It’s been a week of frustrating dead ends for technology, trying to figure out solutions, and learning new things that eventually don’t pan out to be solutions.
What’s becoming increasingly apparent is a lot of the ways I’d hoped to preserve old workflows just aren’t working – there’s all these edge cases, like I can sync my iPhone with iTunes within VMWare, but I can’t import images from the phone to Aperture.
A great deal of time was also lost trying to deal with my computer refusing to sleep when file sharing was enabled. It really had me pulling my hair out as first the Thunderbolt networking proved disastrously bad for sleep, then ethernet less so, but still problematic.
In the end, I think it might have actually been Apple Remote Desktop triggering a wake event in the client Mac Mini, thus keeping the Mac Pro awake. With ARD quit, the Mac Pro is sleeping successfully.
I brought a new piece of hardware into play – an Airport Express, which provides a direct Airplay bridge between WiFi devices, and traditional stereo gear. It’s working nicely.