Turns out Anandtech has started providing some Mac coverage. Anand starts off with A Month with a Mac: A Die-Hard PC User’s Perspective providing his take on the Mac experience to the “uninitiated” with a hefty Dual-G5 desktop. This led to the mobile experience with a Powerbook. Most recently, he’s taken a look at the Mac mini.
Monthly Archive for January, 2005
Went to the Castle Theater in Bloomington yesterday with Amanda to see Raiders of the Lost Ark. Really outstanding theater setup. Instead of the usual uncomfortable, cramped stadium seating, the Castle has a set of squishy couches and loveseats. Much more enjoyable experience. Raiders is such a classic.
Macworld has lots of good coverage on the Mac mini. They’ve got a nice review with benchmark results, discussion of some of the available options, and even some cool findings (looks like some of the 40GB machines come with 5400rpm drives instead of 4200, and some systems may come with faster RAM, but I don’t know whether it’s actually being clocked any higher than PC2700). They’ve got coverage on disassembly with lots of pictures (opening it up and stripping it down to bare components). They compare it against a “comparable” Dell, and even provide a decent FAQ.
I’ve decided to work a bit on porting over some of my old content to the new site/format. So far, I’ve converted over the pages about the senior design project I developed with John, the UR-5beta. Figure I may put up a copy of my public key at some point, but since the only one I use with any regularity is already up at my CRHC site, I’m not sure there’s much point. I’ll probably put the archived copy of TacoLand up too, but that won’t really require any porting, since I’ll leave it in its original format. Not sure I’ll bother with much else. While the “Malaise” site was an interesting experiment, I’ve never been all that happy with the layout, so aside from a few of the graphics I developed… it’s not all that interesting. I may start a new album in my gallery to house my “original works” that weren’t photogarphic in nature, but that’s probably it for now.
Blah blah blah. Back to work you lazy bum!
Got a couple of song lyrics related websites for you. I rarely have a clue what the artist/author means when they create something, be it abstract painting, poetry, or song lyrics. So I found songmeanings.net of some interest. On a related note, have you ever heard little kids singing a song (or the pledge of allegience). As a group, they usually sound about right, but if you listen to them individually, you hear some rather bizarre stuff that sounds about right, but is totally wrong. Well, kissthisguy.com is full of stuff like that. The domain name comes from Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” (“Scuse me, while I kiss this guy…” vs. “kiss the sky”). According to the site, Hendrix was even aware of this common mishearance (?), and would play it up sometimes live.
Took Spooky into the vet today (now that his course of antibiotics is completed), and he is a healthy little kitty. Both kitties have now had their vaccinations: Merry has had the full set of rabies and FVRCP shots, and Spooky had his first dose of the FVRCP today. I’ll have to take him back in another month for the FVRCP booster, and then a month or two after that for rabies. Both kitties also have negative blood tests (kitty HIV and leukemia), so they both have clean bills of health. 
Unfortunately, this now means the next thing on the to-do list for Merry is to get a little snip-snip, but she’ll be a lot happier, and so will we.
Finally bit the bullet and ordered myself a Mac mini. There’s a good 3-4 week lead time on them currently, so I still have time to back out if I get cold feet. But I’ve been wanting a machine that’d run OS X for some time now. Every so often I look into “cheap” used Macs on fleabay, but have always been thwarted by the remarkably high prices that old Macs go for. Fairly ancient G4′s (350MHz, 128MB RAM, Rage 128 video, 20GB HDD) were going for $300 or more. Seems like if I’m gonna give it a shot, a brand new mini would give me a whole lot more bang for not too much more buck. And it would be tiny to boot!
It was only a matter of time. Someone got their hands on one of the new Mac minis and figured out how to open it without destroying it (Slashdot). Some fellow has the video up on his blog (wonder how long he’ll survive the slashdot effect). I’ve managed to snag the video already, so if he does go down, I may make it available to interested parties. A review site has also gotten their hands on a bare motherboard.
So the Macworld Expo started yesterday. The big deal as I see it is the announcement of the Mac mini. That’s actually got me kinda excited. It’s a cute, little sub-$500 Mac that’ll run OS X. The dimensions on this thing are quite impressive (6.5″ x 6.5″ x 2″). That’s awful tiny. Comes with a 1.25GHz G4, a 40GB ATA HDD, DVD/CD-RW, 256MB DDR RAM, 32MB Radeon 9200 DVI, and the usual plethora of I/O (10/100 ethernet, modem, audio out, Firewire, USB2). No monitor, keyboard, or mouse. But who cares since it looks an awful lot like they’re targeting potential PC folk such as myself who already have that stuff and aren’t as likely to take the plunge and check out a Mac running OS X given the traditionally high price of admission. I have to admit, I’m tempted to get one for an additional box. Thing is, I don’t know much about Macs, so I don’t know whether I’d want any upgrades (there’s a 1.42GHz/80GB HDD version for $100 more, RAM can be bumped up to 1GB, and there’s an option for a DVD burner among other things). Hence, I’ll just have to wait for reviewers to actually get there hands on one and tear it apart to see how much of this stuff is user-upgradeable (ie the RAM in particular that I can undoubtedly get cheaper elsewhere if it’s an ordinary DIMM). Guess I’ll have to see if there are any good Mac review sites (ala Anandtech, et al) that perform in-depth hardware comparisons and so forth. Looks like it may be an interesting year for Apple though.
So in my Christmas stocking this year I got a Mitch Hedberg CD, Strategic Grill Locations. I’d seen him on Comedy Central some time back and found him absolutely hilarious. He’s got this funny, stoner sort of vibe and just cranks out all sorts of oddball, inane comments that are really entertaining. If you are a follower of my blog, you may have already noticed that I have a number of his quotes that randomly appear in the sidebar. While they’re funny, they just aren’t the same until you’ve seen his routine. After that, you can just picture him. I’ve actually caught myself laughing out loud while driving in the car listening to this guy. If you get a chance, check out his stuff some time (Comedy Central airs his special every so often). Now I have to go out and get his other CD, All Together, which includes a DVD with an uncut/unedited version of his Comedy Central special.