Aaaaaaaaagh!
I should say that I do not like fiddling with technology. I like technology, but I like it to WORK. I get no enjoyment out of the debugging process.
Nonetheless, I was all psyched to set up my home network with a central music server. You know, so I could play music from any computer in my house, and so there wouldn’t be that awful mess of CDs piled up everywhere — the living room, the kitchen, the bathroom, the pantry, and so on.
I bought an Airport Express base station and a new hard drive for my used PowerMac Cube, so as to have enough room to store all that music. Okay, it was a bit of a pain upgrading the hard drive in the Cube, including removing the CD ROM drive temporarily in order to copy files from the old hard drive to the new one. But I managed to get it working with only a modicum of hair-pulling.
Next it was time to start streaming music. This was supposed to be the easy part. You just plug your stereo into the Airport Express, then select the Airport on the handy-dandy little menu that pops up in iTunes, and you’re streaming, baby!
No such luck. The menu didn’t even show up on my Cube. Even more frustrating, it DID show up on my iBook’s menu. Fat lot of good that did me: the whole point was for the Cube to be the central music server. So I went to Apple’s support site and searched for answers. It turns out, a lot of people were having trouble getting iTunes to play music on Airport Express. They were trying everything: updating firmware, reverting to older versions of the software, you name it. So, dutifully, I tried everything they did, with no luck. This process went on for DAYS. Aaaaaaaagh!
Finally, a few minutes ago, I decided I’d just search through the iTunes preferences. Maybe there was something I’d missed. And there it was: a little checkbox, next to the following text: “Look for remote speakers connected with Airtunes.” The checkbox was not checked.
It couldn’t be that easy.
I checked the box. I watched in shock and horror as the menu popped up in the corner of the screen. I selected my Airport Express and instantly began to hear music. I had wasted three days of my life for THIS?
Aaaaaaaaaaaaagh!
February 9th, 2005 at 10:21 am
Wow. That sounds more like Microsoft. I remember one of my coworkers trying to get a slideshow in PowerPoint. She did everything she could. Finally she found a box deep down inside some sub-submenu that said something like “don’t do a slideshow even if you click on ’slideshow’”. I wonder if there is a box somewhere that says “do a slideshow even if you check the box that says ‘don’t do a slide show’”?
February 9th, 2005 at 10:47 am
Yeah. There were a few points where I *wished* I was using windows. There was even an item on the Apple support site for windows users that matched my problem exactly — except I wasn’t using windows!
The fix actually wasn’t particularly buried in the prefs. I think I would have found it faster, but the fact that the iBook was working properly really led me astray.
Now if I can only get the new motion detector outdoor floodlights I just installed to start working.
February 9th, 2005 at 1:10 pm
If you’re having problems with the outdoor floodlight motion detectors, maybe I can help. I was at the point of rewiring mine when I discovered that I had turned them off with the switch inside the laundry room.
February 9th, 2005 at 1:45 pm
Though I wouldn’t put myself above that sort of mistake, that’s not the problem. Just in case you *can* help, let me describe what it is: I turn on the switch (similar to yours), and the lights come on. No motion detection: they just stay on, and on, and on.
February 9th, 2005 at 3:08 pm
I assume you have checked the bottom of the sensor, which on mine has a test switch that turns them on. As you know, the sensors are supposed to be adjustable for sensitivity to motion, darkness, and duration of lighting. If none of these is out of adjustment (I don’t think the photosensor is adjustable), it sounds a like the sensors have failed. More than one at a time? Unusual in my experience, but maybe.