My Airport arrived yesterday. This morning I got it set up to stream audio from my MacBook’s iTunes to my home stereo. The set up took about a minute with no hitches. So far it’s working great. There’s a little latency in the system which is expected, but it’s pretty minor (that is, there’s a little lag between turning up the volume in iTunes and hearing the volume get louder on the stereo).

It would be great if you could stream any audio to the Airport from the Mac instead of just from iTunes. Fortunately, “RogueAmoeba”:1 makes a product called AirFoil that enables that functionality. Nice to know that AirFoil is out there if I ever need it.

To get the Airport to act as a WiFi extender you either have to own an Airport basestation or do some work with your router. I have a Linksys WRT54Gv3, and somehow I got it to work with Airport. Now the Airport is a WiFi repeater for the Linksys. I read a bunch of stuff on the net saying you had to use third-party firmware to get this to work, but all I did was download the latest firmware from Linksys, update the router and fiddle with the Airport settings via the Mac… and somehow it worked. Guess I got lucky.

[1(RogueAmoeba homepage)]http://rogueamoeba.com/

[1(Zooomr blog-friendly photo service)]http://www.zooomr.com

Luv, luv my new MacBook.

However, one fustrating thing about OSX is that you can’t unminimize a window from the keyboard — you’re forced to use the mouse (to unminimize with the mouse, just click on the window in the dock).

Fortunately, there’s a handy utility called “Witch”:1 that solves that problem. After you install Witch, clicking on _option+tab_ pops up a window listing all of the open applications *and* their associated windows. Releasing and clicking the _tab_ key (while still holding down the _option_ key) cycles you through the list. Once you are over the window you want unminimized, just release the keys.

Witch is a must-have utility for the Mac!

[1(Witch homepage)]http://www.petermaurer.de/nasi.php?section=witc