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…

around the house, mac mac

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.)

mac, techology mac