This evening I knew I was going to have to work late to get some code finished up for tomorrow morning. So, I stopped by to see my friendly salesperson over at Microcenter. I have been popping in randomly over the past few weeks to see if they got any Airport Express devices in.

It turned out that today was just my luck, as they had one left. I figured that I have been working hard lately and I would be working hard tonight, so I’d reward myself a little bit and plunked down the cash for the device.

So, now I’m sitting the living room listening to streaming music from my computer and it sounds wonderful. Nothing like wirelessly networking the stereo into the rest of the house.For those who aren’t familiar with the Airport Express, it allows me to play music directly from my computer to the stero without using any wires. It’s much nicer and more convenient to control the stereo from my laptop when I’m programming.

Technical stuff - beware

I did run into a few problems with setting it up, however. I am currently using a security password on my wireless network, in hopes of deterring people wardriving around Kansas City. I found that in order to get the Airport Express to work correctly with my Linksys wireless router, I had to put a dollar sign before the WEP key. This was frustrating and it took about 30 minutes to figure this out. Unforunately, Apple did not document this very well, and it took quite a bit of searching (on the net and in the included PDF guides) to find that out. So, I thought that I would post that info up on the web for anyone else searching for a solution to the problem.