Before my first Mac, I was considering Sonus as a way to stream music throughout the house and onto the deck. The cost to stream music to 3 locations (at the time…haven’t checked lately) was about $3,000. Instead, I installed an Airport Express in each location where I wanted music and streamed my iTunes to each device…problem solved. It streams in a synchronized stream so there is no weird effect as you walk from keeping room to the back deck. Total cost - don’t care, as the ease of use was worth it. But I think each Airport Express was around $179, so I’m way ahead of Sonos.

I started the system using a Linksys WRT54G like 90% of the world. I’ve since retired the Linksys and substituted an Apple Time Capsule with a 500 gig hard drive to get 802.11n wireless speeds and for Time Machine backups. It works well, and I’m actually (mis?)using it as a file server. AS it turned out, I’m not crazy about using Apple’s Time Machine backup program to back up every durn thang I do as I use my brain instead to figure out what to back up. I also like my backups to be off-site, so I ended up with a spare 1/2 terabyte in the Apple Time Capsule to use to store files.

We currently have music streamed to living room, back porch (sorry, neighbors, and yes, I realize music carries over water), master bedroom, master bathroom, and upstairs to the Apple TV. To stream music from iTunes, I just choose from the menu:

Next in the series….what music do we stream? Hint-XM radio on the web, iTunes (with special playlists), Pandora….more to come…

Keep tabs on things….

I doubt there are any college students whatsoever reading this, but in case some parents of college students are, here’s a good deal for Windows users.

This is a closed circuit post to Mac users only…

I noticed on Saturday morning that my Macbook Pro was unusually slow. I ran Activity Monitor to see what was running. A process called “find” was running and the parent was listed as “SH”. That’s pretty close to SSH, the program you use to open a terminal session on a different computer. No one should be SSHed into my computer, so I got a little bit worried.

I googled it and found the answer here. It was only Spotlight updating its index of files. As proof, I opened Console and saw the following under /var/log:

The timestamp was around the time I noticed the slowdown. Mystery solved.

(okay, all my posts can’t be gems.)

I bought some replacement speakers for my Mac at home just because I wanted some extra room. The old speakers I had from the early 90’s had a sub-woofer that took up a whole cabinet in my teeny tiny office. I bought a pair of M-Audio Studiophile AV 40 speakers from Amazon that do not have a sub-woofer based on a recommendation from Scott Bourne on Macbreak Weekly. They sound absolutely fantastic. I turn off my Bose now and listen to the M-Audio speakers if I’m the only one listening to tunes.

If you use Remember the Milk (and if you don’t why don’t you???), you may get really tired of that cow logo. I personally don’t think it looks very professional.

To eliminate the logo in Safari and Omniweb, you can use a custom style sheet with a style to override the site’s style sheet. The cow logo is a background image in a div called appheaderlogo. Create a plain text file and add this line to it:

#appheaderlogo{background:white !important ;}

and save it. I call mine “rtm.css”. Then

• go to Preferences in Safari or Omniweb
• choose Advanced in Safari or Appearances in Omniweb
• choose the file you created
• view RTM. If you still see the logo, empty your cache.

You should now have a blank space in place of the cow. The area where the logo was is still a clickable link that takes you to the home page.

I should not have waited so long to get one, but I hate AT&T so much. I have no idea how it will turn out, but the first week has been fantastic.