Tell Siri, “I’m being pulled over.” This can be useful if you are pulled over by the police for ANY reason. You should open the link on your iPhone, then click on the link to the Shortcut. Once you see the Shortcut, scroll to the bottom. (You might have to go into Settings—>Shortcuts—>Allow Untrusted Shortcuts (simply means the Shortcut was not developed by Apple) Once you start the process of installing the Shortcut, you can specify someone you trust to receive the video created. Shortcuts are really fabulous automations. Thank you Apple!
When I purchased my house in 2000, I had it wired for Ethernet. This was long before WiFi became as commonplace as it is today. Because of the structure of the house, the one room the installer wasn’t able to drop a lead to was the living room. This has constantly proven to be the inconvenience I thought it would be. I did an end-run by running a long Ethernet cable from one of the rooms to the living room. It’s a very long cable and only goes to one area there.
A few years ago, I purchased a TiVo Bolt on Amazon. This was after cutting the cord and installing a rooftop antenna. I wanted to be able to DVR TV shows during the regular season since often there are two or more shows in the same time period. Originally, I used a Powerline solution to connect the Bolt to my home network. Worked OK for a while but then it started buffering a lot. Replaced the Powerline with WiFi which worked fine until I added a TiVo Mini to one of the bedrooms. The Bolt worked fine, but frequently the Mini would lose its connection back to the Bolt. And, the Mini was hard-wired via Ethernet.
I thought if I could link the two via Multimedia for Coax Alliance (MoCA) the connection might be more stable. MoCA uses the internal coax wiring to extend the network. Similar to Powerline using the internal electrical wiring to extend a network. Bought a MoCA adapter and set it up at my router. The MoCA light on the device never came on. Returned it to Amazon and bought a TiVo Bridge instead. Same problem. No MoCA connection from where the coax comes into the house. Yes, I used a Point of Entry (POE) filter. It was just a no-go.
In the last week, I thought I’d try again to get MoCA working since the Mini was frequently losing its connection to the Bolt. Still a no-go after a few hours trying. Finally, thought, what if I used a better Powerline adapter to get Ethernet to the Bolt and then used the Bolt’s built-in ability to create a MoCA network. Son-of-a-gun! That worked! The Bolt was now doing Ethernet+MoCA! Now, it was a case of getting the Mini on MoCA as well. Disconnected the Ethernet cable from the Mini and connected the coax cable instead. Went into the settings, changed Network from Ethernet to MoCA. Here’s where the ‘fun’ started.
While the Bolt acted as a bridge, letting the router do all the DHCP, the Mini in fact DID get an IP address from the router. But, when I tried to bring up the Mini’s TiVo guide, I got an error that the Mini could not see the Bolt. Son-of-a-gun. What the heck?
Finally, broke down and called TiVo support.
And, here’s what finally brought it all together: I reset the Mini to factory settings. I disconnected the Bolt from power as well as disconnecting the Mini from power. Then, I rebooted the router. After the router came back up, I reconnected the Bolt to power. When it came up, I turned the MoCA on the Bolt off. Then turned it back on. When asked about the MoCA channel, I accepted the default of channel 15. Then, connected the Bolt to the TiVo service. Twice. After all looked good on the Bolt, again, I plugged the Mini back in. Ran through the guided setup. When it got to the MoCA setup, on the Mini, I again accepted channel 15 as the default. Now, the Mini finally was not only on the MoCA network, but it could also see the Bolt!!
I wasted many hours trying to create the MoCA network with external devices. My thought was splitters installed with the outside antenna were causing a problem. Turns out, they weren’t. I just had made a simple solution, letting the Bolt do the work, much more complex than it needed to be. Now, I can only hope the Mini and the Bolt play well together using MoCA. Time will tell.
Hopefully, this will shorten any time you need to spend troubleshooting.
You can find other tips by going to the blog homepage. You can find iHelp’s main offerings, here.
Use Amazon Alexa to control your MyQ garage door opener for free!
**As of 8/23/2021, SimpleCommands has fixed their link to MyQ. This procedure is now the one to use, with some modification**
Have you been looking for a way to use Alexa to control your MyQ garage door? I bet all you’re finding is to pay an annual subscription fee to Chamberlain. Granted, it’s only $10 per year to subscribe, but it is pretty selfish of Chamberlain since they had an Alexa skill, but chose to remove it in order to charge a fee. I looked too, and was about to pay Chamberlain their $10 until I found another good and free solution. And, this solution will work for both iPhone or Android devices.
This is a pretty simple, straight forward solution. First, you’ll need the SimpleCommands app. Links to the apps are here. Once you’ve installed the app, use this page for step by step instructions on how to setup the routine.
**Changes to what the above link tells you to do.**
In Step 5, instead of telling Alexa to discover devices, go to the Devices tab at the bottom of the iOS app (hopefully it’s in the same place on Android), then, scroll left at the top until you find Scenes. Next page, click on “Discover Scenes.” Alexa should now find the Scenes (Routines) you created in SimpleCommands. Once the Scenes are found and added, go to the More tab, bottom right on iOS, click Routines in the page that comes up. Call the routine whatever makes sense to you. For the When, you can do a voice trigger or a location trigger. I prefer the latter. For the Add Action, have Alexa control a scene and add one of the scenes (Open/Close) from the newly discovered Scenes. If you’re using a location (geo) arrive trigger, when your device gets within the radius of the location, it will trigger the routine and your garage SHOULD open. You can also add an additional action such as having Alexa give you a Welcome Home greeting.
That’s all there is to it. Now, when I’m at the end of my alley, since I just installed the Echo Auto which gives me Alexa in my car, I just say, “Alexa, start Open Garage.” Voila! By the time I get to the house, the garage door is open. SimpleCommands can be used for much, much more. Just explore their knowledge base for other routines you can have work with Alexa or just the app itself.
June 17, 2020 Addendum:
After noticing twice Alexa heard the command, but failed to open the garage, I began a troubleshooting session. When I used the shortcut, from the comments, ‘Alexa, open garage’ she would answer OK but the garage remained closed. Going back to the original command, ‘Alexa, start open garage’ she would indicate there was a problem. Going into SimpleCommands, I found an error of the garage opener offline. Yet, when I looked in my WiFi app, I could see the MyQ was connected to my network. In fact, using the MyQ app on my iPhone worked as expected. I had reset my network a couple of days before in order to get a TiVo Mini working via MoCA. Even though it appeared everything should be working, SimpleCommands was still showing the Open Garage as offline.
I proceeded to delete the association with SimpleCommands and start anew as outlined above. I went into the ‘Add a Connnection’ portion of SimpleCommands and added the myQ connection. When I attempted to link myQ with SimpleCommands it would fail. Multiple times. Testing logins with the same credentials at myliftmaster.com would succeed. After many attempts, instead of using the myQ connection I used the Generic Garage Opener connnector instead in SimpleCommands. Success! This must have something to do with not having the ‘paid’ subscription to Chamberlain for myQ. Once I was able to link SimpleCommands with the Generic Garage Opener (which by the way still shows myQ) everything worked again.
Some things to take note of: it was necessary to recreate the Open & Close routines in SimpleCommands since I deleted everything. Then, I had to use the Alexa app to re-establish the Scenes connections. Finally, when abbreviating the command in Alexa from ‘Start open…’ or ‘Start close….’ to just ‘Open….’ or ‘Close…’ it was necessary to relink those as outlined below in the comments.
July 3, 2020 Addendum
Why involve Alexa at all for opening? If you setup the SimpleCommands routines, you can set a location trigger for when you come home. This uses what’s called geofencing to locate your phone and if you have been gone, as you come home the garage will automatically trigger and open. I’ve used this everyday since I walk outside. Works a charm! (You can setup a location trigger to close your garage, but I like to see that happen as I leave, so I don’t use it.)
Hopefully, this will shorten any time you need to spend troubleshooting.
July 29, 2021 Addendum
As of about July 15, 2021, the API link between SimpleCommands and MyQ has been broken. While SimpleCommands has been working to fix this, as of the date of this addendum it remains in disrepair. I have discovered two other methods of linking Alexa with MyQ.
The first is to build a custom Alexa skill as outlined in another blog post here. Building the skill is much easier than you might think. If you have a hard time with technology, it might take an hour. If you can follow directions and technology is easier, maybe half that, give or take. It works.
The second method involves using SmartThings. If you’re already using SmartThings for your Samsung TV or other home automation then this might be a good fit. You can find the instructions here. This one was not so easy for me. It took a couple of hours. I may rewrite the instructions if enough persons comment here about it.
Both of these other methods do allow you to control a MyQ garage opener without interaction through geofencing. Simply, you get to or from a location and that becomes a trigger to open or close the door.
You can find other tips by going to the blog homepage. You can find iHelp’s main offerings, here.
A client wanted to have all photos on iMac, iPhone & iPad. Easy peasy, right? Not so much.
Of course, the first thing that needs to happen is all devices must be signed into iCloud using the same Apple ID. Once that was confirmed, we turned on iCloud Photo Library on the iPad & iPhone. Then let it sit for a while. Checking both iOS devices and logging into iCloud from the Mac showed the same number of photos in all three places.
Next, opened System Preferences on the iMac and again confirmed it was using the same Apple ID and confirmed the iCloud System Preference was set for iCloud Photo Library (see image, below).
iCloud Photo Library turned on in iCloud System Preference
So far, so good. Opened the Photos app on the iMac to insure iCloud Photo Library was turned on there, as well. (Open Photos. From the Photos menu, choose Preferences, then the iCloud tab. Insure iCloud Photo Library is checked.)
iCloud Photo Library turned on in the Photos app.
At this point you should see a progress bar and as you follow along, Photos should begin adding & uploading photos to iCloud Photo Library. And, there’s the rub. Photos would get to the point where it appeared to be adding photos to iCloud Photo Library but nothing would happen. The counts for photos on iCloud & the iOS devices remains the same and nothing happens. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.
I followed the link to “Repairing the Photos library” (above), then quit the Photos app and launched it again holding both the Command & Option keys while clicking the Photos icon in the Dock. What shows next is this:
Repair Library shown after starting Photos with CMD-OPT keys held down
Clicking the Repair button, good things happen as the Photos Library is repaired. Time to do so will of course depend on the number of photos in the Library. (We only had about 3,200 so it was pretty quick.)
After the repair, we had to go back into Photos preferences and re-check the box to connect to iCloud Photo Library. Once we did that, the magic happened and Photos on the iMac were added to iCloud Photo Library and the iPhone & iPad received all the photos which had only been on the iMac. YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary).
You can find other tips by going to the blog homepage. You can find iHelp’s main offerings, here.
I’ve been using iMazing for awhile, and meant to do a write up but MacWorld beat me to it.
This is highly recommended, especially if you are dealing with multiple devices and either want to retrieve info from any of them or, and this is big, you are backing up multiple devices and want to move those off your internal drive where they can take up HUGE amounts of space. Additionally, for persons wanting to drag & drop photos from your computer directly to your iDevice (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch), now you can.
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