January, 2009

AppleCare proves to be well worth the money!

Posted by Evan at 10:00 am

About 2 weeks ago to my horror I heard a horrible clicking noise coming from my 17″ MacBook Pro even though it was sitting next to my chair closed and was supposed to be sleeping. I heard the fan kick on and heard the clicking noise, picked it up and the screen was black and wouldn’t come on. I held down the power button to force shut it down, waited a second and started it back up. It wouldn’t boot… from anything… CD, hard drive and none of the standard startup key combinations would do anything. I had one of two things a dead hard drive or a dead logic board I thought.

I called up AppleCare and after they walked me through many of the steps I had just tried again for good measure they made me an appointment at my local Apple Store so they could have a look and, if need be, send it in for repairs. I show up at the store a couple of days later, give them my laptop so they can have a look and eventually the guy tells me that he’s going to order a new hard drive and logic board for me and send it in for repairs and that I should have it back within a week. Much to my surprise I find out that I wont have to drive an hour back to Indianapolis to pick it up either because they now ship repaired products directly back to the customer!

Six days later the FedEx guy shows up and I have a very carefully packaged 17″ MacBook Pro that has been cleaned very thoroughly and more importantly works like a brand new computer. The best part about all of this is the fact that were it not for AppleCare these repairs would have costed me nearly $1300 for parts alone!!! With AppleCare it was completely covered.

Using your iPhone as a remote control for iTunes

Posted by Evan at 3:58 pm

I’ve been working on setting up a work bench and trying to get things organized in the garage. I got a Blu-Ray player for Christmas and our small all-in-one home theater setup was no longer being used, so I decided to put it to use out in the garage, thinking it would be a great system that could probably produce enough volume to be heard over most of my power tools. I got it setup, ran all of the speaker wires and got things looking as organized as possible, speakers mounted to the walls and all and now there was the question of getting my music to the receiver so I could listen to it. This is where things got interesting.

Extending the network reach

We’ve got a large wireless network setup at the house currently but the signal wasn’t quite strong enough to reach to the back end of the garage, so I took one of the Airport Expresses I had lying around and plugged it in out by the receiver and a 2nd Airport Express towards the front of the garage to bridge the gap between my router and the one hooked up near the receiver. I set the “bridge” AE to extend my existing wireless network and the receiver’s AE to join my existing network and enabled AirTunes. I had a nice strong signal so I used an 1/8″ stereo to stereo RCA cable it hooked it from the receiver’s AE to the AUX input on the back of the receiver and was able to setup iTunes to play my music from my MacPro through my receiver in the garage, which was cool enough but I wanted a way to be able to change songs from the garage without going inside to interact with iTunes, and then it hit me.

The iTunes Remote Control

If you’re fortunate enough to have an iPhone you have access to one of the most amazing apps created for the device. It’s called Remote and it’s probably the best example of a sleeper app I’ve ever seen. I had downloaded it (it’s free) from the App Store but never really had a use for it until now. With Remote you’re able to connect to your iTunes library (as well as your Apple TV) and control the playback of songs. What’s amazing is that is also gives you a wonderful artwork view, ability to control AirTunes speakers, search your iTunes library, edit playlists and more. So instantly I had this amazingly powerful remote that allowed me to access and playback music sitting inside on my computer and hear it outside in the garage through my receiver and the sound quality was excellent.

The other bonus is that I now have wi-fi access out in the garage should the need ever come up