Monthly Archives: July 2004

Airport Express – One of the coolest things I have ever used

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As I write this I hear the sweet sounds of Tom Jones coming through our main stereo system in our Family Room. I am across the room writing this on a wireless 15″ PowerBook, which also happens to be the source of the Tom Jones I am speaking of.

So what’s going on here? Simple. I picked up Apple’s new Airport Express 802.11g device and plugged it in to the power outlet, ran a cable from the Airport Express to the stereo, turned it on, loaded the Airport Express Setup software and told it to join my existing Cisco wireless network. Thanks to the update of iTunes to 4.6 (free) I now can tell the sound from iTunes to either play through the computer speakers or output to any Airport Express it can see. So I told it to play in the Family Room, the name I gave my Airport Express, and away it went. Extremely easy. Took about 10 minutes total and most of that was spent trying to get behind the entertainment center to plug in the cables.

This thing is also an 802.11g wireless access point as well. Just plug your DSL or Cable Modem in to it and off you go. It’s pretty small too. A little bigger than a deck of playing cards. You can also plug in a USB printer and share it from any other computer on your network; Apple or Windows.

You can check it out here. Oh, and it works perfect for any of you Windows users out there too!

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Various Movies / Music

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Over the last 2 weeks we went and saw a bunch of movies and I bought a bunch of music from iTunes.

In order of how we saw them:

Anchorman – what the heck happened here? Val and I both love Will Ferrell. We think they guy is hilarious. We were both bored to tears during this movie. We both gave it a 4 out of 10.

Spiderman 2 – Excellent. Probably better than the first one in my opinion. We both agreed this one gets an 8 out of 10.

The Stepford Wives – Just OK. 6 out of 10 from both of us.

Garfield – Yawn. I gave it a 2 out of 10, but only because I at least got to look at Jennifer Love Hewitt for a while. Val gave it a 3 out of 10. The kids said they liked it though, but they weren’t laughing like they were when they saw Shrek2.

Heart has a new CD. Jupiter’s Darling. Just downloaded it last night from iTunes and so far I like it. It sounds just like you would expect Heart to sound. If you’re expecting more you may not find what you are looking for here, but if you are looking for a good CD with that classic Heart sound, this is it. I’m listening to it as I write this.

So that’s pretty much it. I’ve been enjoying the every Friday off in the Summer vacation schedule I took. So far, there have now been 2 full Fridays where I didn’t get a call from work. Pretty cool. 2 out of 8 is better than 0 out of 8. We went to the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum yesterday. Lots of construction going on there to triple the size of the place. It’ll be pretty nice in November when they reopen under the new floor plan. The kids had a blast.

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Firefox – the best web browser you’re probably not using (but you should be)

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Here’s an update to this post that I made back in July. Today Mozilla.org released their version 1.0 of Firefox. Everything up to this point has been beta testing. So get out there and download yourself a copy of Firefox and start to regain control over popups, adware, and spyware. Gain some performance while you’re at it. It was good advice in July and it still sticks today. http://www.mozilla.org

Here’s the text of that earlier posting.

So here we go again. More Internet Explorer vulnerabilities and another round of running Windows Update. Get there now and update your software if you haven’t done it already. When Cert says there’s something to worry about – believe them.

Or, for a better solution, load FireFox. Don’t worry, the world won’t end. I have been running FireFox on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux for quite a while now and have never looked back. I still do my online banking, etc. Plus, why not discover some of the features that Internet Explorer has been lacking for years now:**

Tabbed Browsing – you’ll wonder how you ever lived without this. Popup Blocking – do I really need to explain how nice this one is? Ad Blocking – via a ton of free Extensions.

It’s based off the Mozilla browser, which some of you may remember as the open source side of Netscape. So do yourself a huge favor in terms of features, security, and speed (did I mention it has been faster for me than Internet Explorer?) and go get the latest version of FireFox by clicking here. You can thank me in the Comments section.

Hey – did I mention it’s free?!

** – Yes, I am aware that with WindowsXP Service Pack 2, due some time this year, that Microsoft will finally have tabbed browsing and popup blocking, but I ask you – why wait? Hasn’t it been long enough? Plus, what if you don’t run WindowsXP?

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