The above might strike you as a rather peculiar title considering my rather whole-hearted enthuasiasm toward Apple Inc’s line of products — and no, I haven’t lost my mind. But even there’s a fair bit of “Apple fanboy” in me, I’d like to take this opportunity to put in a few good words about Microsoft, quoted rather unfairly as the “Devil of the IT world”[1]. I’ve owned a fair few Microsoft products throughout my computer-driven life; different OS’s, games, Office-programs, peripherals.. you name it, I’ve probably got it. And throughout time, Bill Gates and his horde of Microsoft-demons have pretty much been the be-all-end-all target of computer-related foul mouthing.
But with the release of the Xbox 360 in 2005, Microsoft have managed with one fell swoop, made amends for every single piece of bad programming and ‘let’s get this shit out before Christmas and make lots of $$$’-products that have haunted at least me for the past 1.5 decades or so.
This is why: I went to a local computer store and got myself a new Wifi base station. I already have the Apple Airport Express, but since I have roughly a gazillion pieces of hardware that need an Internet connection, I bought a Buffalo AirStation; which by the way looks like it could control satellites in orbit — the antennae on the device are a little OTT. Anyway, I unplugged all my devices and essentially rebuilt my home network from scratch. So now I’m running my AirStation behind my cable modem, which has an additional 4-port switch connected to it to provide a few extra eth-ports — just in case :)
So now that I have my Macbook Pro connected to my Wifi network — on which resides my Xbox as well — using a program called Connect 360, I can stream music, videos, and photos over the network straight onto my TV! And this of course is FUCKING AWESOME!
And I’ve set up the program so that it doesn’t use my Mac’s Movies-folder but the one on my Buffalo TeraStation (also connected to the same network) and so this allows me to watch all my DivX-movies straight from my sofa.
So this is what it took to make me realize that Microsoft isn’t such a bad company after all :)
[1] I did in fact make that one up.