Bradley C

One of the significant changes in my life over the past few months was building a distance learning solution for my school as we dealt with the effects of COVID–19. One of our critical applications during this process was Zoom for Mac. In using it, even for just screen recording, I realized that Apple could learn a lot about how to evolve QuickTime in the future to better address distance learning.
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One of the tasks in education the iPad enables over a Chromebook is Augmented Reality, and right now is the time for AR apps to shine. With students forced home for the final stretch of the school year, class trips, field trips, and other immersive experiences have been canceled. Education is more than just pencil and paper, but when students can’t leave the house, augmented reality comes to the rescue. ARKit2 is supported by iPhone 6s and later, all iPad Pro models, iPad 5th generation, or newer.
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One of the areas of my HomeKit lighting setup that I ignored for a long time was outdoors. We honestly didn’t have a real need until recently when we got a new puppy. If you’ve ever had a puppy, you know that a lot of time is spent outdoors trying to train the dog to use the bathroom outside. It became clear that we didn’t have enough outdoor lightning when we were taking her out late at night and early in the morning. Like any smart home fanatic would do, I looked at solving this problem without the use of a costly electrician and add HomeKit support in the process. This week, I am going to explain my outdoor HomeKit lighting setup.
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I’ve been a customer of 1Password for as long as I can remember. I love being able to have a dedicated application/service for password management, rotating one-time passwords, storing secure information like social security numbers. I know I have a dedicated place to manage all my data in a place I know is safe and easy to access. On the other hand, iCloud Keychain works well and is built-in on all my devices. Is it time for Apple to release a dedicated app for iCloud Keychain, so it’s easier to manage and interact with that data?

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During the past few weeks, we’ve been looking at overhauling a K–12 network, and all that goes into that. While we’ve not covered everything, we have included some essential items like a firewall and Wi-Fi. This week, we will move on to discussing device selection. A lot of your software decisions will be based on your device, so it’s essential to pick the right one. Let’s dive into K-12 device selection.
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As much as I have been investing in my HomeKit setup over the past few years, HomeKit security cameras are something I hadn’t been able to pull the trigger on. My hesitation is that I didn’t want to be tied to paying monthly fees for each camera, nor did I want a solution that required a cloud service that wasn’t end-to-end encrypted. For my HomeKit cameras, I ended up using the eufyCam 2 thanks to it the option of local recording to a base station, no monthly fees, HomeKit integration, battery-powered and the possibility of using HomeKit Secure Video. Let’s dig into my eufyCam 2 review.
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In this episode of the Apple @ Work podcast, Bradley is joined by Mark Rand of Diamond Assets to discuss how customers can handle reselling and trading in old Apple computers and iPads after their leases are up.

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Building a new network for a K–12 school shares a lot of similarities with building one for enterprise, but when it comes to Wi-Fi, there are likely going to be some differences to consider. K–12 schools have different security needs, content filtering needs per SSID and capacity needs thanks to 1:1 iPad deployments. This week, as we continue our K–12 network overhaul series, I am going to look at Wi-Fi. For K–12 schools, the vast majority of users on the network will be Wi-Fi only. Regardless if a school uses iPad, Chromebooks, or Microsoft Surface, classrooms are rarely going to have more than one or two ethernet jacks. How do you build reliable school Wi-Fi?
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As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’ve been a Nest customer for the past seven years. I put it a second-generation Nest when I built my house back in 2013, and I added a second Nest a few years later for our upstairs unit. I’ve been using the Starling Home Hub for the past six weeks to enable HomeKit support on these products, but I recently swapped out my downstairs Nest with the ecobee SmartThermostat. After a few weeks of using it, I am ready to compare them and decide which unit has the best HomeKit integration. ecobee vs. Nest: what’s the best smart thermostat?
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Edison Mail has just announced a new venture for their company. Currently, they make an email app for iOS and macOS. This summer, they are branching out into something that you don’t see from most email application developers: an actual email service. Email services are something that most app developers don’t attempt because Google, Microsoft, and Apple all offer free services that work very well. But Edison thinks they can offer something unique through their new OnMail service.
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I have been using a Kindle for many years now. Most recently, I was using a Kindle Oasis as my primary book reader. As I was looking at some upcoming books a few weeks back, I realized that I was not too fond of the purchasing process on iOS for Kindle. I started thinking about if the Kindle (and the Kindle apps) were still the best place for me to purchase books. Apple Books vs Kindle: what’s the best way to read books and listen to audiobooks?
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Although there are a lot of similarities in K–12 and enterprise networks, K–12 networks will have some requirements that must be considered when overhauling a network. Over the next few weeks, I am going to discuss all the various pieces of building a K–12 network. We will look at firewalls, switches, Wi-Fi, device management, and device selection. This week, I am going to look at picking the best firewall.
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