Well, after weeks of struggling with my conscience, red faced approaches to Debbie, and so forth, I’ve finally succumbed, and ordered a Mac Mini.
1.42GHZ
256MB RAM (I can upgrade this at non-Apple prices)
80GB HDD
“Superdrive” DVD burner
“Airport” 802.11 wireless
It turns out there is a three week build time. The waiting game sucks, and we don’t even [...]
Nowadays if you buy an iPod, you don’t get a case, and if you want one you need to buy one separately. I happened to buy my iPod at a time when a case came bundled. An official Apple one like this.
I got used to it (even though it necessitates either the Apple remote [...]
When the Mac Mini was announced, I thought “Hmm, it’s only a matter of time before an enterprising third party makes a matching external hard drive that will sit underneath. They could probably have some USB and Firewire ports on it as well. Maybe an audio input.”
And — aside from the audio input — [...]
When I’m using the iPod out and about, I clip it to my belt in the case that it came with. Only the top edge of the iPod is accessible, and I frequently need to adjust the volume — for example, the ambient noise is much louder on a bus than it is on [...]
If, like me, you’re curious about what’s happened to the Macintosh user interface in the last ten years, but not quite curious enough to spend £340 (the cost of a Mac Mini — at the moment second hand Macs don’t seem competitively priced against a new Mini) on the experience, here is a PDF [...]
After several prototypes — including one which was stymied by the way clay shrinks as it dries — I’m proud to announce my Blue Peter “make”: a crafty home made iPod cradle for the car cupholder, made from two Coke cans.
Ajay has christened it the “iCup”…
I am the king of hobbies!
Blogging/Podcasting/content management/etc. developer and pundit Dave Winer often gets mentioned in NTK, generally when he gets petulant, or says something silly. He lives in a world where people use Macs and are prepared to pay him money for some kind of web scripting thingy. Hence when he pronounces, I generally pay no heed.
But, he [...]
Sneaky, sneaky, sneaky.
The Mac Mini is released, people look at the US price, people look at the European price, and they do some sums, and they take into account tax, and upgrade options, and eventually they come to the conclusion that, on balance, Europeans aren’t being ripped off all that badly. Certainly not as [...]
Life wasn’t worth living with the wireless access point out of action, and we were reduced to making an evening visit to PC World in Coventry. Wireless ADSL routers are de rigeur, and plain old APs didn’t seem to be available. I settled on a Philips “Wireless Base Station” which does slightly [...]
Oh Apple.
When I was doing my degree at Aston, the Computer Science department had two kinds of computer: Sun SPARC workstations, and Apple Macintosh desktops (some other departments had PCs which we were allowed to use, but we seldom found cause). The university was pretty much run on Macs: from admin offices to [...]