Woot! After adding a gigabyte of RAM to my new Mac mini, I’m very, very impressed with it. It’s really a very fast machine — faster than my new iBook.
Here are the Xbench scores of my Mac mini 1.42Ghz versus my G4/500 RAID server.
Note that this is after adding RAM. Before the RAM upgrade, the Mac mini was so horribly slow that I wanted to set it on fire. ProTip: max the RAM.
Apple to Supply iBooks for Cobb County
Apple???? today announced that the Cobb County School District has selected Apple as its supplier in the largest ever one-to-one computer learning initiative. The district’s program, named “Power To Learn,” plans for Apple to provide iBook???? G4s to every student and teacher in the district, starting with deployment this fall of more than 17,000 iBooks for teachers district-wide and students at four high schools designated as demonstration sites. Pending school board approval, the second and third phases of the program will equip all Cobb County high school and middle school students with iBooks beginning in 2006, resulting in a total deployment of 63,000 iBooks.
This is how not to install Tiger on an older G4:
Insert DVD.
Listen to DVD whir.
Realize you only have a CDRW installed, not a DVDR.
Mutter obscenities.
Re-visit the horror of installing the CDRW into the G4.
Locate old slot-load DVD-Rom drive.
Crack the G4 case and splice in the DVD-R.
Install Tiger, and be amazed.
These colorized Mac Minis look pretty sweet.
Is “colorized” really a word?
I’ve only found two comic book viewers — apps that will display compressed, scanned comic books — for OSX:
Jomic is large, slow, and Java-based [which you should have guessed from the prior description]. It doesn’t support gradiated image zoom (that I could find), so you can only view images at either full-size or fit-to-window, which is bad when you’re trying to read comic books on a smaller laptop screen.
It warms my technophilic heart to see this Mac mini leeched to the back of a large plasma screen, quietly injecting Apple-ness into the display.
I’m revoking my previous statement about how wonderful and cool NewsFire is.
As it turns out, NewsFire’s developer, Dave Watanabe, has decided to start charging $20 for it. My problems with this are many:
- NewsFire really isn’t worth $20. It’s an RSS reader. My toilet has an RSS reader, these days. It might be worth $5.
- There was never any indication that NewsFire was going to be shareware. There was just a prompt to upgrade, and a minor mention of a “registration” system in the release notes.
- There’s no real improvement over the existing, working 0.62 version.
- NetNewsWire Lite does the same thing, and is free. I’m not sure which drugs Mr. Watanabe is on. Gone are the days where a developer can give a marginally-better-than-the-competition application away for free, then arbitrarily decide to start charging for the next version. Particularly when Tiger’s version of Safari will support RSS feeds natively within a few months.
Hooray for TLAs.
The Mac OSX DVD Player User Operations Prohibition patch allows the user to perform actions that a DVD may regard as ‘prohibited’, such as skipping the ten thousand advertisements for whatever mindless drivel is being pumped out by Disney this month.
I haven’t tried it, so if you do, let me know if it melts your Mac.
One nice feature that the Powerbook has over the iBook is support for screen spanning: you can connect an external monitor to the laptop and ‘extend’ the desktop to the new monitor. For some inexplicable reason (save maybe another ‘selling point’ of the Powerbook), iBooks don’t ship with this feature. Instead, they only support screen ‘mirroring’, which is pretty worthless since the laptop goes to sleep with the lid closed.
Macservers.org has a nice article on how to configure the built-in Apache webserver, and how to install and configure MySQL and phpMyAdmin on OSX.
Some of the information in the Macservers article is out of date. I recommend getting the updated Mac OSX PHP 5.0 installer package from here. The newest MySQL package includes an installer for the OSX startup item script, so you won’t need to install the Entropy.ch one.