Apple’s Airport Express is indispensable.

It’s a small 802.11b/g wireless base station. It also has an ethernet jack, a USB port for printer sharing or connecting a remote control, and - best of all - an audio port (analog or digital). It’s great for use at home and it’s great for travel, so you don’t have to be tethered to the desk at your hotel.

The Airport Express is roughly comparable to the Airport Extreme in terms of acting as a base station. It only has one ethernet port. It can act as a NAT (Network Address Translator), so you can use it to connect multiple computers to a single Internet connection. If you use NAT, it can act as a DHCP server to allocate IP addresses to the computers as well. If you’re using NAT, you can also map inbound ports to ports on particular computers behind that NAT.

You can also use access control - you can either list the acceptable MAC addresses or have it talk to a Radius server.
The Airport Express broadcasts the availability of a USB printer via “Bonjour” (ZeroConf) and the printer can be accessed via IPP - the Internet Printing Protocol.

The most exciting to thing about it to me, though is the audio out port.You can stream audio to the Airport Express from any Mac or PC running iTunes.

Finally, don’t think you have to be a Macintosh user to take advantage of the Airport Express. It comes with both Windows and Macintosh configuration software. 802.11b/g is non-denominational and will work with any computer that supports it. Both Windows and MacOS X support the Internet Printing Protocol and can take advantage of shared printers, and iTunes under both Windows and MacOS X will be able to play audio through the Airport Express.

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