Almost a completely apple household

I've been having a few networking issues at home, partly due to my existing router getting on a bit and some new rules it randomly decided to implement to block most of my iTunes streaming and syncing traffic only over the Wireless Network. As a result I had some elaborate system to get ethernet to all of the devices that really needed to talk, ie the iMac iTunes Server and the AppleTV. This still meant that all of the iDevices were blocked out from being used as remotes etc.

This week I finally bit the bullet and got an Airport Extreme and a Time Capsule and put them into play. I have to say it was probably one of the easiest setups I've every had to implement (even for apple products). I picked up both the items from ebay and if the Time Capsule had come up first I probably wouldn't have bothered with the Airport Extreme but the solution is markedly better with both devices. Adding the Time Capsule wirelessly to the Airport Extreme extends the wireless network (genius) and acts as an ethernet bridge.

The only real problem is it now has me thinking about getting an Airport Express so I can Stream to the nicely wired Tivoli Setup.

Brain dump mid flight

It's a strange thing my blogging habits, the more and more I have on (like at the moment) the less and less time I have to blog. I'm actually using the time on my flight to Townsville this morning to blog.

There is one nice aspect of the flying at the moment, I do it so infrequently that it's turned in to a nice time for me to catch up on my huge backlog of iTunes downloads and frivolous stuff like blogging. It's now a bit of a guilty pleasure not only for the catch up time but also because I'm also leaving the littleone and Vanessa to fend for themselves.

First of all on iTunes, I'm loving the whole Genius concept. A while ago a setup a few favourites Smart Playlists so I could easily managed all my music using ratings and genres on the iPod/iPhone/AppleTV. The downside is that I've not got over 500 songs in my "top favourites" and this means that if I'm in the mood something it's always followed by something I'm really not interested in. I threw on a genius playlist the other day and it was pretty much spot on although I've discovered that it seems to "like" some songs more than others. But on the whole it's become the way I listen to the songs on the iPhone. I love the fact that you can save them and even refresh them.

The last few weeks have been pretty crazy, stressful and exciting. I'm sorry if I've been not much of a conversationalist while I've been musing about things and life in general. There were some pretty big decisions to come to in the end which was pretty tough, especially over the weekend. In the end I've taken a bit of a risk but I'm pretty confident that it's the right move and will pay off in the end. I think I might make a few people unhappy in the process but I'm hoping that they understand that's not my intention. Well that's probably enough soul searching for one post.

I've been slowly but surely doing a few upgrades to my arcade table. Nothing major but the CRT that was in it was starting to go in the corners and I was also looking for a way to solve the side by side game problem with the cocktail style cabinet. In the end it was a disaster of viewing angles that generated the solution. I had a couple of 19" LCDs around that I wasn't using any longer (with my nice new shiny 24" in the house) and I put one in to replace the 19" CRT. The issue was it was unusable at the flat angle of the table top. To solve the problem I managed to slot the monitor in the table at the right viewing angle for player 1 but it completely obscured from player 2. Then it dawned on me I could dual mount the monitors one for each player. Result : Instant dual screen cabinet that still looks like and is every bit a cocktail cabinet but Aliens Vs Predator multiplayer is a reality. It's almost complete I've just got to source the VGA splitter to run the dual monitors and it's done. The Littleone already loves the cabinet and this way I'll be able to train him up as a wing man for double dragon.

and here's the descent... Well that's the end of this blog.... until the flight home.