of equipment designed to secure and monitor our home. Our home isn’t just secure, it’s secure in a smart and tech savvy way.
We’ve been using window sensors, wireless and fixed video cameras, emPower lights, and glass break sensors as part of our Alarm.com home security system. We’ve found the advanced interactive technology to be easy to use and provides peace of mind that our home is protected.
I love the integration with our smartphones that allows us to enable and disable security features while monitoring our home remotely through archived video feeds, text alert notifications, and a great dashboard that provides a comprehensive look at activity in and around our house from any computer.
This is just an overview of the Alarm.com technology in the ASG Security products we are using. More in-depth coverage about the different products we’re using to secure our home will be shared through future posts.
Alarm.com and ASG Security provided our family with a customized package of home security products to meet our needs. Products and 6 months of service were provided in exchange for sharing my honest experience with the technology with you. No additional compensation was received for this post and we do plan on continuing to pay for our service when our complimentary service ends. Images courtesy of Alarm.com.
With all the
talk about cars in our home these days, Little Miss Techie and Captain Computer
have developed a keep awareness of based on hearing me talk about automobile
brands, press
trips, and my involvement as a Toyota TWIN
member.
I love that
they’re starting to take notice of cars on the road and in-car vehicle
features. They ask questions about the logos on vehicles driving by as well as
the names of various models. They’re expert button pushers who stress test
everything from the windows in the back seat to the radio when sitting in the
parked car in our driveway and trying to pull up favorite songs on satellite
radio.
Little Miss Techie and Captain Computer aren’t shy about expressing their opinions. They’re quite the critics who don’t hesitate
to tell me that the car feels bumpy, if the seatbelt placement makes it hard to
buckle around car seats, and will stretch out their legs and kick the back
seats if there isn’t enough legroom.
For us, a car is
an investment and must to meet all of our needs. (By all, I even mean the family dog who loves
car rides almost as much as being fed, walks, and squirrels.) By involving our
kids in test drives and having conversations about cars, I feel like I’m doing
my part to provide them with an early education that will make them knowledge
consumers.
It’s going to be
8 more years until Little Miss Techie is old enough to have a license of her
own. Surely the technology
inside vehicles will be even safer than it is now but hopefully providing
this foundation will make my kids confident
consumers who can walk into a dealership and without hesitation, take
charge of their car buying experience.
This post was inspired by my work with Toyota and the Toyota Women's Influencer Network (TWIN). I was selected for
participation in the TWIN community through a program with Clever Girls Collective. All
opinions are my own and based on personal experience and do not reflect the
views of Toyota.
Part of being tech savvy is to make technology work for you
and choosing the right services and devices that can streamline tasks. Over the past month I’ve been getting to know the wealth of services that Comcast offers through
Xfinity Triple Play as a Digital Ambassador.
I love the way Comcast is reinventing entertainment with
Xfinity Triple Play that includes TV, internet, and voice. Watching content no
longer happens in one room of the house around a single screen. Mobile phones, tablets, and multiple
computers allow us to stream shows to watch whenever we want and on our device
of choice.
As someone new to Comcast, I have a lot to learn but look
forward to sharing Comcast Xfinity features that work well for me and my family
so you can check them out too.
Are you a Comcast customer with Xfinity Double or Triple
Play? If so, do you have any tips for me about things you love about the service and recommend I try?
As a member of the
Comcast Digital Ambassador Program, I receive Xfinity Triple Play in exchange
for my involvement in the program. All
opinions are my own. Images and logos courtesy of Comcast.
I'm a DC Metro area dwelling mom of 2 and former teacher with an background in classroom technology integration & school administration. I am a family internet safety & security expert, social media consultant, regular columnist on Parents.com's Tech Savvy Parents, Savvy Source Washington, D.C. editor, dog owner, car enthusiast, and an avid gardener.
