About a year ago I bought myself a cute little Mac mini to replace my Blue&White G3 that had died.  Around six months later I ditched the Mac Mini in favour of a more powerful and capable G5 tower which now acts as my primary computer.  Since then I’ve been at a loss to know what to do with my Mac Mini; I tried selling it to people I know, but no one was interested – I had bought it second hand and it just wasn’t new enough or powerful enough to be of interest to anyone.  So it sat in a bag on the floor in the study, feeling sorry for itself.  Until yesterday.

Having bought my wife a new mobile phone I found myself thinking about technical things (to try to quash the feelings of jealousy at her having a nicer phone than me), and after much research I found I could actually make use of the Mac Mini for very little additional cost.  We don’t watch much TV, so it wouldn’t actually be of any benefit to us for me to install a funky internet TV system, but watching iPlayer and YouTube on the telly sounded like a cool idea – much more comfortable than several people trying to cram into the study to watch stuff on my computer.

This, then, is not a detailed tutorial on how to create a media centre, but rather an explanation of what I have done to create my particular system.  It might not be what you need, and I don’t pretend to have all the answers to every question you could possibly have on media centres.  But I will be including screenshots to explain stuff, and hopefully someone will find at least some of this useful, or vaguely interesting.

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The geniuses (or should that be genii??) behind the Firefox project have come up with a nifty bit of marketing to get everyone to download the latest release of their web browser.  Instead of just releasing it, they’re hyping it up and going for a world record to see how many downloads they can accumulate in the space of 24 hours.  Firefox 3, available for PC, Mac, and all those ‘other’ operating systems, should be a massive step forward compared to Firefox 2, and challenges most other browsers too.  It claims to be faster than Safari on the Mac, and faster than IE7 on the PC, and with the enormous community base and a massive library of add-ons available, Firefox’s finger in the pie is surely set to grow.

However, there has been significant confusion in the world-wide-web community, because it’s still not available.  We were told that Firefox 3 would be available on 17th June.  It’s been 17th June all day, and here in the UK we’re running out of day in which to download the darn thing.  And yet there is no sign of it on the Firefox web site.  There are some clever people who have managed to locate the actual download separate from the web site, but that’s cheating somewhat, and I wonder whether those results will count in the world record stats.  Take a look at the comments on this news item and you’ll see people from around the world thoroughly confused at the lack of the promised download, wondering how, why and who screwed it all up.

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Over the years I’ve owned a motley collection of computers.  My first (other than family computers) was a little laptop I came to university with.  It was relatively cheap, being in an end-of-line sale at Novatech, so it wasn’t exactly state of the art by the time I bought it.  It had a 360MHz AMD processor, 32MB of RAM, a 5.6GB hard disk, and ran Windows 95.  Not exactly impressive, even then.  Still, it did me fine for a year, though it did spend most of its life sat on my desk and wasn’t really mobile much.  After that came a 1.2GHz tower, with 128MB RAM, 20GB hard disk, and Windows XP.  Even though it was still entry-level it was a significant step up for me, and allowed me to play games.  Not very good games, but they were games nonetheless.

However, it wasn’t long before I grew tired of the plastic look of XP, and started modding my desktop with all manner of programs, making it look very little like Microsoft designed it to be.  Eventually I found myself themeing everything I could lay my hands on to make it look more like a Mac, striving for that perfect interface.  It was no surprise then when a few years later I bought my first Mac, a second hand G3 Blue&White.  Although originally it would have been only 450MHz the previous owner had stuffed a 1GHz G4 upgrade chip from Sonnet in there, which made a big difference.  In terms of numbers it should have been slower than the PC it replaced, but in fact it was still faster and smoother and certainly more satisfying to use.  Hooray for Apple!

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Work has generally been quite busy recently.  Which is a good thing.  More work means more money.  However, there is more to life than work, and there are a whole load more things I need to squeeze into my week than just work.  I’d like to share just a few of this week’s additional bits and bobs with you.  It gives me something to do after all.

This afternoon I took the opportunity to put work on hold briefly while I went outside and mowed the lawn.  It has needed doing for a while now, and I’ve been putting it off, but today I figured I ought to take advantage of the sunshine and get out there while I can.  Looking at the forecast, the weekend isn’t going to be too promising.  The lawn actually needs treating at some point, as one half of it looks to be more moss than grass.  We’ve got some moss-killer, it’s just a case of spraying it on and letting it do its job.  I didn’t get round to that today, but I did cut the grass and do the edges, so the garden is looking nice now.  I also noticed that the peas in our vegetable patch are beginning to grow too!  We’ve got carrots and parsnips in there too, but I only planted them last week so it’s no surprise they’re not topside yet.

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