I don’t get to write much these days, I guess. Anyways, here’s what happened with the streaming business: Finally I gave in and dropped my scepticism about Apple products and purchased the Airport Express. I liked it ok at first: installation was a breeze but I couldn’t get the remote speakers and the computer to produce sound at the same time – bummer! I thought maybe it is only a feature on a Mac and with a PC I would be out of luck.
Then, I found a firmware update for the airport hidden on the Apple website. Once I upgraded the little toy everything worked as expected: both sets of speakers playing music simultaneously – and I mean simultaneously. When you are in between rooms you can simply hear no delay on either end. So, that was a good experience in the end.
During the hot days here in Cologne my Claxan multi-purpose server appliance started acting weird on me. It didn’t hold a connection with the internet for more than 5 minutes. That was enough of a reason to downgrade. I retired the CL-SA113 and went for a plain vanilla setup with the Airport Express. Consequently, my 300GB web space / NAS is sitting on the shelf and I need to look for new solutions…