My Macbook Pro 2.2 just decided to kill the display and all I get is blank on boot. Apparently, it’s a known issue relating to the 1.5/1.5.1 firmware update. When the software fixes don’t work (and they didn’t), the solution is to change the logic board. Nice.

This incident made me think about all the Macs I’ve had for the past few years and how they’ve all failed in various ways. I often donate older machines to family, so I get to hear about how they do 2-3-4 years into the process. And it’s usually not pretty.

My old G4 iMac had it’s DVD drive fail on it after two years. Three of my older laptops have had their hard drives fail (with painful data loss in one instance). One of my Macbook pros that my brother is using lost its firewire ports and its DVD drive (it’s just 2 years old). Mary’s fairly new Macbook air is making weird noises occasionally.

It’s a pretty terrible statistic. Jason’s current Macbook Pro also has a variety of issues and he ordered a new one just to be sure he wasn’t left stranded. Luckily, I also just got myself a new MBP (and the dual-DVI cable is supposed to arrive tomorrow!).

I wonder if this is just par for course. Or if I, and many people I know, have just been incredibly unlucky with Apple gear. But it has happened enough times that it seems statistically unlikely.

So please share your successful run of Apple machines that have been able to last 3-4 years without breaking down. I need to regain some faith.

I’ve been a happy Sirius Radio subscriber since the day Howard Stern went Satellite. I think I’d miss Sirius more than I’d miss cable or any other entertainment subscription I have.

I was thinking about buying another radio recently, but I figured I’d check to see if I could stream Sirius over the net instead.

It turns out Sirius has two internet streaming options. You can stream for free at 32k, or pay $2.99/month (if you already pay for Sirius) to get 128k “CD Quality” sound. $2.99 ain’t bad, so I signed up for that. If you don’t have Sirius, streaming at 128k costs $12.99/month. Sirius doesn’t stream every channel due to some licensing issues, but they stream about 90% including every station I listen to.

StarLightXM

In order to stream you have to use their web-based player which is pretty crufty. So I did a couple Google searches to see if I could stream it through iTunes or some other Mac app instead. That’s where I found StarLightXM.

StarLightXM is a lightweight app that streams Sirius or XM through a native player instead of the crufty web players. You just enter the same login credentials that you would with the online players, and you’re all set. The UI is simple and compact. It’s free (donations accepted) and works great.

So now I can stream Sirius to my desktop. That works. But I wanted to stream the audio to multiple speakers in my house. I have three Airport Expresses set up to play music from iTunes in multiple rooms, but Airport Express can only stream music from iTunes. That means I can’t natively stream audio from the StarLightXM app to my remote speakers.

Airfoil

Enter Airfoil. Airfoil allows you to stream any audio from any program on your Mac (or PC) to your Airport Express-connected speakers. You can stream all system sound or just sound from a specific app.

The way I have it set up is to just stream sound from StarLightXM to my remote speakers. This way I only get system sounds (beeps, new mail, etc) on my desktop, but Sirius plays on my desktop + my remote speakers. It’s a simple setup that works beautifully. Airfoil costs $25.

Airfoil allows you to set volume for each location independently or you can fix volume to system volume. If it’s fixed to system volume you can use your computer’s volume to raise or lower volume in different rooms. If it’s not fixed, you can change your computer’s volume and not affect the volume of the speakers in other rooms. Nice flexibility.

A great way to save

Streaming Sirius over the net is a great way to save some money too. I currently have Sirius radios at home and at the office, but now I can cancel Sirius at the office since I can just stream it over my computer instead.

So for $2.99/month my MacBook turns into a portable Sirius Radio. Plus, I can broadcast to multiple rooms with just a single stream. So instead of paying for radios in multiple rooms, I just pay $2.99/month to stream and point the sound to whichever room(s) I want with Airfoil.

Software is amazing.

UPDATE: Rogue Amoeba, the folks behind Airfoil, have released Pulsar, a Sirius/XM client for the Mac.

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Highrise
Highrise one of “Top 10 most useful webapps of 2008”
“Highrise became a big-small contender in the CRM space this year by adding Deal tracking and full data export. Not to mention, no CRM comes close to making it this easy to keep track of your contacts in detail. After falling off the wagon with Salesforce (multiple times), SugarCRM, and PipelineDeals, Highrise is the only one that became critical to my day-to-day activites at work.”

Newsberry, a service to send and track email newsletters, integrates with Highrise
“With Highrise Sync enabled, Newsberry will automatically sync contacts in Highrise to subscribers in your list. All changes in your Highrise account will be visible in your Newsberry contacts list in which you enabled Highrise Sync.”

What size rolling luggage to buy? Shopping at Amazon, it feels like a shot in the dark.

Lots of closeups of handles and wheels, but what’s the difference between a 19” or 22” bag? There’s no real guidance.

This is the kind of situation where a site that focuses on a specific niche can really shine.

Luggage Online offers a size chart (and Carry-On Luggage Regulations for each airline too).

eBags also offers a Rolling Luggage Size Guide.

Sometimes, a little context makes all the difference.

Today we announce a new way to share pages in Backpack. Now when you share a page you can decide who may edit the page and who may only view the page. This allows certain people to be responsible for editing pages and to allow others to read their pages without allowing the others to make changes. It’s a very useful feature, especially for larger teams.

Here’s how read-only pages work. When you click “Make a new page” you’ll see a link below the people checkboxes that says “Specify who can make changes to this page.”

The checkboxes are replaced by a table when you click the “Specify…” link. The people on your account appear on the left-hand column with the familiar checkboxes to give them access to the page. Then to the right of each person you can set whether they can “change the page” or “only view the page.” Two links above those right-hand columns allow you to apply the same setting to all people at once. By default everyone can change the page.

In this example we want to allow David, Jason and Sarah to change the page. Everyone else will have read-only access. The settings look like this:

A couple of days ago we launched the new Highrise marketing site. We’ll be posting a lot of design-related articles about the design process — including the unreleased versions — over the next few weeks.

A peek behind the scenes

Today I wanted to give you a peek behind the scenes at an app we built to help us maintain the “Fresh News & Buzz” strip in the sidebar. This element is called out in red below:

Extra Extra

One of the things we wanted to do with the new site was to have a place where we could display current comments, ideas, and conversations going on around the web about Highrise. We’ll be rolling this out to the other product sites as we redesign them as well.

To do this, Sam built an internal app called Extra Extra. Sam will be talking about the technical aspects of Extra Extra next week, but for now I just wanted to show you how it looks and how we use it.

This is what it looks like:

Extra Extra scours the web and Twitter every hour or so for keywords including 37signals, Highrise, Basecamp, etc. It displays matches in a list view. We can then review the matches and select which product sidebar gets which blurb by just clicking the icon.

Some blurbs may be appropriate for multiple sites, so multiple icons can be clicked. You’ll notice the fourth one is selected for both 37signals and Highrise. Once an icon is clicked the entire row turns yellow so it’s easier to spot which ones have already been published. Blurbs that aren’t appropriate are just ignored.

Once an icon is clicked, the item gets published to the appropriate product’s feed. Right now the Highrise site is the only site with the sidebar, but we included all products and the 37signals logo (for the 37signals site) so we can get into the habit of selecting content for those sites too. Once the new sites launch we’ll already be ready with content.

If we spot something on the web that Extra Extra doesn’t pick up we can add it manually by clicking the “Add a news item” button at the top.

How it works on the sites

In the sidebar we pop in a DIV with some Javascript that looks like this:

      <div class="extra_extra_news" count="8">
        <script type="text/javascript" src="http://news.37signals.com/feeds/highrise.js?no_expire"></script>
      </div>

The Javascript pulls the appropriate feed from the Extra Extra app and the count=”8” tells it how many entries to display.

More soon

We hope you enjoyed this little peek behind the scenes at Extra Extra. Sam will be following up with technical details soon and we’ll have a lot more design related posts about the new Highrise site soon.