An individual calling himself “Lilmuckers” has posted the process he went through to build a mac-mini into the wall of his kitchen. “It is hidden and everything works perfectly.” he says.

The Mac mini is pretty small as it is, but I’m all for aesthetics. The less visible and obvious it is, the better.

via MacMerc

The term “supershuffle” was at least some attempt to diverge from the name. But, capital letters?

Check out the site for some snapshots.

Let the frenzy begin.

For the past 8 years or so, I’ve been running a 21″ CRT as my primary display. I’ve loved it from the day I brought it home and it’s served me well. Acquiring it was a milestone for me, almost on par with getting my dual G5 this time last year.

Now it’s time to retire the beast and move to LCD. I’ve considered getting a 20″ or 21″ display, as I like the resolution these sizes offer, but cost aside, I wouldn’t gain any more screen acreage than what I have now and that just doesn’t feel worth the $1K or so. Dell is set to release a 24″ LCD in just a few days, but even at 1920×1200, I’m not sure I want to pony up the $1199 (or whatever it comes to be with their awesome coupon deals) when I can get two 17″ or 19″ displays for half that and HAVE TWO DISPLAYS and 2560×1028 resolution!

Thus, my dilemma. Both 17″ and 19″ offer the same native resolution. Response time is important to me, so I don’t want anything more than 16ms. It must also support DVI and analog connections. Fortunately, this limits my choices in both sizes. The Samsung 172x is a great display, super fast, but lacks swivel and I don’t like the VESA mounting and lack of height adjustment. The Viewsonic VP171b is my favorite: faster yet, thin bezel and black. Dell has great deals almost daily on their line of flat-panels and if the timing is right, I can get the 1905FP for just a few bucks more than the Viewsonic. It’s significantly slower (violating my 16ms requirement), but does offer USB 2.0 ports.

Are those 2 extra inches really worth it? Two 17′s would fit much nicer on my desk and probably suit me just fine, but part of me, whether it’s ego or just that I’m used to 21″, wants two 19′s. Both monitors get great reviews, so I’m torn.

Two 17″ Viewsonics or two 19″ Dells?

This Chinese site has an excellent photo tutorial on how to open your mini, using modified bamboo chopsticks. The softness and tensile strength of the bamboo apparently make the food utensils a great tool for this and from what I can tell from the pictures, there is absolutely no damage to the mini whatsoever.

Read the full tutorial if you can (I suppose you could just jump right to the end). There’s a neat mod to the mini at the end, in the form of a cork covering that looks very professional. Not sure if we can get cork adhesive tape here in the U.S., at least that thin, but I might investigate the next time I’m at the craft store.

If you know French, you can check out the original site, otherwise, head on over to Ars Technica and check out their translation.

This guy took his 1.25GHz mini and overclocked it to 1.42GHz. Via four jumpers, the G4′s speed can be selected between four settings: 1.25, 1.42, 1.50 and 1.58GHz. He tried 1.5GHz, but had stability issues.

I probably won’t be this bold, as the jumpers are really, really tiny and I wonder if I could even get 1.58GHz out of my faster G4 (it wouldn’t be worth it for just 1.5GHz). Maybe when the warranty runs out and I dramatically improve my SMT soldering skills…

There is one thing that this cluster has that I believe wasn’t available in the VT cluster:

The Turing Cluster is available to students and faculty for school-related projects. The school’s Usage Policies specify that “the cluster is to be used for scientific and engineering computational jobs only; no other work is allowed.” In addition, sponsors of the program, all different departments in schools in the University of Illinois, can utilize the system for their own projects.

Too cool. Check out their site for pictures and a live webcam.

Via TMO.

Mechanic: “What seems to be the problem?”

Customer: “I’m not sure. My car just freaked out yesterday. The windshield wipers started wiping, the lights were flashing on and off, and when I turned on the radio, I got a BSOD.”

Mechanic: “Hmm, sounds like you caught a virus.”

Customer: “Again? Geez, that’s the third time this month. I just installed Norton Mobile Anti-Virus® last night!”

Mechanic: “Well, we’ll have to reformat your car and reinstall Windows XP Automotive®. You can pick your it up in about 39 minutes…”

Sometime later I gave some guy on the internet the 500 and some cash and got myself a 2000 with dual floppies and a 40MB HDD. Now I was in the big leagues, with a Motorola 68030 25MHz processor–a real screamer. No, seriously. It was 1990 and that was some serious speed then. That machine was my baby for some time until I eventually got out in the real world and finally got bit by the PC bug. I’ve missed it ever since.

If you know anything about Commodore, you know it’s been bought a gazillion times by as many companies, after each in turn went bankrupt for one reason or another. Eventually, the Amiga faded away into oblivion, despite small pockets of devoted users who to this day somehow manage to keep it’s legacy alive.

Now it seems that the Amiga may have found a new name for itself, with a new operating system and a new hardware platform. Is the Amiga back? We’ll have to wait and see.

The line was a couple dozen long or so, but most were there for iWork ’05, iLife ’05 and the newly released Mac mini. Me? Since I haven’t quite got my free iPod yet, I was there for the iPod shuffle, two 512mb versions to be exact, one for me and one for the misses.

Unfortunately, despite confirmations to the contrary from an (obviously misinformed) Apple store clerk the night before, there were no shuffles to be had. A couple of the clerks had demo units—those bastards—hanging from lanyards around their necks, but, as the clerk jokingly acknowledged, these were not for sale. I wasn’t really joking, but oh well, life is hard and then you die. I went home.

No more than two hours later, after a desperate call to the store to confirm stock, the whole family was back in the store, this time to pick up a Mac mini for my wife. I stood in line, holding our youngest, while my wife and three-year old played some Nemo game on an old iMac in the kiddie section. I could see three mini’s on the left and about a half-dozen on the right. A couple minutes and $599 later, we left the store with one of those last three minis.

UNPACKING AND SETUP

The box itself is surprisingly small. It’s hard to believe there’s a computer in there, let alone a smokin’ G4. A hard drive I bought recently came in a bigger box.

My heart raced as I cut the seal. Inside, everything is organized into it’s own place, clearly part of the presentation of the thing. There’s just enough packing to protect the precious cargo, without going overboard like some packaging I’ve seen.

First up is the software—a couple of install discs and iLife ’05—and the mini documentation, literally.

The first layer removed, the mini rests comfortably in it’s styrofoam bed, protected by a thin wrapping of plastic, again, up to Apple’s standards. It reminds me briefly of unpacking my G5 almost a year ago.

This is where the notice “Actual size” on the outside of the box really hits home: This thing is just plain small.

It’s impressive how much architecture fits into such a small package. I realize that the mini is essentially an iBook without the keyboard and LCD, but the form factor is still amazing.

I failed to take pictures of the power supply organization, but needless to say, it was organized just as neatly underneath the computer.

Setup couldn’t have been any easier. Power, ethernet, keyboard, external speakers—still leaves an USB port and a Firewire port. Since my wife’s flat panel has DVI input, I didn’t need to use the DVI-VGA connector, but it’s nice that one was included. I like it’s compact size better than the dongle that came with my G5.

IMPRESSIONS

Did I say how utterly amazed I am at just how small the mini is? The old Gateway mousepad (dug up from who-knows-where) takes up more precious acreage on the desk than the mini.

It’s the perfect size for my wife’s desk, as the real estate is tight.

The mini replaces an aged Windows XP tower that stood on the floor next to the desk. All that size for a Pentium II 350Mhz and a 20GB HDD. Even with just two fans, it was like a wind tunnel in the living room, but we eventually got used to it and just turned up the volume on the TV.

The mini is so quiet, it was actually distracting at first. There is barely a whir emanating from the underside, you wouldn’t know it was even on if it weren’t for the tiny power LED shining brightly from the front. The only time this thing makes any noticeable noise is when a CD/DVD is in the Combo drive.

PERFORMANCE

It’s a G4, ’nuff said. It’s noticeably slower than my dual 1.8 G5, but still much faster than that old G3 I used to play around with. I thought about running some benchmarks, to really test things out, but I think that’s been done enough times elsewhere, that it wouldn’t serve much purpose here.

I’m positive that the miniscule 256mb of memory is a serious bottleneck, so this thing will get a 512mb or 1GB upgrade very shortly. After seeing the difference between 512mb and 1.5GB on the G5, I know that will increase the snappiness of OS X dramatically. (I’m still biting my nails about trying to open the mini, but there are how-to pictures and even a video floating around, I should be okay if I’m careful).

The HDD is a 2.5″, so it’s only 5400rpm, but I’ve never really the noticed the difference between that and 7200rpm, so that doesn’t really matter much to me. I suppose if you were into serious multimedia or other disk-intensive tasks, it would matter, but then you would probably want a G5 anyway.

CONCLUSION

Despite my initial misgivings about the mini when it was first announced, now that I have one, I’m duly impressed. Apple has come out with a great entry-level machine.

It would be nice if there was a second DIMM slot for more memory, but given what my wife (and probably most users at this price point) uses her computer for, I think 1GB will do just fine. For $75, it makes sense to have the Apple store upgrade the memory, but $325 for 1GB is ridiculous. I can get Crucial or Kingston PC2700 DDR RAM for just under $200 locally, even cheaper online, so that will likely be the road I take.

If I didn’t already have a DVD-burner via the Superdrive in my G5, I would have seriously considered the $100 upgrade to the Superdrive for the mini. Much cheaper than trying to do it later.

The only other thing that can be upgraded is the hard drive, but that was partly the reason I chose the more expensive model. Given the cost of 2.5″ drives, it was worth the extra $100 for the twice-as-big HDD and I got a faster processor to boot. The faster processor probably isn’t really that noticeable and the 80GB drive upgrade is only $50 as an option, but I walked out of the store with this thing. There’s something to be said for not having to wait.

And my wife has a Mac mini on her desk to prove it.

Forty-four years ago, someone wrote an article in some obscure magazine (well, obscure to me, at least) about what life would be like in the year 2000. That was a long time from then, 39 years to be exact, so the “future” seemed a lifetime of technology away.

It is a pretty interesting read, really. A lot of technological forecasts and predictions, some of which may actually exist now in some form or other. But given the relative slow advancement of technology in the last 39 years (I did say relative), some still seem pretty unlikely, even 39 years from the year 2005.

Our children will learn from TV, recorders and teaching machines.

Ha, ha ha, that’s funn–oh wait, they already do. Is that supposed to be a good thing?

By default, iChat exposes your personal information, which is available to any other Mac user via Rendezvous. At home this probably wouldn’t matter, but at work, a conference, or school — well, you might not like other people snooping your info.

Fortunately, the fix is quite easy: Launch iChat and under “Privacy” in Preferences, check the box labeled “Block Rendezvous users from seeing my email and AIM addresses.”

via O’Reilly

Here’s an interesting image of what appears to be a crash in the display system for the video billboard at the Paris casino in Las Vegas. You can just make out some sort of dialog, but what really tickled me was the Windows cursor, larger than life, for all the world to see.

Except they shouldn’t.

Via MacMerc.

Sonnet, a big name in Macintosh accessories and upgrades, announced on Thursday the Tempo Bridge, a SATA to Parallel ATA adapter. Essentially, the little board plugs into the back of most 3.5″ hard drives, allowing G5 user’s to take advantage of the often cheaper parallel drives. Just slide the drive into the second slot, plug in the SATA and power cables and you’re done.

I recently just picked up a Seagate ATA 200GB for $69 after rebate and came across (but didn’t buy) their smaller 160GB drive for $49 after rebate. Granted, the $50 price tag for the adapter effectively puts even a rebated drive into the same price category as a comparable sized SATA drive, but when you have some big ATA drives lying around unused as I do, it seems worth it.

It’s due to ship on October 25th. Give it a few months and I’ll bet you can pick one up on eBay for half the price.

At just a tad larger than a business card, but with a 20GB hard drive, while it can’t play music from iTMS, it can store a heck of a lot more music than similar-sized flash and (much smaller) hard drive based players and it can play both WMA and WAV music files. It’s even priced the same as the iPod Mini, but with five times the storage.

That said, this one looks just sweet. No, not because it stars Jessica Alba in a skin-tight suit, but because we finally get to hear “It’s clobberin’ time!” from The Thing, see the Human Torch light up the sky, and see just how stretchy they make Mr. Fantastic.

Due out July 1.

I’ve seen things like this in my past programming days and I’m probably guilty of one or two myself. When you’ve been up all night coding, sometimes your brain just doesn’t work right.

There’s probably even been a time or two when I forgot to remove my debugging code for production and ended up with strange variables and output that shouldn’t be seen by an end user. Oops.

I didn’t read through every one of them, but from the ones I did, this is my favorite:

Once I had a junior programmer writing VB code that needed to know the day of the week. He decided to write his own code, and read something like:

 if (day = 1) or (day = 8) or (day = 15) or (day = 22) or (day = 29) then
 weekday = "Monday"
 elseif (day = 2) or (day = 9) or (day = 16) or  (day = 23) or (day = 30) then
 weekday = "Tuesday"
 ...

Trying to be educational I asked him for his opinion about his own code, and he said that he would simply modify it every month.

– PedroChan

Most of these I already understood to be what they were, but there were a couple that were new to me. A good resource for the next time your friend rants about how Saddam caused a Playstation 2 shortage back in 2000. You’ll know the truth!

It’s true, well, sort of.

It figures that some folks over in Japan have developed an Optical Camouflage suit. It works by projecting a video image of the background behind the subject onto the suit’s reflective material. In essence, the subject appears to blend into the background, as if they weren’t there.

This could have all sorts of applications and I’m sure the military would give a few bucks to get their hands on this technology. Of course, there are some issues to be worked out, like how to have a video camera “floating” around the soldier in just the right place so the enemy doesn’t see them and…well, you get the point.

It’s certainly an interesting breakthrough.

The Transformers was one of my favorite cartoons back then and I watched it religiously. I recently acquired many of the episodes on VHS (they’re these long, black cartridges that people used to watch movies on, back in the day) and the local video store carries the Transformers movie if I really want a dose of the old days.

Well, now it looks like Dreamworks, the Steven Spielberg studio, is going to release a live-action version, slated for a summer 2006 release. If it were anyone else, I’d wonder about the outcome, but with Spielberg behind this, it sounds like something I’ll go see, if only to relieve a moment of my youth on the big screen.

Well, it was interesting to come across this site and realize that there are actually girls that play Counter-Strike, some of whom are quite good, enough to be playing at the World Cup level. Of course, what was even more…interesting, for the lack of a better word, was that some of them are also hot.

If I wasn’t married, I might consider taking up Counter-Strike again.

The solution clamps the G5 into a 19-inch rack, the same amount of space taken up by a Power Mac G4, and rides its case on ball-bearing slide-rails that allow easy access to the computer’s interior and its rear connectors. The rack’s depth can be adjusted from 21 inches to 34 and it’s constructed of lightweight aluminum and steel. Pricing is US$250.

This seems like a slick idea, but I nearly fell out of my chair when I read this little blurb on their product info page:

We said we remove the handles… but, actually, we’ve set it up so that you can remove the handles. Complete do-it-yourself instructions and tips are included in the G5 Horizontal Rackmount package, so you can tackle the job with confidence and end up with a great-looking rackmounted G5.

What’s even more distressing is the drawing on page three of the associated PDF that depicts a hacksaw depriving the G5 of it’s blessed body parts. It wasn’t enough to just describe it (so pleasantly, I might add), they had to show it as well. At least they offer a service to do it for you, in case you chicken out and can’t bring yourself to such a drastic measure.

I suppose if you need to rackmount your G5, this is a great product. For me though, I think I’ll stick to keeping mine up on my desk.