Walking into our house you will instantly understand that technology is deeply a part of our lives. You might not always know it to see us in person, or to talk to us, but spend any time in our home or get to really talking to any of us and you will shortly understand that we are a modern technology family. It is deeply ingrained in the definition of who we are.
Jeffrey has called himself a hack IT guy forever. And he has charmed me with the story that he engineered a powered gate for his family’s guinea pig when he was in elementary school. Our house and family life is basically one giant motorized gate for us guinea pigs. He has filled our lives of technology, and hacked our way into living a modern life.
Our tech may not be the latest and greatest like it might have been years ago when we were obsessed with consuming and acquiring things. Now we are more obsessed with making things work for us while having super great Tech.
It may not be the way that everyone has done it, but this is How We Tech:
Home Network:
we’ve always had the top of the line internet speed into our home. at the time of building this house we wired the whole home ourselves, and had a pipe drawn into the house for the internet. we had our online business in the basement for may years and jeffrey has always had multiple servers here, which is now all over the internet. we house a base unit downstairs where 100s of wire meet from all over the house. at this point, there is so a lot of wireless magic happening.
because we have apple tvs all over our home, we have access to airplay things all over from our phones. We have an apple wireless router and have speaker systems set on their own network as well.
Everything is able to talk to each other, everything is somehow magically connected.
I don’t know all of the linguistics of this network, but I know it’s hacked and not the most cutting edge technology, but for us, it’s the bombdotcom.
Regular tv
we’ve literally cut the cable cord into our home. we’ve had Directv satellite for more than 18 years. and are in the process of cutting that cord too. we’ve stopped upgrading that equipment, and have let the receivers die one by one and are down from 5 to 2.
we watch more on Hulu and Netflix or other network apps than we do regular tv at this point. So no more “regular” tv for us.
(even for live sports!)
we’re in the process of trying out several of the other internet type streaming services. I’ll update you on those as we get through those.
Movie server
we are movie junkies. we’d usually rather watch a movie than a tv show. because of this we have converted all of the dvds that we’ve ever purchased onto a server that we can access anywhere at any time. we can even access it while traveling and on the road. because we have them all digital we can also make them “travel size” and put them on our devices so we can watch them while we have no access to the internet. We literally access this server at least once a day. we can access it from multiple Tvs at once and have even allowed access to our college student from her dorm room.
Apple tv
this is our life line. this technology has changed the way that we live. and we love it. we use this for accessing our movie server, and a ton of internet streaming services like Hulu and Netflix. we can also use it to access our entire music library and music account, all iTunes purchases, our photo library and a ton more. we have one of these on every tv in our home, even if we don’t have satellite or whatever on it. we’ve set up our college student with one as well as the grandma!
iPhones
every one of us has an iPhone. this is our family touchstone. we use our phones to stay in contact at all times, via apps, calendars, emails, group texting, find my friends, photos, music and more.
Regular phones
we don’t really have one anymore. we have tried to actually cut this from our home, (cord cutting) but in order for us to get the internet connection that we want to have they make us bundle and unfortunately the phone number comes with it. boo.
iCloud.
we use our iCloud accounts to share everything. we create iCloud photo sharing albums of every trip we are on together, all special events and on holidays — on Thanksgiving we create one each year called Gratitude and we all share photos of the things and people we are grateful for.
this technology has also forever changed our lives. more on this in it’s own post.
Music
we have a family music account. we love to play music in our house. it is not uncommon to have someone air playing music to the kitchen speakers in the morning during the morning rush, or during dinner or during pool time. we play music in our cars, we create and share music playlists for all of our travels and for christmas.
Apps
we use a lot of apps to help us stay connected, texting, gps locating, photo sharing, social media, games, calendars, evernote, homework app, and more. each category deserves its own post.
Computers
we are an almost an exclusively Apple computer household and have been for more than 20 years. we all have our own laptops, varying in age, size and all that stuff. we have several desk tops and servers. Jeffrey has been building his own computers since he was a child, and he has passed that on to our son who has also begun building his own gaming computer from scratch.
Laptops
we all have a laptop to ourselves. this is an area where our tech is hacked…. we were lucky enough to have older laptops that got passed down from our business. we did NOT go out and purchase our kids apple laptops. hacked.
everyone having their own laptops really helps to cut down on program problems, viruses and issues with time. everyone wants their own stuff, their own systems and their own apps. I don’t want my system to have their apps on it and vice versa. each child does so much school work on a computer that it was becoming a problem for us as they got older to have them sharing one or using one of the parental laptops. they are varying in age, size and capabilities. but we each have one.
Gaming
we have been gamers since we were children, as such our children are too. we are mostly playstation, but still retain an older xbox 360 unit and some wii items. because of the evolution of games and gaming we still hold on to some older playstation units as they older versions of games can only be played on older platforms.
there is also quite a bit of desktop gaming in the way of Sims, and flight simulators and such.
Cameras
photography is a mainstay in our household. it is very important.
we use a dSLR Nikon camera with multiple different lenses. this is our 3rd big dSLR and we’ve had this one the longest without upgrading it. we go in fits and spurts of how often we use it.
we also use a FujiFilm x100s that is amazing and fun to play with.
we also have a GoPro Hero 4 that we have only recently purchased (halle’s birthday) and its amazing.
Instax cameras, and a few smaller digital cameras finish out this category.
it shouldn’t go without saying that we use the cameras in our iPhones for 75% of our daily photography. our life captures are here. on a few vacations we’ve taken in the last couple of years we’ve elected not to take our bigger cameras and only go on our iPhones. It was fun and easier to manage. It was a different kind of experience that I will touch on in a post some day.
we store all of our photos on a large external drive and library. we can access it anytime through our home network and all of our AppleTvs.
a word about Apple. we have been working with Apple computers since we were in High School. our first big purchase while in college was a Mac. we have worked with a lot of other computers in our time as Online business owners and Jeffrey being an IT guy. but when it comes to what we want to use in our own home, we go to Apple. We are Mac Evangelists. we have all of our parents (and anyone who comes to us) all set up on Apple products. iPads for the grandparents, iPhones for everyone, MacBooks for my mother.... It is what it is. we love the ease and style of their technology and we will forever be fans.
this is how we tech. and tech is important to us.
we just do things differently from other people. we’ve hacked our way into a modern technical household. and we love it.
