The northlondonhippy

Archive for January 28th, 2006

I’m a hippy of my word.

Not only did I sort out my brand new, wire­less, stream­ing sys­tem to be an audio bridge between my iMac and home stereo, but I did it all today.

Who says hip­pies are lazy? This one fuck­ing kicks ass!

I pur­chased, set-up and con­fig­ured every­thing I required already and have been groov­ing to the tunes ever since. iTunes, of course!

First I went to my near­est Maplins and pur­chased the following:

1) One 4 WAY AUDIO SWITCH — £13
2) One RCA Stereo to RCA stereo cable — £5
3) One RCA Stereo to 3.5mm stereo cable — £4

Then I down­loaded and installed a very cool appli­ca­tion called SALLING CLICKER. It’s works very well with my Sony­Er­ic­s­son s700i mobile phone, turn­ing it into a fancy remote for the iMac via Blue­tooth. It cost around £16.

Then I went into cen­tral Lon­don to the Apple store on Regent Street and bought another Air­port Express, the prici­est bit of this set-up. It cost £89.

The whole thing cost £127, which I didn’t think was too bad.

I needed the audio switch because my stereo on has one Aux input and it was being used by my SKY+ through my DVD recorder. Now, I can eas­ily select between the two with the flip of a switch and I still have 2 spare inputs remain­ing, if I ever need them.

Typ­i­cal Apple, I had the new Air­port Express out of the box, hooked up, on my net­work and stream­ing music in less than five min­utes. The con­fig­u­ra­tion was a snap and it actu­ally took longer to reg­is­ter the prod­uct than it did to get it up and running.

The 2nd Air­port Express joined my exist­ing net­work in client mode, which means all it really can do is stream music, but trust me, that’s enough!

I could have con­nected it to an opti­cal in, but my shitty stereo doesn’t have one, so it’s an ana­logue sig­nal into the ampli­fier, but it still sounds great.

Even cooler, since the lat­est firmware upgrade, you can stream music to as many as three dif­fer­ent bases­ta­tions, plus you can use the iMac’s inter­nal speak­ers too.

I’m dig­ging it! I’ve got my entire musi­cal col­lec­tion ripped onto the hard drive of the iMac, so any song I own is only a cou­ple of clicks away.

Salling Clicker turns my mobile into a fully func­tional remote for iTunes, which means I can con­trol all of this from pretty much any­where in my house.

I know, this is turn­ing into tech-geek cor­ner again, sorry I’ll stop.

I’m on drugs. There, are you happy? Is that what you really want? The hippy is stoned. Trust me, I’m always stoned!

I had lunch with my younger brother was I was in cen­tral Lon­don. We went to an American-style diner off Oxford Street. I told them I was the northlon­don­hippy and demanded free food. It didn’t work.

I had a wicked burger and chips, but the high­light was an ultra-thick vanilla milk­shake, which was so good it hurt!

Cen­tral Lon­don was far less busy than I expected, espe­cially around Oxford Street. It was nowhere near as bad as it is on a week­day and I’m sure the cold weather helped.

The Apple Store was very busy, but then it always is. Luck­ily for me, it was busy with browsers and not shop­pers and the queue for the tills was mer­ci­fully short and I was in and out of the shop in about 5 minutes.

What can I say; I’m a card car­ry­ing, paid-up mem­ber of the cult of Cuper­tino. They make the coolest shit going!

I wish they invent even more cool stuff, just so I can buy it. I’m seri­ous,; noth­ing fills the empty void that is mod­ern life bet­ter than prod­ucts from Apple.

Last night was the end of Celebrity Big Brother and I must say I’m always sad to see any series of BB end. This series was espe­cially enter­tain­ing and I under­stand the view­ing fig­ures last night were very high.

The win­ner was actu­ally a non-celebrity; which is kind of ironic, in a post-modernist, wank-speak sort of way.

I’m a self-confessed fan of the for­mat, but I do have one change I would make to it. I wouldn’t let them back out again; I’d leave them in there until they all killed each other and feasted on each other’s flesh. At least once, anyway.

The next series of reg­u­lar old, normal-people-BB starts in a few months and I can’t wait. I heard they’re going mix it up a bit this year and put in half nor­mal peo­ple, half pris­on­ers from Pen­tonville prison, but only those doing time for seri­ously vio­lent crime. It’ll be an exper­i­ment to see if the nor­mal peo­ple help reha­bil­i­tate the pris­on­ers, or if the pris­on­ers just kill the nor­mals! I can’t wait!