the mofo with the info.

I sometimes grief Apple for what I perceive as marketing ploys or overpriced crap and the fact that it sometimes seems to be helmed by an irrational hegemon who dresses like a flood victim, but I dollaz speak louder than blogposts, and I recently purchased the Intel Duo Core Mac Mini. As I’ve used the little device for about a week now, I figured it was time for the inevitable review (and plus, I’ve been pretty light on the blog content this week, so what the hell).

While my 12″ Powerbook is only about a year and a half old, my headless linux server was pushing 6 years (which is like a hundred in computer years), and after my last move, I think I jostled it to the point that I couldn’t rely on it for basic operations like serving web pages, acting as an ftp server, etcetera. I’d been planning to replace it since November or so, but I put on the brakes expecting Jobs to announce an update to the line shortly. When he announced the new Mac Minis, I was pretty happy with the announced specs, save for the crappy graphics card; and as I was primarily planning to use this for non-graphics intensive operations, I went ahead and ordered the diminutive box within the first hour of its announcement. It arrived much faster than I expected; not only did it ship the same day that I ordered it, but it was delivered in 2 days despite the fact that I selected 5 day shipping. I’ve heard that this is a common experience among people who order in-stock products the same day they are announced.

First off, I found the Rosetta performance to be acceptable. Even before I installed the 1GB of RAM I ordered separately, I found the performance of most apps to be responsive if run by themselves. Non-Universal binary applications like Photoshop were not noticeably slow, and were certainly usable even with the translation hit.

Though I didn’t think much of it from Steve’s original announcement, I really took to Front Row. The interface is very clean, and just animated enough to let you know that it is being responsive. Before I installed the extra RAM, though, the performance was abhorrent, so you definitely need at least 1 GB of RAM to be using this without a noticeable lag. Once I had the extra RAM it ran great, and it was a ton of fun to browse through my music, photos, and video files in this way. I’m definitely going to be using this as my fullscreen music player of choice, and I plan on using it to view downloaded tv shows, and the like.

My main criticisms of the system as a whole are:

1. iTunes must be used to organize movie files in Front Row, and there is no clean way of labeling movie files as “tv shows” or “music videos”
2. Movie files must be playable in Quicktime, which leaves out a lot of the good bittorrentable files that require obscure codecs.
3. Front Row’s interface is just similar enough to the iPod to really irritate a heavy user of both. Aside from the wheel differences, the fact that you can’t rate songs while listening to the songs in FrontRow is really annoying.

All in all though, the Mac Mini has restored my faith in Steve Jobs’ ability to pour our Kool-Aid. Drink up, Mac whores!

UPDATE: I’ve uploaded the pictures of the RAM install job to Flickr. It gets pretty gory…

The minds at Penny-Arcade have a new comic dealing with their newfound feelings at having switched to the flamboyant Apple lifestyle. While they joke about the dangerous path they have set down, I saw the announcement that the two authors of the comic were switching to Macs from PCs to be groundbreaking, and a signal of a big victory for Apple in general.

Here’s some background. Penny-Arcade is the most widely read webcomic around, and they primarily deal with the topic of video games. They have a rabidly fanatical fanbase, and are treated by video game manufacturers as journalists; they have access to sneak previews of new games and consoles, they have been commissioned to make supplementary material for big video games such as Rainbow 6 and World of Warcraft. In addition to this, they have traditionally had a strict anti-Mac attitude; a character in their strip Charles, is typically ridiculed for his love of the Mac platform in general. This has made sense, as they are gamers, and there are… exactly one game (s) available for the Mac that are worth a crap. So I was pretty surprised when they announced over a month ago that they were both looking into buying Apple machines, spurred by the switch to the Intel processors. Though as a Mac fanatic, I am pretty happy about this, it had me a little confused. The switch to the Intel platform has very little impact on the immediate availability of games for the Mac. In fact, due to Rosetta issues, there are reports that some games that worked on old Macs will not work or will run slower on the faster powered Intel Macs.

So… These people were unconvinced by Apple’s switch to BSD, they were unconvinced by Ellen Feiss, and they were unconvinced by Tiger. Why switch now, when nothing has changed from their perspective? How could two users so defiantly anti-switch be swayed by a change of architecture, and the announcement of minor improvements to the basic hardware that they offered before? I have a theory, natch.
(more…)

I give Eater a lot of slack, because they’re part of the Gawker network which makes a living saying ridiculous things, and because they’re mostly spot-on. However, their recent re-review of Per Se had me scratching my head. Did we eat at the same restaurant? I’m not going to go into their claims of “memorability” or “quality”, because those are subjective things. Personally, I’ve been their twice and found the food to be phenomenal, and I certainly won’t forget either of my dining experiences there any time soon. However, when reading that this man’s colleague, a 90 pound size-zero was still hungry after eating there… I was flabergastified and confustibobulated. It is with a heavy heart that I call shenanigans; and disingenuous shenanigans, the worst kind. Unless that restaurant has changed completely in the past 8 months, there is no way that anyone leaves that place hungry.

My first meal there was a seven course meal, with several courses not even counting toward the total, such as extraneous bread and dessert courses at the end (I believe there were three dessert courses actually, but I may have lost count). This meal took about four hours to complete, and we had so much food that we had to take our last two dessert courses home in boxes, along with a free complement of cookies, chocolates, and Thomas Keller’s signature Macaroons. My second time there, Keller was actually in the restaurant at the time, and our waiter gave us the option of having the “Extended Menu”, which all parties involved that night now refer to colloquially as “The Meal of Death”. This is because there was so much food on the table, in our stomachs, and probably scattered on the floor by our chairs that we actually wanted to die. The waiters seemed to take a cruel delight in serving us our gastronomic demise; toward the end we were no longer eating out of hunger or even enticement, but rather that we were too embarassed to consider sending an unbelievable foie gras terrine or a lobster tail over orzo back to the kitchen unfinished. Toward the end of the night we wondered if Keller himself was preparing us, in a Twilight-Zonesque twist, for our own slaughter, after which he could feed our own fat livers to the next customer; I expected him to come out of the kitchen and force food down our beaks with exquisitely crafted, pearl-handled chopsticks.

I cannot conceive of any person, be they female, 90 pound, hypoglycemic, tape-worm infested, or of any other constitution, that could leave that place hungry. Unless of course, they were picky and didn’t eat the food in front of them… in which case I contend that the moniker of “Eater” is extremely disingenuous, no?