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April 4, 2005
Uncle : Mini Apple!
Well when I fall off the wagon and belly back up to the bar, I tend to do it in a big way, so last week I bought a SECOND apple (actually it is the third in the house with my old iMac). I followed Johnlu's lead and bought a fully stoked Mac Mini as a home theatre PC. 80gig drive, DVD drive, 1GB memory, bluetooth keyboard and mouse, Wifi, DVI cable to the Samsung flat panel.
Ordered on Apple.com. Their site is so smart that they sent it to my mother (an Apple die-hard where my last purchase went) without even asking me. One e-mail and three days waiting later and two packages arrived at my door this afternoon. Again Apple excels at the OOBE. Beautiful packaging, a thoughtful handle to pull the Mini out of the box, simple easy recognition of the Bluetooth mouse and keyboard, no software to install, just a charm. Immediately it did want to update some of that software though... First thing I noticed was that there was no DVI cable and I needed a Male to Male headphone jack to connect the MAC to the Samsung flat panel. Thinking to continue my Steve Jobs charity, I fired up the Touareg and headed over to the Apple store. Lots of fancy cables. No DVI cables. I asked the supercilious troll in a white doctors smock for a DVI cable. He said that they come with the Apple monitors and they don't need to sell them. I asked "what if you want to connect it to a non-apple monitor?". He looked stupefied and completely confused muttering "we don't have any demand for them..." Too bad Steve, I am off the Magnolia Hi-Fi for the cable. At the high-end flat panel store the cables are $175!!! Wow, ouch! I find a 3 foot one in the exchanges bin for $75, grab a Sony double male headphone cable and head out. Plug Plug and press a couple buttons and there on the screen is the telltale grey mac start-up screen. Walks me through the keyboard and mouse set-up, finds the Wireless network no problem, asks for password (connects to Cisco wow), and registers me. Then starts downloading 24mb of software updates. Hey, I thought this thing was just made for me last week? Their build disks must be old.
Again a problem getting iTunes to find and be happy with a library in the sky, but after getting it to work for Alex, the process is quicker this time. Everything streams fine. Wait, over on my laptop I am getting a "IP Address conflict" problem. Checked the Watchgaurd to see if it had handed out all its IP addresses. The IP address of the MAC wasn't even there. So I figured out that the Cisco Aeronet 340 was handing out IP addresses to. Reboot both devices got the IP addresses all peachy keen. Mac is accessing the Internet and so is laptop.
Played some music over the lan on the TV. That is cool, but I really want to route the sound into my home theatre rather than the crappy TV speakers. Then tried playing a DVD over the LAN connected with Wifi. Jerky and choppy. Not enough bandwidth. Scrounged up a cable and plugged the mini into my hub at 100mb. Played just fine. The picture had some overscan lines on it, but that was my edit, not the Mac. Had to do a horizontal adjust on the SAmsung to get the picture centered. But now plays Video over the Lan like a champ. Look out guests, the whole home movie archive is now available!
All in all, I gotta say I like the Mac Mini. As much as I didn't want to. It is
Posted by Martin at April 4, 2005 10:26 PM
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Comments
You could always use the Airport Express to stream tunes straight to your home theater.
Posted by: Toby 
at April 5, 2005 6:05 PM
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