Apple Inc.: August 2004 Archives

Finally! After having a fairly lousy time at work, I managed to complete "the trifecta" after I left. First I swung by the comic shop, and picked up "Astonishing X-Men #3" (I'll try and review it once I've had time to read it). Then I swung by Fry's, where I was astonished (no pun intended) to see that they actually had Apple's Airport Express in stock!

So, since I have been wanting one of these, for like ever, I immediately snapped one up. Being able to hold one of these little marvels in my hand really made my day. The level of design and engineering that Apple put into this thing is incredible. And what's even more incredible, I can't think of another company that can even compete with Apple in this space. I just saw a competing product on Gizmodo, from SMC. Not only is the thing ugly, but I'll bet that it's nowhere near as simple to setup. The hardest part of setting up my Airport Express was hooking up the audio cable (because I had to get in behind my receiver -- ug). But once that was accomplished, I literally plugged the thing in, and it appeared in iTunes. I then told iTunes to output to the Airport Express, and hit "play" -- iTunes continued playing the song that I had been listening to with my headphones the night before, only this time, it was coming out of my stereo.

Granted, I do have some more configuration left to do (I want the Airport Express to be client to my pre-existing wireless network, which from what I have read, should be possible).

I was also happy to find that the hybrid audio output jack is standard -- I was able to use a Toslink cable that I bought years ago for my MiniDisc player in order to get digital optical output from my Airport Express to my Yamaha receiver. Too cool.

But I didn't stop there. When I was in Portland last week, Chris and I were talking about Airport Express. He said that he'd be sold on it, if you could do a "double stream". Chris has all of his music on his PowerMac G5, which is upstairs in his office. His stereo, however, is downstairs in the living room. So, he wants to be able to run iTunes on his laptop, and have it stream music from his G5, and then route that out to Airport Express. Since I don't (yet) have a G5, I endeavored to get the Open Source "daapd" server working on my FreeBSD machine. After some hackery (I needed some newer versions of stuff in order to work with iTunes 4.6, and I had to deal with the usual compile/configuration/etc. problems), I managed to get a setup where my PowerBook could play mp3's that physically resided on my FreeBSD machine, via Apple's streaming DAAP protocol.

But then came time for the acid test -- could those same mp3's be heard on my stereo, via Airport Express?

Of course it works! This is Apple, after all! In fact, I didn't even try not playing the audio via Airport Express -- once I gained the ability to see all of the mp3s one redefine in my iTunes, I just hit play, and it worked.

So, there you go Chris, say good bye to another $130 of your hard-earned cash... :)

Thus far, I have only described two great things that I got today. What is the third thing? Well, some CDs that I ordered when I was in Portland showed up in the e-mail. Primary among them, the new EP entitled "H", from NJ-based "Philip's Head". This is the band that Mike and I hang out with whenever we go out east, because his cousin Ben is the drummer. The new disc is pretty good -- to quote Maynard, "I suggest you buy it".

-Andy.