Tony ([info]quikchange) wrote,
@ 2006-03-21 23:10:00
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Current mood: content
Current music:They Might Be Giants - We Want A Rock
Entry tags:review, technology

24 hours with the Mac Mini
My Mini showed up yesterday afternoon. After dinner I unpacked it and turned it on. There were no problems with my Dell LCD display but I was mildly disappointed that, despite the promises of digital audio support, it did not offer either optical or coax audio ports so I'm still stuck with stereo sound. Upon booting it asked me if I wanted to transfer data from another Mac. I did so I connected the Mini to my Powerbook via a Firewire cable (borrowed from Shawn) and rebooted the Powerbook in Firewire mode. The data transfer tool did an impressive job of migrating everything over. It felt like I was using the same system, only with a lot more memory!

There were a few small problems but the only one that I wasn't able to work around easily is the lack of a universal binary driver for my Blackberry, since PocketMac hasn't been ported over yet. After moving my music over I was informed by iTunes that this machine was not authorized to play the songs I'd purchased from iTMS but providing my Apple account userID and password fixed that in a few seconds. My Flickr export plugin for iPhoto and Cisco VPN client no longer worked but upgrading to the latest versions of both solved that too.

Despite having to go through binary translation layer, using Photoshop is actually faster for me now because I don't have to deal with constantly swapping to disk. That's one sound I'm not going to miss!

Update: FrontRow is freaking awesome! I can control iTunes and browse my photos while sitting on the bed :-)


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Digital audio output
[info]grosskur
2006-03-22 09:35 am UTC (link)
Apparently you can, in fact, get digital audio output:
The new Intel Mini DOES have digital audio output. It uses a SPDIF output that has both analog audio output and digital optical audio output on the same plug. You just need to get a special cable or a special adapter ($1.00 - $2.00) that converts this input into a regular TOS-link socket. The new macbook and iMac have digital audio output also. Also, you need to enable the digital audio output in the DVD player preferences.

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Re: Digital audio output
[info]quikchange
2006-03-22 02:52 pm UTC (link)
Oh! I'll have to make a trip to Fry's and pick up an optical cable then :-)

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)
Re: Digital audio output
[info]flojee
2006-03-23 05:49 pm UTC (link)
I would like to protest the removal of anonymous posts, what makes this life worth living is useless comments, funny jokes, and tony's odd scary-like bat movements behind people while they're getting their picture taken.
Bring back the comments! :)

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)
Re: Digital audio output
[info]quikchange
2006-03-23 06:46 pm UTC (link)
Anonymous comments are quite welcome as long as they're informative, insightful or entertaining. "You little nerd" was neither ;-P

(Reply to this)(Parent)
Rosetta
jfpoole
2006-03-22 04:53 pm UTC (link)
Rosetta's not bad. I did some Rosetta benchmarks a couple of weeks ago and I was impressed with its performance (Rosetta performs at ~40-80% of native speed).

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