Weekly randoms
Useful discovery: iTunes will authorise against multiple iTunes Store accounts, and this flows through to AppleTV. If the lack of useful captioning weren’t an issue I could absolutely see subscribing to 10 or so TV shows — the price is similar to buying a season on DVD but you get ‘em as soon as they air in the US, with no ads, and no mucking about converting for playback. 10 shows a year is cheaper than even basic cable here, and much better value too.
Last weekend I got fed up with Vista making things break and nuked the PC, installing XP and using it only for games and video encodes. The “main” machine is my old first-generation G5 iMac hooked up to a decent display, and it’s perfectly usable though I can really notice the difference between this old machine and the first-gen Core2 Duo iMac at work. Not going to do anything in any great hurry, but this does rather confirm for me that I should be looking to update to a newer Mac at home some time this year.
We had a large bin delivered on Wednesday and have spent some of the long weekend clearing out accumulated rubbish. I’ve finally chucked the last remaining big box of cables and we’ve gained maybe 1/3rd of our study back. The kitchen is also looking much better. By spreading this out over the weekend we’ve been able to get stuff done without feeling like we’ve given up much time to do it.
Weight-loss continues, slowly. I’ve lost about 7kg since we started this 3-ish months ago. Our scales have given up, so we’ll need to buy new ones. 7kg is a drop in the ocean — overall I want to lose 60kg from my starting point — but hey, 10% is 10%. It all feels quite viable, I’ve quit with the obsessive calorie-counting now, but that stage is useful for getting your head into the right place.
The new Portishead album sounds a bit mechanically goth. It reminds me a bit of Switchblade Symphony, but with more drum machine. Not sure how I feel about it, will have to give it a few more listens.
Popularity: 31% [?]
Yah. If you’re not particularly looking to do anything heavy-lifting graphics related (i.e., games), then a Mac Mini will be perfectly suitable for home use.
If you are, a Mac Pro will be particularly nice.
Oh, I forgot to mention, an Airport Extreme or Time Capsule is also very very nice to go with it, since Time Machine is particularly awesome. I’ve been using the Extreme with the two older version Macbook Pro laptops around the house, an attached Targus USB hub and 3 external drives, and it’s very nice.
There are two options: keep the PC around for games, in which case a Mini would do Just Fine. Or consolidate it all onto a single machine. But a Pro is too expensive.
Thanks to Australian tax law a Macbook Pro is cheaper than an iMac, so I’m tending in that direction. Also have rather more confidence in the GPU in those than that in the iMac.
At the moment I’m not using Time Machine, but when I (eventually) retire the house server I plan to get an external case for the 300GB disk in there and use TM with that. We also do offsite backups using Jungle Disk which works very nicely with the Mac.