Express Indeed

Apple’s Airport Express is hardly new tech, but bear with me here.

Our apartment has two laptops that want to play music and one set of speakers that’s inconvenient to both of said laptops. We already have a wireless network. We also have a USB printer that doesn’t share nicely over my ReadyNAS NV.

So I buy an AirPort Express. I plug it in to one of the Ethernet ports on my existing router, a Linksys WRT54GL running alternative firmware. I plug in the printer. I tell the Express not to talk wireless, just to hang out on my network and play music and share the printer.

That’s it. It works. Playing music to a set of speakers across the room. Playing other stuff, too, thanks to AirFoil. Printing.

This makes me happy. Wireless anything still has a sense of magic when it works. The Express manages to be magical and still play nice with decidedly unmagical, unsexy network setups.

Money well spent.