iCastle
May 29, 2007 Posted by Al Castle
add a comment Categories: Castle, OSX, Puter Stuff
Last week I purchased a couple new toys for myself, the relatively new AppleTV and the latest version of the Airport Extreme. The AppleTV uses the same standard remote that comes with the Macbook Pros, thankfully as I lost my remote within seconds of opening the box.
Setup was easy for the most part, the unit auto detected my wireless network and asked to join. I had to enter in my WPA password for the AppleTV to authenticate to my wireless network, my password is more than 25 alphanumeric characters long, and required that it be entered via that little remote. I was sweating while attempting to find each character on the onscreen keyboard, for fear of having to enter it all again from scratch. It was only after I had finished setup and began syncing my iTunes to the unit did I realize that I could have just plugged in the Ethernet connection and skipped the wifi. While waiting for the gigs upon gigs of music, tv shows and movies to sync, I went and purchased an HDMI connector to handle audio and video which allowed me to connect the unit into the back of the 32″ flat screen (I won at last years Xmas party) via a single cable. (The number of cables connected to this TV is impressive as well as hideous.)
I already owned the older cone shaped Airport Extremes, (a Xmas present to myself last year) so I moved that one
downstairs into my new bedroom. This new Airport was setup as my primary on the third floor office with the one in my bedroom daisy chained to it for expanded network coverage.
The new software for managing the Airports is pretty slick, including some parental controls, as well as the ability to setup and access disks on the wireless network. In my case 
I can plug my Epson color printer into the back of the Airport for wireless printing, as well as my half terabyte MyBook which contains more iTunes content to stream to the AppleTV. Muy schweet.
A little over a year ago I was not an Apple/Mac enthusiast at all, now if you come over there’s less Linux and Windows in the house then before.
