So I’m in the beginning stages of planning a whole-house automation system. Since music is pretty damn important to me, the first part of this system I’d like to get right is whole-house audio. I want to be able to play music in pretty much any room I’m in, all controlled from my phone or tablet. Since I’m already running Apple products everywhere, it just makes since to use an AirPort Express for each zone.

To get things started, I have an older version of the AirPort Express that plugs directly into the wall. It hasn’t been updated in a while, but my OS X systems have. I’m currently running Lion (not Mountain Lion) and the current AirPort Utility application (version 6.1) doesn’t support the old AirPort Express. The older version that does support it only runs on Leopard/Snow Leopard. Or so it says. What to do?

Well, there is an excellent explanation here. I’ll forgive the errors in the title of his/her site because the solution and walk-through are great.

Briefly, here’s what you need to do:

1. Download the disk image from http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1536.
2. Mount the image / move AirPortUtility.pkg to your Desktop.
3. Open Terminal, and cd ~/Desktop ; mkdir tmp ; cd tmp.
4. Extract the payload: xar -x -f ~/Desktop/AirPortUtility.pkg Payload.
5. Extract the app: gzcat AirPortUtility.pkg/Payload | tar -xf -.
6. Open up the app located withing the new Applications directory.

Following the instructions above allowed me to finally fix my old AirPort Express to get it showing in my AirPlay list again. Now I just need to buy a few more to get audio in each room. I think it’s time to go listen to some music. Yup.

What goes well with notebooks? Pens! Since my last post was about notebooks, it only makes sense for this one to be about pens. Right? Right.

Earlier this year I was on an all out yetti hunt to find the perfect notebook after Moleskine completely screwed their previously lovely square-ruled notebook with ink dark enough to compete with my own writing. The quest was successful after I found my perfect notebook in the Behance Dot Grid Journal. The bright green strap just does it for me.

For the Dot Grid Journal, my favorite pen so far is the Papermate Flair UF. The Fisher Space Pen is great if you’re into ballpoints, as is the Parker Jotter. And while I have the stainless steel version, I far prefer the lime green (yes, bright green is a favorite color of mine). The weight and feel is a bit different too, and I actually like the colored plastic versions better.

If I were still writing on Moleskines, there is no question what pen I would be using: the Pilot Hi-Tec-C. And to make things more interesting, there have been a few successful Kickstarter projects for better housings.

• Pen Type-A
• PHX-1
• Render K
• PHX-Pen

My choice would be the Render K. Just something about it. I haven’t felt like forking over $40 just yet though. Hmmm, the PHX-Pen looks interesting as well. Decisions, decisions.

I’ve been on a mad hunt for the perfect notebook the last few days. Not a laptop. Certainly not one of those spiral notebooks typically used in gradeschool. No, just a regular black notebook. Oh, but with graph lines. Not blank. Not ruled.

My last Moleskine Squared Notebook is nearing completion with 11 pages left. Why the hunt? Why not just buy another one? There are several Barnes and Noble stores near me that sell them, BUT, there’s one major reason why I won’t do it again – the graph lines are TOO DARK!

It wasn’t long ago that the Moleskine Squared Notebook was the perfect one for me. Except for being a bit pricey, I loved everything about them – the color of the paper, the graph lines, the way the binding allows the notebook to lay flat when you have the notebook open. Oh man! Anyway, while I’m sure you care about the details of what works for me (I know you don’t), that isn’t the point.

After calling a few places and driving around to several different stores in the area, I came up with nothing. Needing a notebook immediately, I gave up and bought a ruled Moleskine from B&N. But, here is what I found.

After a large search around the area, I wasn’t able to get my hands on a physical copy, but apparently Piccadilly makes exact replicas of the Moleskine notebooks on the cheap. Apparently they are both made in China. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are made by the same company.

Ecosystem has a really nice line of notebooks themselves. They use 100% post-consumer recylced paper and are 100% USA made. Awesomeness. Unfortunately for me, their Architect line of notebooks just isn’t what I’m looking for. The lines are printed dark and are much too small. If I was looking for a ruled journal, I would definitely consider them – their flexi cover is amazing and I just love their story.

Markings sells a line of products at Staples and Target. I find their cover disgusting and refuse to use it.

Behance sells the Dot Grid Journal, which looks pretty interesting. I know I was looking for a squared ruling, but if the dots aren’t too dark, it could be perfect.

UPDATE! The Behance Dot Grid Journal is the best notebook I’ve ever owned. Plus, their customer service is awesome.

While I try my best to improve all areas of my life continuously (kaizen), sometimes I fail to perform with exemplary status. Countless times a day I have the need to open a new Terminal tab in the same working directory. Before today, I issued a pwd command, copied the output using the mouse, Command-T, and cd Command-V. Ugh. That’s a convoluted mess.

When I was growing up and mastering conventional memory management in DOS for the sole purpose of viewing various graphical demos from around the world, I knew about and how to use every command available within the operating system. Even though that’s probably not realistic these days, it’s something definitely worth shooting for over time (hmmm Linux from Scratch. If the same were true today, then I would have already been using the pbcopy and pbpaste utilities.

Now I can simply pipe the current working directory to the clipboard:

pwd | pbcopy

Open a new terminal tab or window, and use a combination of cd and Command-V or pbpaste to get back to the original directory:

cd `pbpaste`
cd [Command-V]

While pbcopy and pbpaste are excellent utilities, they aren’t the best solution for what I originally set out to do: open a new tab in the current working directory. I’m sure there is an even quicker way to get to the same current working directory, probably with an AppleScript, and I suspect that OS X Lion has an option for this in Terminal, but for now, pbcopy will do the trick.

RVM is a badass tool. My only significant gripe is that it slows down the creation of new Terminal windows, something I do quite often. While there are a few other concerning behaviors (such as the overriding of key system commands like cd), it’s the slowness of opening Terminal windows that really annoys me. I’m not dependent on much of the awesome functionality that RVM provides, so it’s time to try a new tool. Meet rbenv.

rbenv subscribes to the Unix philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well. It’s one job is managing multiple installations (and versions) of the Ruby programming language. It does nothing else.

Remove RVM

Since RVM stores everything in a single place, removing it from your system completely is a simple task. In fact, the rvm implode command provides most of this functionality for you.

$ rvm implode
$ sudo rm -rfd /etc/rvmrc
$ rm ~/.rvmrc

Within your .bash_profile (or whatever shell initialization file you typically use), there should be a line that initializes RVM:

[[ -s $HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm ]] && source $HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm

Remove it. Farewell, RVM.

Install rbenv

rbenv is easier to install than RVM is to remove. Usually I like to refer to the awesome Homebrew package manager for OS X, and this time is no different.

$ brew update
$ brew install rbenv

Then add the following line to your .bash_profile:

eval "$(rbenv init -)"

rbenv is now installed. Now we need to install some Rubies! Remember when I mentioned that rbenv does one thing (and does it well)? Well, that one thing is MANAGING multiple Ruby versions, not installing them. To give rbenv the capability to install Rubies, you need another tool: ruby-build.

Install ruby-build

Installation of ruby-build is even simpler than rbenv:

$ brew install ruby-build

Install Rubies

Now you can install Rubies all day. Why not write a script to do it? See how fast you can fill up your hard drive with Ruby installations — wouldn’t that be a beautiful thing? Well, it’d probably just be a waste of hard drive space. But in any case …

To see a list of available versions, either of these commands will work:

$ rbenv install
$ ruby-build --definitions

Choose your favorite Ruby and install it:

$ rbenv install 1.9.2-p290
$ rbenv rehash

It’s necessary to run rbenv rehash after installing a new Ruby version or gems that include shell commands. This simply gives rbenv the knowledge it needs to run the correct commands.

If you want to install multiple copies of the same Ruby version, use ruby-build instead:

$ ruby-build 1.9.2-p290 ~/.rbenv/versions/1.9.2-p290-custom

Where “1.9.2-p290-custom” is the directory name where the new version will be installed.

Switch between

Globally:

$ rbenv global 1.9.2-p290
$ rbenv global 1.9.2-p290-custom

Per project:

Add the version name to the .rbenv-version within your project’s directory:

$ echo '1.9.2-p290-custom' > .rbenv-version

Or override the version within the shell completely:

$ export RBENV_VERSION='1.9.2-p290'

More information

For more and up-to-date information, please see the rbenv project page on GitHub.

Nice to meet you, rbenv. Boom goes the dynamite.