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.
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I don’t know why most of the Apple event recappers left off the most important part of Stevie-J’s keynote, so i’ve transcribed it here.

10:49 Oh, one more thing… [The crowd goes wild]
[Steve pulls off back panel of iPod Hi-fi to reveal a fat wad of cash.]
10:51 Every $350 iPod Hi-Fi comes with $200 cash in the back of it! That’s why the damn thing costs so much! It will also be available in a $450 version that comes with $300 dollars.
[Much applause from apple shareholders. Exeunt omnes]

Much better.

Thomas Pink was clearly a classy brand up until about six months ago, so what the hell are they doing? First I hear about this stupid iPod nano tie, which everyone is quick to point out will be unavoidably uncomfortable, and well, retarded. Fine, plenty of high-fashion brands have tried to profit off of the iPod or PSP brands with overpriced unusable accessories. However, right after that I backed out to their main US page and am greeted by… The Pink Panther?

OK, ok, back up there fella. About three years ago, Thomas Pink was the pinnacle of metro fashion; a businessman’s way of declaring individuality from behind a boring double-breasted suit. Even pre-Queer-Eye, this posh british import convinced us that you can wear pink and purple stripes while still grooving on the vertical smile. New York magazine still refers to the store as “a wardrobe mainstay for cosmopolitan businessmen.” Any New Yorker who visited a Pink store during their seasonal sale days would be confronted with a veritable shopping bloodbath, with grown men tearing through stacks of clothing like twenty-something girls at a Louis Vuitton sample sale.

Maybe they’ve just spread too fast. While it used to be a arduous task to find the oddly located Pink stores, they now have locations in prime spots, such as the Time Warner Center (which, let’s face it, kills everything it touches). In either case, why would they tie their upscale menswear brand to a mediocre kids movie remake? OK, I get it… you both have the word “Pink” in your title. But are they really trying to spread the message “when you think of our brand, think of cheap foreign accent and fart jokes”?

We have zero idea what this thing is, if it’s real, or if it’s some kind of factory leak, but this does look a bit promising as the new Dell Dimension B210 that fans have been speculating about for a while now (and yeah, we’re assuming that’s a USB slot at the bottom there). Dell Inc.’s marketing department has yet to confirm or deny the veracity of these leaked pictures, but they certainly look like they are in keeping with the existing Dimension aesthetic that fans have come to recognize. A VERY GOOD SOURCE suggests that these exciting new boxes will ship with 256 MB of DDR SDRAM, a CD/DVD combo drive and a whopping 80 GB Hard Drive!

More details are expected at Dell’s widely expected press event this Thursday, and we will be sure to post more news as it comes to us!

Refresh… Eat… Refresh… Eat…

The saddest thing is that I’m not only watching the apple announcements like a total psycho, I’m also streaming the important stuff to my friend Lin’s phone, who is waiting for a plane right now and doesn’t have internet access. Sometimes connectivity is a bad thing.

I read up on Google’s latest mind-boggling project, Google Secure Access, a free, secure wireless initiative, and prepared to get geekily excited about it until I found the increasingly common “(Windows XP and Windows 2000 only)” disclaimer. I thought back to the recent offerings from everyone’s favorite Mountainview mothership, and couldn’t help but think, “Why does Google hate me?” As a home Linux and Mac OS X user, I have gotten by pretty well lately, playing some cutting-edge games (ok, game), finding most new hardware to be OSX/Linux compatible, and using the commodity standard Microsoft Office platform; things were looking pretty good for a lowly Linux/BSD/OSX user such as myself. The systems were finally making inroads to the non-tech crowds, too: my technophobic brother was asking me serious questions about the Mac mini, and I hear you can get a free Linux box with the purchase of a qualifying rifle at Wal-Mart[1]. Just as it looked as if the Redmond beast might have to deal with some serious competition, opposition came from the unlikeliest of places: the company that Microsoft identifies as its biggest threat.

Though the first line on Google’s company overview page smugly declares that the company’s mission is to make information “universally accessible and useful”, a glance at Google Labs is enough to turn a *nix user green with compatibility envy. Google Desktop, Google Deskbar, Google Web Accelerator, Google Video Viewer, Google Talk, and now Google Secure Access are six projects recently released into beta or production through their lab, and all are currently only compatible with Windows systems. Though Google Talk uses open standards for the bland text chatting protocol, the real meat of the service is its VoIP client, which currently only lets you talk to other boring Windows users. Even Gmail, the nothing-short-of-revolutionary webmail client, went into public beta without Safari compatibility (though they are now Safari compatible, advanced features such as Rich Text formatting still only work in IE and firefox).
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