We purchased an Apple TV sometime back as a decent way to control and stream my media library. The HP Media Smart Server is used to store and serve the music/video throughout the house, I will say both the Apple TV and the Media server have issues. The server comes with a iTunes server built in but doesn't seem to list all of the music library, so I hacked in and loaded iTunes on the server, it works okay besides it seems as though the server reboots about every two weeks or so and I have to log back in and get itunes running again.

Currently I am in process of setting up a home theater in the lower level of my house; well in the planning stages anyway. I have an idea about using multiple airport express units to be able to have music on the deck, by the hot tub and where ever I want, I currently use an AppleTV in my main room, I will have multiple itunes clients running so I can select different music for different zones; I used to own an Express but sold it, it has issues that it may play for 1 minute or an hour, but hooked up wireless you can count on it stopping at one point or another...

Just a quick post to give a little tip of another mac site that has some good tips and tricks for using your mac.

http://macs.about.com/

I read an article on http://gizmodo.com about someone uncrating a new Microsoft Surface Table, I had written about this on www.geekjoust.com about a year ago, so now I see it coming to life, but reading some of the comments makes me sick, why is it that Apple FanBoys have to compair this to a giant iPone, the iPhone is a touch screen, it only knows something is touching the screen and where, the Microsoft Surface uses a whole different technology so it can see what is touching the table, I'm not saying its better or worse technology but it is totally different and way more capable than a simpl

Well you regular visitors may notice a new banner ad at the top from our new sponsor, Gray Kangaroo Liquor Filter, Its one of the most useful products I have seen for turning cheap Vodka into great Vodka, A few years ago I tested and messed with running Vodka through a Britta water filter, the idea is to run the cheap stuff through the filter and take the bad flavor and smell away.

I recently Stumbled onto Stickam, a very slick free online streaming video service, it allows anyone to stream high quality video to as many people as you like without hogging all your bandwidth.

Using WiFi to check your email has a simple little security problem, most of the time your user name and password are transmitted in plain text, pretty simple for someone to grab your info, at home more and more people are using some kind of security (WEP or WPA) but when you hit the local coffee shop its as open as can be, so one way that can be used on gmail is to use HTTPS instead of plain HTTP, so now your user name and password are encrypted along with all of your emails at this point.

Amazon.com has opened a new DRM free MP3 download service to compete with Apples iTunes Music Store. I have only purchased a few songs from iTunes first because of the DRM on them and it ties it to only a couple devices, I use many computers in a day so being able to use the music lots of places is a must, I also use Tivo Destop to serve my music but it only handles MP3 format, not AAC, as a matter of fact I'm not a fan of the AAC format for this reason.

I watch the videocasts on Tivo like CrankyGeeks and CNet, but there are a few like Diggnation and CommandN that I have wanted to watch on my bigscreen TV not my laptop, so converting the downloaded video to the correct format has always been a pain until I was introduced to VisualHub ( http://www.techspansion.com/visualhub/ ) it pretty much takes any format video and converts it to any format, there are profiles for everything from VCD to a special one for Tivo.