I don’t have an Apple TV or iPhone but I discovered that I could do this from my iPod Touch to control iTunes on my G4 Mac mini (which is connected via HDMI to my HD TV). I use it to watch TV shows ( Avatar: The Last Airbender ) from my couch.

Any time you need to type on Apple TV, if you have the Remote app open on your iPhone, the keyboard will appear and you can just type on your iPhone instead.

(Via -Daring Fireball: Distant and Remote.)

I have been using Wireless Distribution System (WDS) between Time Capsule (TC), AirPort Extreme (AE) Base station, and AirPort Express (AX) to extend my network all over my home. The Time Capsule is the main with the AE and AX as “supplicants”. The configuration is such that it appears as one wireless network with one SSID. I get between 80% and 90% signal strength from anywhere in the house. As long as I use the AirPort Admin software ( either on a Mac or on Windows ) setting up the WDS network is a breeze. All I needed was the MAC address of each device.

The AX is connected to the stereo for use with AirTunes from the Mac mini ( which is hooked up via HDMI to the TV ). My stereo and TV are not in the same room. The AE is just a repeater and also connects the Series 2 TiVo to the network.

I had configured a LinkSys WRT54G with the DD-WRT firmware but never got around to testing it in WDS mode with the TC. I’ll have to dust it off.  I was going to write up details on what I had done to accomplish this when I received the following email from a colleague in response to an email from another colleague.  I think he says it better than I could.

Both the main base station and the relay/remote base stations have to know they are participating in WDS. I know the old Linksys routers are not capable of WDS right out of the box. You have to reflash them with alternate firmware. On the Apple gear, you have to tell each device what role it plays in WDS and tell it the MAC address of the other devices so someone doesn’t just join your WDS network with their router. I would imagine other branded devices would be similar. (You kow, Ting, it might be time to buy that TimeCapsule afterall, lol)

As an aside, I went into the Apple Skunkworks lab last night (my house and production network- lol). I was able to get my TimeCapsule and Airport Express to talk WDS (I need a better hobby for my free time).

The TC is cabled to my cable modem and served as my main base station.

My AE served as a remote base station. I set LEDs on both to flash on activity so I could see which router I was talking to. I’ve found:

- Close to the main base station, data would fly (testing speed against speakeasy.net’s speed test). If I went to the AE, throughput would be halved but was not unbearable. It worked as the WDS spec advertized.

- I could see the AE start to flash as I got closer to it. It transferred the connection seamlessly (and back again when I got close to the TC). I didn’t have to kick anything to get it to flip back and forth between stations.

- I kept the same IP address no matter where I went. The AE would just relay the traffic to the TC.

- An added benefit is that you can use the WAN port on the AE as a regular LAN port. I shut off my PowerBook wireless and plugged in an ethernet cable from the PB to the AE. I was able to talk wired to the AE which then spoke wireless back to the TC. (Hmmm, maybe a good way to get an wired remote machine to network without having to run cables

everywhere)

- No complicated setup on the AE. It honored all of the MAC address filtering and IP address ranges of the TC. All I had to do was tell it the TC’s MAC address and duplicate the SSID and security settings

(WPA/WPA2 Personal).

Johnny

This is a followup to the problems I was having with Time Machine backups to Time Capsule. Time Machine would start preparing a backup and after about 10 would fail. After a few weeks of failed backups or backups taking hours I called Apple support. They had me try several things including reseting Time Capsule. One of the things that we tried was using the Disk Utility to mount the sparse bundle files as a OS X volume. That’s when I got this error message.

After almost an hour on the phone with first level and second level support I decided on a drastic course of action. I used the AirPort Utility to erase the Time Capsule disk. Once that completed I configured Time Machine to point to the Time Capsule disk and Time Machine has successfully completed two weeks worth of backup.

Despite its advantages of being linked to iTunes and the iPod, Apple TV faces three difficult barriers that also affect every other comparable device on the market, including several products that have already failed while trying to sell movie downloads through a set top box.

(Via -Three Barriers Holding Up Apple TV — RoughlyDrafted Magazine.)

mac mini intel, originally uploaded by tachikoma on 16th December, 2006.

My Mac mini was my first Mac. It got me excited about the Mac and OS X. When I bought my second Mac ( a MacBook ), the Mac mini was turned in a media server. I attached it to my Sony HDTV, attached an external drive, and my wife ripped most of our music collection. We have been using it to rent movies from iTunes ( it has an Apple Wireless Keyboard and Mouse ) for the kids and as a sync station for our three iPods.

But recently the slowness of the G4 PowerPC CPU has got me thinking that perhaps the mini is over worked. I have been thinking that it’s time to either replace it with a newer Intel based Mac mini ( a Core 2 Duo ) or get an Apple TV. Either way, I would have a machine more capable of handling video ( both iTunes and stuff imported via our new Sony HD camcorder ) and a way to control media without the user of a keyboard.

I like my Time Capsule. Together with Time Machine my MacBook and Mac mini have been wireless archived … or so I thought. Over the last few weeks I started to notice my MacBook huffing and puffing ( the fan would come one and stay on ) and Time Machine seemed to be taking forever to complete backups. My Mac mini was behaving similarly and would hang ( the mini is a 1.42GHz PowerPC ).

Then one day I got a message from Time Machine saying something along the lines of “The last time machine backup was 7 days ago”. What!!!???

I manually kicked off a Time Machine backup but it was taking a very long time. I went to use Spotlight to find something and noticed that Spotlight was indexing the Time Machine backup image. 2HRS!!!!!!!

So here is what I thought was going on. Time Machine would create and image file to archive my current local disk for backup. But before it could complete, Spotlight would start rebuilding the system index, which would then be included in the TM backup, which would then be indexed ….

I tried excluding the Time Capsule disk and backup image file from Spotlight indexing but … Spotlight continued doing what it does and I am stuck with a 500GB Time Capsule that is almost full.

Wow!. Wouldn’t that be cool!

A little birdy tells me that Apple will announce a 12 or 13-inch tablet in the fall of this year. Most likely in the September or October time frame.

(Via -Rumor: Tablet Mac coming this fall (updated 2x) | The Apple Core | ZDNet.com.)

Google Health is an important initiative, if only because it shows users how completely broken medical record-keeping is right now.

(Via -Google Health: Great idea, but scary as all get out | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone.)