Brian's Brain

This blog post references my cover story, 'Mac (Under) the Knife: Piecing Together the PowerPC Puzzle' in the September 15, 2005 edition of EDN.

Soon after PC Connection shipped me the Mac mini showcased in my September 15, 2005 cover story, my wife left for a week-long visit with East Coast-resident friends. While she was gone, I prepared an experiment (with her as the subject). Upon her return home, she found the Mac mini in the kitchen, connected to a 15" Compaq LCD and a set of speakers (I later replaced this setup with a speaker-inclusive 17" widescreen Fujitsu LCD). Surprisingly, she didn't throw a fit. ;-) And even more surprisingly, it's still there. The secret? She got hooked on the TV show 'Alias' while traveling and, upon her return, used the Mac mini's DVD playback capabilities to catch up on three seasons' worth of back episodes.

What else do we use the Mac mini for? TV viewing, for one thing; Elgato's EyeTV 500, tethered to the Mac mini via a Firewire 400 connection, is a capable DTV receiver and PVR. The Mac mini smoothly plays back 480-line resolution broadcasts, which represent the dominant DTV content in the Sacramento area. It doesn't quite have enough CPU horsepower to render 720- and 1080-line HDTV without frame drops, but the presentation is usually still quite viewable. However, I recommend either a HDD upgrade or an external HDD if you want to archive broadcasts. Without doing the math beforehand, last weekend I set up the Mac mini to record the 4-hour-long Notre Dame-Michigan football game. I returned home later that day to find the Mac mini's 40GByte internal HDD completely full and various programs crashed. It's a testimony to OS X that the operating system was still running and that the problem was fairly easy to fix.

I also use the Mac mini to listen to Sirius Satellite Radio streaming audio broadcasts (mostly the Jam_On jam band channel, #17). The Sirius website doesn't like Safari, the browser bundled with OS 10.3 (the Safari version bundled with 'Tiger' OS 10.4 may fare better, I don't know) but after I installed Windows Media Player, Firefox handled the tunes with aplomb. I also fire up Firefox to do occasional fact-checking, poll sports scores and other breaking news, etc. What we don't use the Mac mini for much, at least not yet, are traditional computing tasks such as word processing, spreadsheets and the like. Some things are best tackled, it seems, in the office.

Continued with 'Mac (Under) the Knife: Small, Silent, and Spouse-Sanctioned....The Sequel'....