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Why I Love the Mac (a series) – Streaming Music

bruce — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 00:08:02 +0000

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…

User Nobody – Parent SH

bruce — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 00:28:26 +0000

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.)

Quick RTM tip

bruce — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 21:08:19 +0000

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.

Pandora.com on Mac OS X 10.4.6

bruce — Mon, 15 May 2006 23:12:52 +0000

Okay, maybe this will get picked up on Google and help someone else. I was trying pandora.com after reading about it in PC magazine. It worked fine on PCs, but wouldn’t work on my Mac in any browser. Buried in the FAQ is this statement:

If you’re on a Mac, launching Garage Band once can magically fix Flash audio problems.

That did the trick for me. I think I’ll like this service…