We have been doing more and more trade shows/presentations and the likes these days and in many cases we have to either cart around our own fairly large speaker configurations or arrange to have some speakers provided for us. When a set of speakers is provided for you, you just don’t always know how they are going to perform? In some cases the speakers were overkill and in a booth situation we don’t want the attention on the speakers we want the attention on our product. Even too much bass is distracting as all we really need is for the message to cut through and if there’s lots of bass then often things can get a bit muddy!

Our requirements where a set of compact stereo speakers that had enough volume to cut through a noisy environment and a sound quality that would produce accurate sounding voice. We wanted the fewest possible cables so as not clutter up our table.

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Paul and I recently made a trip out to Ohio which is a bit of trek for us as we traveled from Canada across the boarder to Seattle and then started our air portion of the trip which took us from Seattle to Chicago and then to Ohio. All in all this took us the entire day to accomplish much of which was in the air or sitting around waiting to get into the air.

That said we were fairly iPhone dependent to keep us connected and entertained along the way. The iPhone battery is great for regular day to day activities, especially when you have a home charger or car charger handy but we soon realized this would not be the case in this situation.

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Want to run OS X Leopard on your AppleTV without altering the internal drive in any way? That’s what I did and here’s why and how:

I have this ginormous eMac that I use as an iTunes server on my home network, the eMac sits under the stairs with my other network stuff eating up electricity and creating a sauna like environment from all the heat it generates along with about 80db of fan noise.

You may ask why I even need an iTunes server in the first place? Well, I have two AppleTV’s in the house and they stream all their movies & music from the iTunes Library on the eMac server. In the past I used my main MacBook laptop for this task but every time I left the house the wife and kids would be without their beloved AppleTV media entertainment… Unhappy family – unhappy me!

Then I get this email from a friend that Apple has just reduced the price of their soon to be discontinued AppleTV 40GB down to $169 Canadian! This made we wonder if I could run OS X Leopard on an AppleTV and use it in place of my aging eMac iTunes server, thus reducing my energy bill, lessening heat and fan noise in my network room – AKA under the stairs.

Here’s where this brain child idea came from… A few years ago when Apple first introduced the AppleTV, there was a frenzy of geek activity when the geeks united to try and hack the AppleTV to actually run OS X and as always some uber-nerds figured a way to do this. So if you had a bunch of time on your hands and a bit of computer know-how, one can read through all the pages of geek jargon and actually get OS X to run on an AppleTV.

So I decide to go down this slippery road – with caution…

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