Helping Graham

I read Graham Barlows's article in Issue 270 about forgetting his Apple TV remote. We have all done that, so here's a quick tip for Graham! Instead of connecting to your parents’ Wi-Fi, set up a personal hotspot on your iPhone, giving it the same SSID and password as your own home Wi-Fi network. The Apple TV then connects directly to the phone having been fooled into believing it's still at home. This allows you to use the remote to either stream directly from the phone or to reconfigure the Apple TV for your parents’ Wi-Fi.

I learned a lot of lessons here prior to taking Apple TV with me to a hotel in Edinburgh, where I used it to stream a movie from my phone to propose to my stunned girlfriend. Fortunately, she wasn't too stunned and she said “yes”, and is now my wife! Good old Apple… Scott Chambers Christopher Phin says: That is a good tip – it always weirds me out a bit that it’s just the SSID – a string of characters, also known as the name of your network – that devices use to connect, rather than the MAC address of the router, or BSSID or some other combination of parameters. Remember too that with current-gen devices, you can just tap your iPhone to the Apple TV to have the Wi-Fi login details transferred.

Happy to hear the proposal went to plan. I’ve done a few talks and lectures and I always get stressed about getting my tech set-up working, but that’s quite another order of stress altogether!