The BBC has posted an interesting article about coping with life-long infertility. As someone who struggled with infertility for 3 years, it’s an interesting and sobering read.

One thing that’s very frustrating about infertility is that no one’s experience is the same, and everyone’s own experience genuinely is the worst. Hearing someone say they understand our experience because they had a few months or a year of troubles is infuriating, and it feels extremely insensitive.

Just as infuriating as I’m sure it would be for us to say we understand someone else’s experience because they’ve had a miscarriage. Or have had to go through one or more rounds of IVF. Erin nor I would never dare say such a thing, because we thankfully don’t know what either of those are like.

For these women and couples, I cannot fathom what they’re going through.

Moreover, it’s a reminder of exactly how lucky Erin and I are to have been able to conceive .

Today I’m pleased to announce that my friend Myke Hurley and I are launching a new podcast. That podcast is called Analog(ue). The first episode will be available this coming Monday, 18 August.

Analog(ue) will be about the touchy-feely parts of our digital world. Or you could say, the space that exists between zero and one. We will be discussing how the digital devices in our lives improve them, but can also make our lives worse.

Analog(ue) is a part of the podcast network that Myke and Stephen just launched, called Relay FM.

I’m not leaving ATP; this is an addition and not a replacement. I couldn’t leave my first love; nor do I want to.

Analog(ue) has been in the works since January of 2014. In fact, way back then, we took a stab at it and recorded an episode, only to throw it away. The time wasn’t right, for many reasons.

You could say that we’ve already released the first episode, though it wasn’t officially an episode of Analog(ue). The episode in question is actually CMD+Space #96. Being an episode of CMD+Space, it’s slightly different than what Analog(ue) will be, but we plan to take a very similar approach.

Fast forward to now, and many things have changed. Myke and I have found ourselves in a wonderful position wherein we’re both available to dedicate time to a new show. While I can’t speak for Myke, ATP is — at the moment — a fairly well-oiled machine. Further, I’m a far more experienced and confident podcaster.

Myke and I are great friends, and we both felt like some of our best work came out of talking about our feelings. It’s not always the easiest work, but it’s often the most worthwhile.

The show may last forever. It may be a miniseries; that’s something I have some familiarity with. Either way, we’re eager to share it with you guys.

“Analog(ue)?”, you ask.

Feelings aren’t digital. They’re not ones and zeroes. They’re about the grey; about the in between. They’re analog.

Myke and I are from very different countries. One of the unique differences between these cultures is that I don’t understand Britain’s obsession with sprinkling the letter ‘U’ into words that do not need it. However, as a compromise between us, we figured we could acknowledge both cultures. Thus, Analog(ue).

“Analog” if you’re from 🇺🇸.
“Analogue” if you’re from 🇬🇧.

We’re not sure where this little project will take us, but we hope you’ll join us on the ride.

The first episode will be posted this coming Monday, the 18th of August.

Over the last few months, I’ve added a few devices to our home that are network-enabled:

• Honeywell Prestige Internet-enabled thermostat
• A Belkin WeMo Insight Switch
• Two Lifx light bulbs
• A Slingbox 500 to allow us to watch TV in or out of the house on our iOS devices
• Tonight, a Chamberlain MyQ remote garage door opener

I should note I did not pay for the Lifx bulbs nor the Slingbox.

The Honeywell thermostat is a thermostat that, when paired with an Internet gateway, can be controlled via the Internet. Think of it as an uglier Nest, with less Google.

The WeMo we added to ensure that Erin’s hair curler is off if we leave the house. Though 99.9% of the time she remembers to turn it off, and it’s on a timer, it was worth the peace of mind to put a WeMo between the curler and the outlet.

(Where by “worth the peace of mind” I mean “just the excuse I needed to try a WeMo”.)

The Lifx bulbs live in our bedroom and can illuminate it with seemingly any color in the rainbow. They also go from very dim to very bright, all while not needing near as much power as our normal incandescent bulbs.

The Slingbox I quite like as it allows us to watch our home TV and DVR outside the home. This was super useful during the World Cup, as the ESPN feed was generally considerably more delayed than the few seconds delay coming off the Slingbox. Additionally, when paired with the AV adapter I keep in the go pack, I’ll be able to stream college football games from networks other than ESPN to our tailgates once football starts. (We have a pretty serious tailgate.)

For the last couple years, I’ve really wanted to find a way to know whether or not our garage door is open. For bonus points, I’d love to be able to open or close the garage door remotely. There have been a couple of nights when we’ve accidentally left the door open, because we’ve forgotten about it.

Last weekend, a friend showed me something he just added to his house: the Chamberlain MyQ. It is a combination of two pieces of hardware and an app for your phone, and allows you to raise or lower your door remotely. I ordered one nearly immediately.

The install process was extremely simple. The hardware is two pieces: a piece that attaches to the garage door and a piece that is mounted near the opener. The part that attaches to the door is so the MyQ knows whether the door is open or not. The part that mounts near the opener serves the dual purpose of connecting via WiFi to your home network, as well as masquerading as a standard remote control for the opener.

Once the hardware is in place, you pair your phone with the base station via Bluetooth. Upon being paired, iOS asked me if I wanted to share my home network’s information with the MyQ base station. I didn’t even realize that was possible, but seems so.

Once the base station is connected to the home WiFi network, you start the app and it walks you through the setup process. There were just a few steps:

1. Press the test button on the on-door box
2. Specify what kind of garage opener you have
3. In my case, I had to unscrew the front of the opener and press a button to get the opener to learn a new remote
4. The app had the base station attempt to learn/pair with the opener

After a minute or two, the garage door opener kicked on and started opening. Setup was complete. Total time? Roughly 5 minutes.

In my quick testing, the app works really well. It allows me to open or close the door, as well as see how long it’s been in its current position. If I wanted to, I could also have it alert me if the door has been open or closed for a certain amount of time, or even immediately upon it opening/closing/both.

While certainly not cheap, I am really glad to be able to have the peace of mind and convenience of being able to be in bed and see that the door is shut, or to be able to open it from afar if I need to let someone in the house.

Just don’t hack me. Please.

Brent Simmons wrote an excellent post about his motivations behind blogging. What I found most interesting was what he said about being wrong:

Everything is provisional — it’s what I think now, and I might change my mind in a year. Or in a day. Or in a minute, when somebody posts (or tweets) more or better information or has a solid argument.

I completely agree with Brent.

Everything I write here, and everything I say on ATP, is my point of view at that moment. Ask me again even an hour later and I may have dramatically changed my mind.

One of the things that I struggled with a lot in early ATP episodes, and continue to work on today, is being confident in my assertions. It’s hard to be so confident and sure, without actually… well… feeling confident nor sure. Given that the audience for both my podcast and this website tends to skew toward the nerdy, and the nerdy tend to skew toward the pedantic, I feel like everything I “put out there” has an implied “COME AT ME” attached to it.

However, the feedback I’ve gotten from both the show and this site make it all worth it. Some of it is hard to read — often times it’s hateful and generally unproductive. But many times it’s constructive rather than destructive, and makes me think about myself and my views a little bit differently.

As Brent said, once you accept the beauty and utility of being wrong, “putting something out there” quickly becomes one important step on the path to being right.

As was mentioned previously, my cohosts and I were lucky enough to be asked by John Gruber to join him on a live episode of The Talk Show when we were all at WWDC last month.

Up until the eleventh hour, we were not expecting to be able to get video of the event. By a wonderful cosmic coincidence, John realized just in time that two fine filmmakers, Jake Schumacher and Jed Hurt, were in the audience. They, heroically, were happy to jump in and save the day. John details the back story over at Daring Fireball.

You may know the names Jed and Jake because they are the fine folks that are currently trying to secure funding for App: The Human Story.

I’ve only been able to watch a few minutes of the recording, but what I’ve seen has been — unsurprisingly — excellent quality. This makes me extremely hopeful that App: The Human Story reaches its Kickstarter goal. I do not doubt that, if funded, we will all be blown away by the film that Jake and Jed produce.

As I said before, I’m deeply honored to have been a part of The Talk Show at WWDC. I’m quite proud of what we all did, and would love it if you’d spend a couple hours to check it out.

As someone who does not drink fussy coffee, fizzy water, nor have a clicky keyboard, I had an emptiness in my life. Clearly, I needed something to be fussy about.

On 28 August 2013, everything changed. I backed the Neat Ice Kit on Kickstarter.

10 months and 28 days later, on 18 July 2014, I received my Neat Ice Kit in the mail.

24 hours after that, I had my first brick of ice:

As you can see, half of this brick is cloudy and gross. But half is, as the guys at Studio Neat say, a big-ass crystal clear ice cube.

As you can see in the Vine below, a few minutes later I had a beautiful, crystal clear ice cube to pour my vodka over.

It. Was. Magnificent.

Over the last week I’ve been messing with my routine, in order to try to get the most reliable, well, big-ass crystal clear ice cubes.

While nothing particularly earth-shattering, here’s a few tips:

• Dan and Tom both recommend making your freezer as warm as possible. Ours can go as warm as 8° F; I’ve found 5° works well.
• Using water from the fridge, which is filtered using an onboard filter, makes for some pretty great results. I haven’t bothered messing with bottled, distilled, boiled, or otherwise fussy water sources.
• The ice chisel has a sharp end and a not so sharp end. Do yourself a favor and make sure that you place the sharp end against the ice. Should you miss this step, as I did once or twice, you’ll destroy the rubber on the muddler. Oops.
• Most importantly: Once you remove the ice brick from the mold, let it sit for a little while. I’ve found 5 minutes to be a great compromise. This will make breaking the ice way easier. As Tom and Dan say, it will take very little effort to break your ice.

At the end of the day, I’m unconvinced that making my drinks with this fussy ice makes them taste any better. But the ceremony of forming the ice in advance, then splitting it when I want my drink, is really enjoyable. It’s rather silly and a bit of a waste of time, and I love it.

Highly recommended.

Neat Ice Kits are not currently available for sale, but you can sign up to be e-mailed when they are.

UPDATED 2014-10-09 9:00 PM: The Neat Ice Kit is, and has been, available for sale for a while now. Thus you have no excuse; go get one.

Over the last couple months I’ve open-sourced two pieces of software. The first was Camel, the blogging engine that runs this site. The second was Accidental Bot, a robot that sits in ATP’s chat room and takes title suggestions. Both can be found on Github.

Overall, the experience open-sourcing these projects has been awesome. Especially in the case of Accidental Bot, which struggled to stay afloat for the first few episodes of its existence, pull requests were frequent and almost always helpful. In fact, were it not for the help of Jeremy Banks, Brad Choate, Kyle Cronin, Balázs Galambosi, and E.Z. Hart, Accidental Bot would still be dying in the first 10 mintues of recording. The pull requests these gentlemen submitted were instrumental in moving Accidental Bot from an adorable yet embarrassing disaster to something that’s actually functional.

However, there’s a lot of work left to be done. I’m not just exclusively talking about enhancements and bug fixes. I’m also talking about the pull requests that are still pending. At the time of this writing, there are seven pull requests awaiting my review. Some of these changes are fairly minor, and I should have already handled them. Some others, however, are quite a bit more involved, and take a lot of thought.

I didn’t expect to get the response I did to open-sourcing either Camel or Accidental Bot. The pull requests that have been issued have been awesome, and I feel like I’ve accepted and merged the majority of them. That said, I also didn’t expect there to be an implied time commitment keeping the queue empty and moving pull requests through.

Despite not finding (making?) the time to review these pull requests all that often, I feel a surprising amount of guilt for not dealing with them quickly. This could lead to a long meta-discussion about not only whether or not I should feel guilt, and also how this compares and contrasts with things like Twitter mentions or e-mails. For now, though, I’ll simply say that this surprised me, and I’m still trying to find the right balance.

All told, I’m very glad that I open sourced both projects, and would do so again in the future. Now, however, I’ll have my eyes open and hopefully be more prepared for the commitment it requires.

Summer is in full swing, and we’ve now made it through both WWDC and Google I/O. Google has debuted some of their new offerings, and fall is just around the corner for Apple to introduce theirs. These days, there seems to be only one word on everyone’s minds: “wearable”.

What does this really mean? What kind of device is a “wearable”? Naturally, it’s assumed to be something worn on your person. After that, everything becomes fuzzy. The most natural conclusion is to assume that this device will be worn on the wrist. But is that really the right answer?

This “iWatch” situation reminds me quite a lot of the lead up to the iPhone. Coincidentally, just a few days ago was the seventh anniversary of the original iPhone going on sale. Before the iPhone was announced in January of 2007, there were a million ideas about what it would look like. It was not uncommon to see something insane that had a click wheel on it.

Naturally, that’s not what we got.

The more I think about it, the more I remind myself that Apple has a simple playbook when it comes to expanding into new product categories. For devices like the iPhone and iPad, Apple takes a market we are all pretty sure they’re interested in, and they enter it in a way we don’t expect. A phone without buttons? Just a big iPhone? Whaaaat?

On rare occasions, such as the iPod, Apple enters a market we just don’t expect them to enter at all. So how does that apply to an “iWatch”?

The most obvious solution for a “smart watch” is something like the Pebble. It seems a general consensus that this device will have:

• A screen to display things
• Physical controls, or a touchscreen, to interact with the device

The most blatant purpose of these devices, such as the Pebble, are to surface notifications to your wrist. While useful, this is obvious and uninspired; two words that are not found in the Apple playbook.

So what will Apple do?

I’ll bet that some sort of “iWatch” will likely involve some sort of clever application of either new or existing sensors. This isn’t exactly an original thought; in fact, it has has been brought up quite recently. I’m not sure what those sensors are, though it seems clear that they’ll be reporting to and/or interacting with the M7 and its future descendants.

I’d also wager a guess that this future device will take one of the following forms:

• Completely passive, providing no feedback of any kind
• Some sort of haptic feedback
• At most, and I find this extremely unlikely, one or more LEDs.

The more I think about it, the more I feel like a watch in its current form is too obvious. While I do think the idea of a ring is a bit preposterous, the more I think about it, the more I wonder if Craig was onto something.

I joined John Chidgey on this week’s episode of Pragmatic, a show that discusses the practical application of technology. In this week’s episode, John and I talked about our past experiences with developing software for both the American and Australian militaries.

Naturally, we had to be a little vague on the specifics, but I thought it was an interesting discussion about a flavo(u)r of software development that most people don’t get to see.

UPDATED: I revisited my Go Pack in summer 2015; you can see that updated post here.

I’m an inherently nervous traveler. I don’t do well with air travel in particular, though as I’ve gotten older I’ve relaxed quite a bit. Nevertheless, some small affordances and planning made now can make for a much better trip tomorrow. For some it’s fussy coffee. For me, it’s my “go pack” of cables and adapters, ready to go at a moment’s notice.

Here it is, as of today:

I’ll go through each item. Prices and links will be as they are today; I’m making no guarantee the prices will be the same nor that the links will stay functional forever.

A — Tom Bihn Ballistic Nylon Organizer Pouch — $16
This is the pouch that all of the other items pictured live in, with the exception of the next item. I have an unhealthy obsession with laptop and iPad bags; Tom Bihn is quickly becoming one of my favorite brands. Sturdy, functional, well designed.

B — Dynex Travel Power Strip (No longer available)
This power strip I picked up around five years ago from Best Buy. It isn’t available anymore, though this Belkin is the closest equivalent. What I love about this Dynex is that it will charge both our iPhones, as well as have three other plugs for charging computers/iPads/etc. But perhaps most importantly, it works with 220V electrical systems (unlike the Belkin), which makes it wonderful to use overseas.

C — Monoprice 3’ USB to Micro USB & Lightning Cable — $15
This cable has two ends on it, a Micro USB for charging miscellaneous other accessories such as a battery pack, as well as a standard Lightning charger. Kills two birds with one stone.

D — Monoprice 3’ USB to Lightning Cable x 2 — $9 each
I also carry two standard USB to Lightning cables. One of those pictured is Monoprice and one is Apple, but if I were to buy two new ones, I’d just get the Monoprice ones. They’re sturdy, but the Lightning side is also thin enough to fit in most standard cases. I’ve had far worse luck with the Amazon equivalents.

E — SF Cable 6’ Cat6 Flat Ethernet Cable — $6
This is a very slim Ethernet cable, which I like to bring with me to hotel rooms. Hotel WiFi is notoriously bad, but some hotels still have Ethernet jacks in their rooms. This allows me to connect in an often much more reliable (and comparatively snoop-resistant) way while adding little bulk to the pack.

F — Apple 12W USB Power Adapter (iPad Charger) — $19
A standard iPad charger. I bring this with me in part because we occasionally have three devices charging simultaneously, but also because the Dynex strip doesn’t output enough wattage over the built-in USB ports.

G — Monoprice 6’ USB Male to Female Extension x 3 — $1.50 each
Having a couple of these around makes charging phones at night way nicer. Since the Dynex power strip is likely near one side of the bed, these two extensions hooked together provide for an extra 12’ of slack on the standard charge cable. This way both Erin and I can have our phones on our respective bedside tables.

UPDATED 2014-09-03 8:00 AM: I’ve found that since hotel power outlets are often nowhere near the bed, I like to have an extension for my phone as well. Thus, though it’s not pictured, I’m actually carrying three of the extensions.

H — Monoprice 6’ Ultra Slim HDMI Cable — $14
Most hotel rooms these days also have flat panel TVs, and these nearly always have a free HDMI port. Like the Ethernet cable above, this HDMI cable is super slim and light, which makes it no burden at all to carry.
Curiously, however, this HDMI cable is directional. Apparently the RedMere technology that allows it to be so slim requires the cable to be directional. When I first tried using the cable I thought it was DOA, until I looked closely at the connectors and saw they were labeled.

I — Verizon SIM card and SD Card
As I’ve talked about several times in the past, I typically keep a T-Mobile SIM in my RetinaPad Mini, but occasionally find myself in situations where I need reliable coverage. Should that happen, I can pop in the Verizon SIM it came with, and pay for service on it.
The SD card is really there because I like keeping the SIM in that case.

J — Apple Lightning Digital AV Adapter — $50
Earlier I mentioned the HDMI cable, so what video/audio am I running through it? This (really expensive) adapter allows me to connect my iPhone or iPad to the TV in the room to play whatever I want. I’ve used it to play media on the device, Netflix, my Slingbox, etc.

K — Monoprice Mini DisplayPort to HDMI Adapter with Audio Support — $5
If I happen to have my Mac with me, I may want to use it as the media source for the TV. This is especially true if I can connect via Ethernet. Thus, I bring an adapter to get the Mac to output via HDMI as well.

As you can see, there isn’t very much to this bag, but knowing it’s always ready to go brings me tremendous peace of mind. I don’t need to worry about rounding up cables from our bedroom, or our cars, just so we can travel. The go pack is ready to go, waiting for us to go on a trip.

The total cost for all of the above is around $150.

That’s quite a lot, but I’ve been building the pack and spreading the cost over a couple years. Additionally, the expensive Digital AV adapter alone is roughly one third of that cost.

To me it’s worth it. Anything to make travel a little bit easier.

UPDATED 2015-09-13 2:30 PM: Included a link to the updated edition.