Arnljot.com

Now I’m an apple disciple again

Posted on March 27th, 2008 by arnljot.
Categories: Apple.

My first computer was an Atari 2600jr, okay - so it was a game console. But don’t hold it against my parents, they didn’t know better.

But it was what sealed my fate as a “nerd” after having getting hooked on computers after having played games on an Intel/IBM box of some sort at the neighbours house.

I shortly upgraded to an Atari XE 64, a computer I sometimes think that I’m the only one who ever owned. And searching google it might seem so.

But I quickly became an Amigian, and joined the Clan. I had the 500, the 1200 and the 4000. I also spent all my money on the Phase5 PPC cards, but in 1999/2000 as I was finishing up my IT degree at college, I wanted Java.

Java was, and is not available to the Amiga platform, so I had to leave. Going Wintel was not a choice, so I bought an Apple iMac. It was as modern as I could get back then, without breaking my Amiga heart too much.

Now to what this post is really about.

My recent purchase. The Apple Mac Mini.

In my living room I had a HTPC (XP based) and a PS3 hooked up. Currently the PS3 isn’t complete and versatile enough yet to completely handle all my needs.

The XP based HTPC has always given me grief in one way or an other. And lately it’s become so unstable (hardware) that it’s been crashing and rebooting a lot, and worst of all. The sound has been corrupted.

So I looked for a replacement, that would work great, and be very silent. Very very silent.

I considered the Psile PC briefly. And even though I used to hate Windows and all it’s incarnations, I’ve grown to accept it’s existance over the years, and even like some of it’s ease of use and features… But don’t tell my friends at Amiga.org

But the Psile option could not simply compete with the Mac Mini on price. And also, it was hard to determine if it was quieter. In fact, some reports reported the opposite. So at more than double the price, I determined it was a no-brainer, and got myself the Mac Mini.

Tuesday this week it arrived, and I was very curious to see if the myth “It just works” was true.

Here are my experiences:

1. Wifi: I have a D-Link DI-724GU router at home providing me with a WPA2-PSK net. It did just work. But performance was horrible, and I had to change channel and lock in some dynamic features on the router to get max performance, and be able to watch my HD content on my D-Link DNS323 NAS
2. BYKM: Keyboard and Mouse. Check.
3. Screen: My Sony KDL-40W2000 and the Mac Mini aren’t completely at friendly terms. Most of the time when either of them is off, and they get back on the Mac Mini has “lost” the screen resolution. Silly, but here is a guy with the same problem.
4. Sound: Getting the Mac Mini to pass through sound through the optical link to my Pioneer receiver was harder thatn I’d thought it would be. Here is the recepie I followed to get it working.
5. Codecs: With Flip4Mac and Perian I’m pretty much covered.
6. DVDs: ISOs and TS_Video folders, VLC is your uncle. Also DVDs are slow over network. But here also VLC comes to the rescue.
7. MKVs: Perian works, but is really slow, especially over network. So VLS is the only way to go.

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