AirTunes

Tue, 21 Jun 2005 14:11:27 +0000

Last week I bought myself an Apple Airport Express. It’s a fairly regular wireless 802.11b/g access point amongst other wireless functions, it’s very small, stylish box, and, being from Apple costs a bit more than other slightly less well designed rival products.

The only wireless product I own right now is my PSP. So now I can get game downloads on my PSP! Great! Hang on, I could do that from hotspots around Tokyo anyway. So why?

Actually, both of the above, but also because of Airtunes. Airtunes is an extension of iTunes which basically pumps out a stream to Airport Express which then pumps it out through it’s small optical/3.5mm jack socket on one of it’s sides and from there into the back of my stereo. The benefit is that in my apartment there’s a wall mounted network port just behind my TV / stereo which my Airport Express is wired into. Thus, I can send my huge iTunes library to my stereo for almost 10 days of continuous songs!

WLAN run

Tue, 09 Nov 2004 11:18:53 +0000

Something I forgot to post last week.

I was in the back of a taxi at about 3am going from Tokyo Station to my place in Setagaya-ku - a trip of about 15km - and I had my laptop with me, so I thought I’d just run Net Stumbler, and see what wireless networks were around. I haven’t gone through the results in any great amount of statistical analysis, but the basic results were: 81 networks - about 40% were 54Mb ones, a similar percentage have no security (not even WEP!), and the most popular brand seemed to be Buffalo (Melco?). Also, it seems that most SSIDs are set to a MAC address, and either people don’t change them, or they try to give them ‘anonymous’ names. OK, I know this post should carry a geek warning, but I’ll try to get some accurate stats up, and post them on brightblack, just out of curiosity.

Wifi on Nanikore

AirTunes

WLAN run