Denis Lemire's Site

Picked up a new Apple TV (fourth generation) from the Southgate Apple Store on my way home on Friday. I actually pre-ordered fairly early Monday morning in hopes of having one dropped on my lap come Friday. My pre-order, however, is stuck in that awkward “too far along to cancel but it isn’t going to be here on launch day” limbo.

Who has the willpower to wait when you can just pick one up off a shelf? Had I known they’d be that easy to get my hands on I probably wouldn’t have bothered with the pre-order. I can return it when it arrives but I may keep it. The two I have are 2nd generations. They’re getting pretty long in the tooth, only 720p and unsupported software wise for some time. They don’t even work with YouTube anymore.

Alright, new toy! Let’s play…

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The concept of a “guest” WiFi network, open to anyone but isolated from the rest of my home LAN has always been appealing… The feature has existed in the AirPort Extreme routers since the third generation (circa 2009).

Originally the feature would disappear the moment you turn off router functionality and place the AirPort in bridge mode. This combined with my insistence on letting my FreeBSD box serve as the Internet gateway for my household negated my ability to use the feature.

In a firmware update some time ago, this feature re-appeared, even while the router was in bridge mode… I tried it once, discovered I could get no traffic to flow through it, shrugged it off and disabled it…

Until…

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Today marks five years since I abandoned Windows on the Desktop in favor of an OS that doesn’t completely suck. At the time, my primary motivation, or excuse, was to familiarize myself with an OS that I was receiving an increasing number of tech support calls for at AirSurfer. Trying to support an OS I had never used was no easy task.

I had actually been eye-balling the Mac since the appearance of the Power Mac G4 Cube and later the iMac G4. The high cost of either of these systems kept me away, but I was definitely drawn to the compact and elegant design of the integrated hardware as well as the rich graphical UI Apple had been showing off since the early releases of OS X.

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The factory installed 80 GB Seagate (ST98823AS) was increasingly feeling cramped under the weight of ever growing iTunes and iPhoto libraries.

Adding insult to injury the 5400 RPM speed of the rickety old clunker was a painful bottleneck I could no longer endure. Suddenly the unrestful gleam of the legendary Mac Mini opening putty knife caught my eye. It was time.

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The moment I stumbled upon Prowl (a new iPhone App that routes Growl notifications to your iPhone via Apple’s push service) I knew I would find some powerful uses for it.

At Tera-Byte, several of my colleagues telecommute. In order to stay in constant communication with each other, we all use good ol’ IRC. In order to be readily available and allow quick roaming from one location to an other, I use Irssi‘s proxy module which runs continuously within a screen session on my co-located server.

On my Desktops and iPhone I run Colloquy which connects to my Irssi proxy. Although push capabilities are planned for Colloquy, it’s not ready yet. Prowl appeared to be the perfect band-aid for the situation.

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