January 2012

The garage door opener in my house works perfectly well. It’s a craftsman chain drive and it’s a bit noisy but every time I push the button on the remote in my car, the door slowly moves upward and I can pull my car into the driveway. No worries, right?
One evening I pulled onto my street, however, and my garage door was sitting open for all to see, with bicycles, tools and an unlocked interior door that offered easy access into my house. It’d been that way for over six hours. Not good. But how do you know if you remembered to close your garage door every single morning? It only takes one forgetful departure to lose hundreds or even thousands of dollars worth of household goods.
Enter the Sears Craftsman AssureLink communications system. It’s a three piece solution that lets Craftsman sell Internet-aware garage door openers that can not only be accessed via the Web to confirm the door is properly closed, but that have a handy iPhone (or Android) app that lets you control the door too. Fabulous.

I wouldn’t describe myself as a “gym rat”, but I do go to the gym fairly frequently, and my routine doesn’t vary much. Gym clothes on, sneakers tied, iPod Touch charged so I can continue listening to whatever audio book I’m in the middle of — the current one is the Steve Jobs biography — and my rather scroungy over-ear headphones so I can keep listening even as I move around and get into “the zone”.
Keeping track of my time and performance on the various machines, monitoring my heart rate, and – hopefully! – seeing progress isn’t something I’ve paid much attention to, so when the team at iHome offered to send me a pair of their new Fitness Evolved headphones (developed in cooperation with New Balance), I was intrigued. It’d track my performance and I’d even be able to graph things on my computer. Cool.