Upgrade
Man, I haven't gotten around to writing here in ages. So, news:
Big thing I've been working on lately: new desktop computer for home. My adorable but ~6-year-old lampshade PPC iMac has not really been cutting it for quite some time now (most recent YouTube was kind of a lost cause, if that gives you an idea) and the only reason I hadn't done something about it a while ago was sheer laziness. Apple just bumped the specs on the Mini line again, which has pretty much everything I need for a reasonable price, so I got off my ass to do this thing.
Getting a new Mac involves the opportunity to recycle an old one for free, so first thing I did was drag out my two beige boxes: a PowerMac G3 (circa 1997) and a PowerMac 7100/66AV (circa 1993). I'd only been meaning to do this for like a decade. Anyway, the G3 still runs like a charm. It had tons of old data I'd stupidly neglected to ever get off it, so that's all been backed up now. Thing is, in addition to having possibly the only functional 3.25" floppy and ZIP drives in the house, it's really my only easy way to run pre-OSX Mac software (notably including tons of Hypercard stuff I wrote myself). So I'm'a keep it. The 7100, on the other hand, boot chimes but appears to have a dead video card, plus I'm pretty sure all its data was transferred to the G3 anyway, so off to recycling it went. Adieu, you served my well back in late high school and early college.
Anyway, new machine: Mac Mini with 10.6 (Snow Leopard), Core2 Duo processor, 4G RAM, 320G HD. (In the end I decided to spring for the slightly upgraded model instead of buying the absolute cheapest one and upgrading it myself as I'd originally intended, because on the Minis Apple's upgrade tax isn't as bad as some other models, and honestly I'd gotten kind of sick of ordering my own 3rd-party parts, installing them, finding them defective, uninstalling them, waiting a week for replacements, and installing again (happened both with RAM and HDs w/ my iMac) and figured it's worth a little bit to have Apple testing my hardware for me.) I like it. I can actually run recent programs now, in addition to the stupidly processor-intensive video codecs kids like to put things in these days. Had a few hiccups with Apple's Migration Assistant crashing at the last minute, but it still managed to get all my settings transferred over and save me a lot of time. Had to upgrade a few apps that I didn't have an Intel version of, but that's mostly done.
Other exciting thing: I now have a fast enough processor to run a transcoding media server, which means it can read just about any old video format and translate it on the fly into, say, MPEG video while broadcasting it over my local network. This means I can now stream any file I have to the PS3/HDTV downstairs without worrying about formats or carrying around memory cards or hooking up the laptop. Sweetness.
I was going to stick some other updates in here, but this entry's already long, so maybe I'll just make another post.
Big thing I've been working on lately: new desktop computer for home. My adorable but ~6-year-old lampshade PPC iMac has not really been cutting it for quite some time now (most recent YouTube was kind of a lost cause, if that gives you an idea) and the only reason I hadn't done something about it a while ago was sheer laziness. Apple just bumped the specs on the Mini line again, which has pretty much everything I need for a reasonable price, so I got off my ass to do this thing.
Getting a new Mac involves the opportunity to recycle an old one for free, so first thing I did was drag out my two beige boxes: a PowerMac G3 (circa 1997) and a PowerMac 7100/66AV (circa 1993). I'd only been meaning to do this for like a decade. Anyway, the G3 still runs like a charm. It had tons of old data I'd stupidly neglected to ever get off it, so that's all been backed up now. Thing is, in addition to having possibly the only functional 3.25" floppy and ZIP drives in the house, it's really my only easy way to run pre-OSX Mac software (notably including tons of Hypercard stuff I wrote myself). So I'm'a keep it. The 7100, on the other hand, boot chimes but appears to have a dead video card, plus I'm pretty sure all its data was transferred to the G3 anyway, so off to recycling it went. Adieu, you served my well back in late high school and early college.
Anyway, new machine: Mac Mini with 10.6 (Snow Leopard), Core2 Duo processor, 4G RAM, 320G HD. (In the end I decided to spring for the slightly upgraded model instead of buying the absolute cheapest one and upgrading it myself as I'd originally intended, because on the Minis Apple's upgrade tax isn't as bad as some other models, and honestly I'd gotten kind of sick of ordering my own 3rd-party parts, installing them, finding them defective, uninstalling them, waiting a week for replacements, and installing again (happened both with RAM and HDs w/ my iMac) and figured it's worth a little bit to have Apple testing my hardware for me.) I like it. I can actually run recent programs now, in addition to the stupidly processor-intensive video codecs kids like to put things in these days. Had a few hiccups with Apple's Migration Assistant crashing at the last minute, but it still managed to get all my settings transferred over and save me a lot of time. Had to upgrade a few apps that I didn't have an Intel version of, but that's mostly done.
Other exciting thing: I now have a fast enough processor to run a transcoding media server, which means it can read just about any old video format and translate it on the fly into, say, MPEG video while broadcasting it over my local network. This means I can now stream any file I have to the PS3/HDTV downstairs without worrying about formats or carrying around memory cards or hooking up the laptop. Sweetness.
I was going to stick some other updates in here, but this entry's already long, so maybe I'll just make another post.