…To MacBook

I was looking for a good way to stream my MP3s and Videos from my itunes to my xbox 360. The xbox talks about connecting to a media pc on your local system and there was no obvious way of connecting the xbox to my mac, until I found Nullriver’s Connect 360. I first downloaded their trial version from here. Installation was a breeze, just unzip the file and then double click on the “Connect360.prefPane” file and connect 360 gets installed in your System Preferences pane under the “Other” section:

Preferences Pane with Connect 360 installed

Once you open the Connect 360 preference, all you have to do is click the “Start” button and it will index your iTunes content and make it available for xbox 360. You will then see your computer’s name come up on the 360 when you go to the music or video library.

I didn’t even have to think about going to the site and paying the $20 fee to nullriver. It was so easy to install, so easy to get started and when I played some of the MP3s on the 360 and saw how well it worked I immediately bought a key to activate the full version. I would highly recommend this to anyone who has a mac and an xbox 360.

Our blog now has iTunes podcasts thanks to Bluegrind.com. You can find our podcast within iTunes if you go to “iTunes Store” and search for “Bluegrind to macbook”. You can also see it by clicking the following link and subscribing to our feed:

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=260340833

I am using firefox and when I click on that link, I get a dialog box that tells me firefox will launch an application. Just click on the “Launch Application” button and iTunes will automatically open.

What’s cool about bluegrind is that you don’t need to manually create your podcasts, it will automatically generate it for you. All you need to do is register at bluegrind, then go to:

http://www.bluegrind.com/blogs/register_blog.html

Put your blog’s URL and bluegrind will do the rest for you. From then on, it will automatically generate the audio version of your blog posts. If you want to have that audio player on your own blogs as well (like you see on this blog), go to bluegrind’s “My Account” page while logged in and click on the “View all blogs and instructions to place audio in your posts” link. From there, choose which blogging software you use and follow the instructions on placing the code in your template. All you need to do is copy and paste that code block at the position you want. On this blog I prefer having it at the top of each post.

Bluegrind does not yet have an automated way to register your blog on iTunes. You need to contact them and they will register it. It takes a few days though because Apple places all new blog registration under a review cycle.

So now you can enjoy our podcasts in iTunes and more specifically, if you register our podcast, then all our latest articles will automatically be downloaded and you can have them on your ipod to listen to.