Another interesting old bit of Apple tech I have laying about here at home; the Gen1 Airport Express.

Before the Apple TV, if you wanted to pipe iTunes to your stereo on the other side of the room, you needed one of these – which is why I bought this one back in 2004.

Unlike a lot of the other older Apple stuff I have cluttering up my house, this no longer works with modern hardware… Well, it still mechanically works just fine, you just need an early 2000’s Mac to connect to it and configure it.

Fortunately, I have a few of those. 🙂

Interestingly these had pretty good analog sound quality due to the TI Burr-Brown DAC they used, and with Apple Lossless (ALAC) and using TOSLink (that headphone jack also houses a laser for fiber optic use) the output was 1:1 to the original CD – over wireless!

It was pretty cutting edge stuff in 2004.

I used this with a Sony SAVA 500 home theater setup, which was also pretty good for someone without a zillion dollars to spend.

These days it’s all about the Apple TV, which has enough CPU grunt internally to run its own network connections and Apple Music application. And everything is ALAC now…

Listening to "Who Can It Be Now?" by Men At Work

I’m a big fan of hot sauce and tend to put it on everything, because everything can use a bit more spice in my humble opinion.

I’m also a bit of a hot sauce snob; I like the heat and appreciate anything that can make a little sweat break out on my brow – but it also has to be flavorful… There is a lot of sauce out there that simply tastes like burning, and I’m not a fan.

So, my refrigerator has a door pocket reserved for various hot sauces, but the one I tend to use the most often when I have it, is “Diablo” packets from Taco Bell.

No, really. “Diablo” is really, really good sauce – good enough that once a month I get a couple of soft tacos and ask for as many sauce packets as the nice person at the window will part with, and then squirrel them away for later…

Now, the astute among you may be telling their monitor, “Just buy it in the bottle at the store – they sell Taco Bell sauce there!” And while you would be right, at least around Denver all you can get is yellow (mild) and red (hot). The “hot” is essentially spicy catsup and I’m not a fan of that either.

But recently Target of all places started carrying Diablo bottles, so yesterday I picked up a couple…

What’s interesting is Diablo does not appear to be exceptionally shelf-stable; the bottles I picked up were just put on the shelf, and expire in mid July. So this may explain why it’s so hard to get outside of a trip to Taco Bell.

Either way though, this makes me pretty happy. I’m off to scramble some eggs, make a Denver omelet, and slather it in Diablo sauce – back in a bit!

Listening to "Private Eyes" by Hall and Oates

Blizzard, owned by Activision, owned by Microsoft (Microblizzavision) announced the next expansion for World of Warcraft (WoW) about two weeks ago.

It piqued my curiosity…

See, I more or less gave up on WoW during “Battle for Azeroth” (BfA) as I mostly play for the setting, and the setting had ceased to be “Warcraft”. The current expansion, “Shadowlands”, is such a radical departure from the overall setting that even the company’s writers have no idea where to go with it. So it’s a mess of disparate systems with a janky storyline and a lot of pointless time sinks that only serve to annoy.

In short, WoW is a mess right now and has been for several years. And the abysmal user numbers these days prove this out.

So Blizzard went off to have a rethink apparently; they pulled people off of the current expansion (cancelling an entire content patch) and set about working on all of the broken stuff… And announced the end result two weeks ago.

“Dragonflight”

Dragonflight makes all of the right noises from Blizzard management; “going back to a grounded Warcraft setting”, “getting rid of borrowed power”, “more focus on core functionality instead of layers of systems”, and “putting the RPG back in MMORPG”.

Basically my laundry list of gripes were being addressed, so I re-upped for 6 months to signal my approval of the better direction and have been playing catch-up this week.

When I quit during BfA, I canceled my account completely, so I had to start up a new account and begin from the ground floor; level 1.

Last night I made it to 53 (out of 60) and have started on the Shadowlands content… Fortunately Shadowlands is 2-3 content patches along and most of the truly bad stuff has been edited out. So it’s still a weirdly disjointed story with too much emphasis on Mary Sue NPCs, but at least it’s not painful to level through.

Once I hit 60 I’ll attempt to meet up with a few friends who still play, and bum around the world doing things like unlocking mounts and looking for fancy armor bits until Dragonflight launches.

Given how expensive it is these days to leave the house, $12 a month for WoW, if it’s fun, seems like a good deal…

Listening to "Sailing" by Christopher Cross 

No matter how complicated life gets or how convoluted the world seems, there’s always some solace at Waffle House…

Waffle Houses are interesting in that they are always there for you…

It’s 2am, you’ve been on the road for 18 hours, and you’ve pulled off into a town time forgot? Waffle House is open.

It’s Christmas Eve, you’ve got no where to be, everything is closed, and you forgot to get groceries? Waffle House is open.

It’s the apocalypse and you’ve managed to stick to the shadows and avoid roving gangs of cannibals for days now, but you’re running low on supplies? Head to Waffle House to get a hot meal and more ammo…

I’m serious! Waffle House being closed is so rare that FEMA actually has a disaster scale called the Waffle House Index based on it.

The index has three levels, based on the extent of operations and service at the restaurant following a storm:

• GREEN: full menu – restaurant has power and damage is limited or no damage at all.
• YELLOW: limited menu – No power or only power from a generator, or food supplies may be low.
• RED: the restaurant is closed – Indicates severe damage or severe flooding.

Anyway, this is where I went to tune out the crazy in the world for a bit and have breakfast this morning; and it was nice.

Listening to "More Than This" by Roxy Music

I have successfully written, compiled, and executed an app on the Apple Watch…

The most complicated bit was dealing with dependencies, the code signing, and granting myself permission on everything to allow the non-Apple Blessed code to run…

Basically this will only run on my watch because it’s associated with my phone which is associated with my laptop which is attached to my developer account.

But it does in fact run – and that’s good enough, for now.

Listening to "And We Danced " by The Hooters