Day: July 21, 2004

Geek Heaven!!!

Posted on by Nimgimli

Oh man, am I ever in heaven! I just installed my Airport Express wireless station. Now, I’ve been using a wireless network at home for years…couldn’t live without one.

But this..this is special! The unit is about the size of the ‘power block’ for Mac laptops. It has 3 ports on it. One for an ethernet cable (from your wired network, cable modem or whatever), a USB port to support wireless connectivity to a USB printer, and an audio out.

Audio? Oh yeah! With software they’re calling AirTunes, I hooked the Airport Express up to my home theater unit (using a mini-jack < -> toslink cable…you can use basic RCA jacks too). Now I’m sitting on the couch across the room, playing iTunes on my iBook, but directing the output through my home theater system.

It ROCKS! No more digging out the CD I want to hear, putting away whatever is in the player, and all that mucking about. Instead just fire up iTunes, find the song(s) I want to play and off we go!!

Setup was easy to the point of triviality. Everything worked like a dream. I’m stoked!

Blockbuster vows to go after Netflix

Posted on by Nimgimli

CNN.com – Blockbuster vows to go after Netflix

This should be a good thing. Competition can only help the consumer.

I used to despise Netflix with every fiber of my being due to their aggressive and intrusive online ads. Then I stopped using IE and started blocking pop-ups and gradually my hatred faded enough to give the service a try.

And now I’m a huge fan. One thing that Netflix offers that Blockbuster doesn’t, at least in their brick & mortar stores, is a huge selection of non-mainstream DVDs: anime, foreign films, tv series on DVD (though I suppose the latter is fairly mainstream these days).

Blockbuster has its work cut out for them, but another intriguing factor is the idea of renting games and DVD’s from the same source. If I could get the same quality of service that I get from Netflix and Gamefly via one account with Blockbuster, I might be convinced to switch.