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.

The operating system and other software

I have Mac OS X Tiger installed on the little box, which actually gives me all the basics I need.  In addition to the basic install I have iLife (for sharing my iTunes and iPhoto libraries on my primary computer) and Firefox 3.  Yes, I could have used Safari, but Firefox comes with some cool plugins that will come in useful, and I’ll come onto that a bit later.

The internal hardware

The Mac Mini is running on a 1.42Ghz G4 PPC chip with only 512MB RAM, which is pretty pathetic by modern standards, and it really struggled when I was using it as my primary machine for work – browsing the web is no problem, but running a dozen large programs all at once really was asking too much from that amount of memory.  However, in this particular situation it should be plenty, and the onboard graphics chip handles video well enough.  And since I’m not going to be downloading massive media like films to play on it I don’t need much in the way of hard disk space either.  iPlayer and YouTube both stream their data so I’ve not had to clear out any space on the hard disk yet.  And if I do find myself needing more space later I can always delete some unwanted programs that I don’t use any more (Adobe Creative Suite isn’t really needed on a media centre).

Control freak

So, how do you control a computer from a sofa?  The immediate answer is an Apple Remote, but I don’t have one.  Neither do I have a spare keyboard to plug into it.  However, I did happen to have a wireless mouse knocking around.  Of course, there is only so much you can do with just a mouse – a keyboard is a necessity for typing stuff.  At least, that was until I discovered that Mac OS X actually comes with a virtual keyboard, which they cunningly call Keyboard Viewer.  Now I can bring up an on-screen keyboard and type with the mouse!

If you want to find it, you’ll need to go into System Preferences > International > Input Menu, and select the Keyboard Viewer from the list, and make sure you tick  “Show input menu in menu bar” at the bottom of the window.  You’ll get a little icon in your menu bar showing your country’s flag, and in that menu you’ll be able to bring up the Keyboard Viewer.  By default I think it comes up in the small mode; if that’s too small for you to see from the other side of the room you can click the little green expand button in the top left corner and it’ll expand to a bigger size.

DVI to S-video

A TV is not a monitor.  They speak very different languages, and display images in different ways (at least if you have a traditional CRT TV, if you have a flat screen TV it might be different).  However, a search around the net showed that all I needed was a DVI to S-video converter, provided by Apple, and I’d be in business.  I found one at a good price on eBay, and it arrived in the post yesterday.  So that plugs into the DVI connector on the back of the Mac Mini (Macs use DVI instead of VGA, don’t ask me why, but they effectively do pretty much the same thing), and the other end of the adapter provides a phono socket.  Yes, all you need is a standard phono cable like you’d use for your speakers and you can connect the adapter to a scart adapter.  Lots of adapters, yes, but it works.  OS X recognises what sort of display you’re using and adjusts its settings automatically when it boots up, so that makes it nice and straightforward.

So, that’s a lot of adapters, but it basically follows this sequence of connections:

Mac Mini DVI port > DVI to S-video adapter > phono cable > scart adapter > scart splitter > scart socket on TV

You might not need the scart splitter, but we’ve got too many devices and not enough built-in scart sockets.

Sounding good

The scart adapter I bought (from Tesco) actually has four sockets – video, s-video, left audio and right audio – but at the moment I’m only using one of them.  I’m sending the video to the TV but sending the audio straight to my sound system courtesy of a 2.5mm jack to twin phono cable, plugged into the headphones socket on the Mac Mini.  Sounds fantastic.  As long as the sound system speakers are turned on.

Getting online

My broadband router is upstairs in my study, where my old PC is connected to it via a traditional CAT5 cable, while my G5 and my wife’s laptop both connect wirelessly.  I do have another wireless dongle, a US Robotics USR805422 54Mbps USB adapter, which I used to use on the PC back when it was my primary computer.  Unfortunately no one has seen fit to make a Mac-compatible driver for it, so that presented a bit of a hurdle for my Mac Mini.  I didn’t really want to fork out for a new wireless dongle unless I really needed to.  And that was when my next brainwave hit – I could use my wife’s wireless dongle instead (she was out at the time so couldn’t argue).  Some Googling revealed that there was indeed a Mac driver for the Asus WL-167g.  I found a link on someone’s blog to the right software, downloaded it and installed it on the Mac Mini, and after a little tinkering around I got it working – hoorah!!  Unfortunately rebooting the computer meant that the software revealed its flaw – it wasn’t remembering connection profiles so you had to enter the network password every time you logged in, which wasn’t quite what I wanted.  Eventually I found a link to the official driver on the Asus web site, which appeared to be exactly the same software, but I installed it anyway and that seemed to solve the problem.  The Mac Mini now boots up, automatically logs in and connects to the internet.  Nice one.

A few little touches to make things easier

Of course, controlling a computer from the other side of a room has its difficulties – reading what’s on the screen is a bit of a nightmare.  I’ve set the resolution to 1024×768 for now to allow enough room for everything to fit on the screen, but it does tend to make the writing rather tiny.  I know my way around the OS well enough that I can get around without needing to be able to read everything, but there are a couple of things I’ve done to make it a bit easier for other people.

The dock is on the left hand side of the screen to allow for the keyboard viewer which sits at the bottom of the screen, and is set to be pretty big so you can see the icons nice and clearly.  Magnification is on too, so the icons get even bigger when you need them to be.

I’ve also set the mouse cursor to be bigger too, courtesy of the Universal Access options.  Not too big, just a little bit larger so it’s easier to find.  Unfortunately the Universal Access options don’t appear to provide a way to make all the text bigger in the OS, like you get in Windows, but you can zoom in by pressing Control and using the mouse’s scroll wheel.  And yes, that does work if you’re using the Control button on the Keyboard Viewer.

In Firefox, I’ve installed the Fast Dial plugin to give me nine big links when you open a new tab, like Opera does, which I’ve set to go to YouTube, iPlayer and RadioTimes.  Saves typing them in each time or going through a menu of bookmarks that’s too small to see.  This plugin even gives you a screenshot of the site so you can see where you’re going before you get there.  I’ve also installed the Zoom Toolbar which gives me three handy buttons in the toolbar for zooming in and out of web pages – useful if you want to actually read what’s on the web page.

In use

Now that it’s all set up, I’m really pleased with it.  It plays DVDs nicely (and with less interference than with our actual DVD player), plays all the music shared by my G5 computer upstairs, and iPlayer quality looks fantastic on the TV – I’m not using the uber-high-quality version either.  It’s only a 21″ TV and it’s not HD, so I guess any more quality than that would be wasted anyway.

Using a mouse as a remote is a little odd, but I’d get used to it.  It does give more control than a normal remote, but of course it does lack those instant control buttons that would make pausing and skipping chapters a little quicker – with the mouse I have to move it around (to wake it up) and then find the right button the on-screen controls before I can do anything.  Still, that’s a price I’m willing to pay for now.  I could invest in a wireless trackball mouse with programmeable buttons, but I doubt I’d be able to graft those buttons into the functionality of both iPlayer and YouTube.  So, a mouse it is, for now at least.

In conclusion

I only paid around £250 for the Mac Mini in the first place (second hand on eBay), and the only additional hardware I’ve needed to buy is the DVI to S-video converter and a few more cables.  My wife has graciously allowed me to use her wireless dongle with it, on the condition that I set up her laptop to use my old USR wireless dongle while she’s at work so that she doesn’t need to worry about it.  The fruit of my labour is that this morning I sat eating breakfast watching Top Gear on iPlayer from the comfort of my sofa.  It doesn’t get much better than that.

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!

Of course, avid blog readers will know that my little G3 didn’t last forever, and eventually ceased to switch on, at which point I bought the cheapest Mac I could lay my hands on at short notice – a 1.42GHz Mac Mini.  In terms of raw processing power the Mini was a little faster than the G3, but I noticed that it was still struggling under the weight of everything I was asking it to do.  It got there in the end, but lack of memory really bogged it down.  Clearly, 512MB of RAM just isn’t enough to run the 101 programs I use on a daily basis.

So, after some saving up and some careful eBaying, I finally took delivery of a G5 2GHz Dual Processor PPC running Mac OS X Leopard (10.5.3), with a whopping 2.5GHz of RAM and two 180GB hard disks.  This is actually the first time I’ve owned a high-end computer, and it makes such a difference.  It may not be brand spanking new, and it may be running on a PPC chip rather than Intel, but it rocks nonetheless.  So I thought I’d share a few of the highlights with you, along with some short reviews of the software I’ve been using so far that I haven’t reviewed already.

Mac OS X Leopard

At first glance the OS looks more or less the same as Tiger.  Everything is in much the same place as before, it works in pretty much the same way, and visually it’s all still very much recognisable.  Unlike the whole XP/Vista thing.  But it would be a mistake to say that Apple haven’t done much to release Leopard.  It’s all those little things they’ve done which add up to something quite spectacular.  The interface is mor consistent, the way the Finder works is a little more polished, the Dock has a bit more sparkle and fun in it, and there are some extra built-in apps that make life just a little bit simpler than they were with Tiger.

I actually spent quite a lot of time on Tiger trying to emulate some of the new features Leopard brought in, such as the unified interface (courtesy of UNO), backups (with a little help from iBackup), even Stacks (by simply putting a folder onto the Dock).  I’m pleased to report that the Leopard versions are the original and best.  Time Machine really is a one-click setup; I plugged my firewire drive in, Time Machine recognised it and asked me if I would like to use it for backups, and that was it.  I did look for extra options, but there weren’t any.  It just works.

The Dock was something that caught my eye when Leopard was first demoed by Steve Jobs.  No longer just a flat semi-transparent panel (as cool as that was), the new Dock is more like a shelf, complete with reflections of both the icons and the windows on the screen.  Very cool.  Not exactly a boost to performance or efficiency, and no doubt the novelty will wear off after a while, but it’s one of those little extras that make the whole experience just that little bit more satisfying.  It’s like finding that the cup holders in your car also have a slot for holding a stirring spoon.

I’m not quite so entranced by Stacks, though, I have to admit.  Sure, they look pretty sweet and have cool animations, but are they really necessary?  To my mind they’re a fun feature, but one that I would prefer to be able to turn on and off.

Another useful feature found in Leopard is the screen sharing option.  With another computer on the network you can log in and share the screen of the other computer, which apparently happens courtesy of the VNC protocol.  I’ve been unable to get this working seamlessly so far, unfortunately; I’ve got my Mac Mini on the network still, but I can’t directly log into it, I have to ‘ask permission’ and wait for it to be confirmed on the other computer.  That’s fine if your other computer has a screen, but my Mini doesn’t at the moment, so I have to either unplug the keyboard and monitor from the G5 and plug into the Mini just to confirm it and then plug it all back again, or use another VNC client to log in a different way.  I’m sure there must be a solution there somewhere, I just haven’t got to the bottom of it.  Incidentally, screen sharing with a PC works just fine.

Other built-in apps have also been given subtle make-overs, including Mail, iChat, Address Book and iCal.  Oh and the computer came preinstalled with iLife ‘08 too, plus a few other useful packages that nicely upgrade what I had before.

The G5

Right, I ought to say a quick something about the computer itself.  To start off with, it’s heavy.  Not just compared to the Mini, but compared to any other computer I’ve known.  That’s largely thanks to its metal case, but it also stands considerably taller than my old G3 Blue&White (which I still have, gathering dust).  Still, what makes it stand out even more than that is the sheer quality of it.  I took the side off and found myself looking at the most tidy and well thought out inside of a computer I have ever seen.  Beautiful.  Gorgeous.  Stunning.  While most PCs look like the inside of a Radio Shack back room, the G5 looks like an executive jet.  There are no random wires connecting odds and ends together, no unnecessary big empty spaces, no mess of IDE cables.  Just pure, simple elegance of design.

Unfortunately I had a reason for looking inside the case, beyond the basic intrigue.  The CD drive wouldn’t open; it just clunked and did nothing.  Further inspection showed that the drive must have shifted in transit and was sitting a little too high so that the tray was hitting the casing and not coming through the gap.  Corrective surgery was needed, but thanks to the G5’s marvellous interior designers this proved to be easy as pie.  No screwdriver was necessary, just flick a couple of latches and the whole CD unit unlocked itself and became free.  I was then able to reposition it, relatch it, and it all worked fine.  Nice.

It’s also got an Airport wireless card, Bluetooth, and a selection of USB and Firewire ports.  Which are all very useful too.

Firefox 3

I know this isn’t quite on topic, but I thought it was worth a mention anyway.  While installing all my usual programs onto my fresh Leopard I found that Firefox was offering its release candidate of version 3.  I had previously been a great advocate of Camino, what many would call the Mac version of Firefox, and had an alpha release of Firefox 3 for testing purposes.  There were problems with it though, and I stayed with Camino for the sake of stability and consistency.  However, now that FF RC3 is out, Camino hasn’t been used here much at all.

FF3 is a marked improvement over FF2 on the Mac.  Although FF2 remains arguably the best browser for the PC, on the Mac it was awful.  It was slow, it forgot where it put its memory (ah, the irony), and looked hideous.  FF3 promised a lot, and seems to have delivered on most of its early promises, giving Mac users a browser that looks good, feels responsive, and gives Safari some serious competition on the performance front.  And on top of all that you get that huge repository of addons just in case the basic functionality isn’t enough.

So FF3 is set to become my primary browser for the time being, even though it is still on a Release Candidate (which basically means it’s not completely finished yet, but they’re happy for people to test it for them).

The end

Yep, that’s it for now.  Of all of that, only FF3 is actually new news, the rest has been common knowledge for a while now, it just hasn’t been on my desk until now.  Still, it’s so nice to finally have a computer that is more than capable of running everything I throw at it.  I’ve got iStat meters in my menu bar showing what my two processors are up to, and so far they have yet to break a sweat…

He recommended looking at a PowerMac G5, which isn’t brand new but would provide plenty of power and retain the ability to upgrade in the future. I was a little dubious to begin with, but a quick look at eBay showed that a typical PowerMac G5 was actually cheaper than a comparatively priced iMac. Tempting.

In fact, it wasn’t long before I realised I was looking at something I knew I was destined to purchase. A PowerMac from June 2004, with a dual 2GHz G5 (PPC) processor, 2.5GB RAM, two 160GB hard disks, Mac OS 10.5 ‘Leopard’, and a few pre-installed programs. Not only was this pretty much exactly what I was looking for, but it was cheaper than I had expected to find it. I looked at the photos. I checked some other listings. I came back and looked at the specs again. I checked my e-mails. I came back again and made sure it was still there. No amount of procrastination was going to change the fact that it was exactly what I wanted, at a price I could afford.

So I went downstairs to make myself a cup of tea.

At that point my wife told me off for procrastinating and told me to go and buy the computer before someone else did. So I did. The only snag in the process is that PayPal only allows me to pay for items up to £500 on their basic account – to purchase anything more expensive than that I need to pay them for the privilege. Grrr. So I’ve contacted the seller and I’m going to see if I can pay by cheque or bank transfer or something. Either way I’ve committed to buy it, so it’s technically mine, even if money hasn’t changed hands yet.

So, yay! I have a new computer set to arrive within the next few days! I get bucketloads of memory, stacks of hard disk space, and the joys of Leopard. My next challenge will be selling my cute Mac Mini, and preferably getting rid of the dead G3 under my desk too. Any takers? I’m guessing there will be more people interested in a working computer than a dead one…

To be fair, the Mac Mini has been superb. It looks great, does the job very nicely, is blissfully quiet, and has a faster processor than the G3. And for a £260 Mac, it really was a bargain. Unfortunately, however, its power just doesn’t match up to my needs, and I’ve reached the point where I have to seriously consider budgeting for a more powerful alternative.

In truth, I am not the sort of user Apple targeted the Mac Mini at. I use my computer for significantly more than surfing the web and checking e-mails. On an average working day I will normally end up with at least a dozen programs all open at once, some of them big hefty ones like Photoshop; and my nice big 19″ monitor still isn’t big enough, and I make regular use of virtual desktops, switching between various screens for different types of work. All this is sometimes reasonably processor-intensive, and definitely requires plenty of RAM. And it’s on this count that my Mac Mini falls down.

The 1.42Ghz G4 processor isn’t exactly sluggish, and handles everything I throw at it. It’s the memory that lets it down. The 512MB of RAM is quickly used up, and beyond that it seems to spend all its time swapping memory in and out from the hard disk, which slows everything down considerably and doesn’t do the hard disk much good either. I did consider upgrading the memory in the Mac Mini, but it only has one slot and has an upper limit of 1GB, which I don’t think will be enough for very long.

So, the upshot of all this is that I’m looking at buying a new computer. By ‘new’, incidentally, I mean second-hand, but not old. After reading an interesting article on buying a Mac the other day I don’t think I’ll need a nuclear-powered fire-breathing Mac Pro, that’s perhaps a little too much power and far too many pennies. And a laptop just isn’t enough of a step up from my Mac Mini to be worth the expense, along with the fact that I would never need it to move from the desk. It seems the iMac is therefore the best option for me at the moment, with its reasonable price and mid-range performance. It also has a built-in screen, which means I can use my existing TFT monitor as an additional screen for some double-headed fun. I’ve found some machines on eBay with 4GB RAM and 2GHz processors, and that should certainly do me for a while.

The only problem with this approach is that it’s harder to replace bits when they go wrong. Then again, when do Macs go wrong? My old G3 only died because it was old, and by old I mean really old, and by really old I mean it originally had a 450MHz processor. Ouch.

So, a new iMac is on the cards for the near future. The biggest complication in all of this is that we’re also trying to save every penny at the moment for a deposit for a house, so that needs to be factored in as well. Before I buy myself a shiny new computer, I shall need to make sure I can guarantee I can sell my Mac Mini to a good home and get some return on it. Anyone interested?

Despite being newer and having a faster processor (1.42Ghz rather than 1Ghz) I have to confess the speed increase wasn’t particularly noticeable. In some ways it was much better – its graphics capabilities were much higher, allowing it to do the funky Quartz stuff – but it still struggled on occasions, especially when running several large programs at the same time. That, sadly, is just the way my work goes though – it’s a rarity if I have less than 10 apps running at once, and that could well include several browsers, Photoshop, e-mails, RSS client, FTP client, calendar, address book, word processor… when I’m in full flow it gets rather crowded! In fact, that’s on reason I’m using a virtual desktops setup, giving me the ability to put different programs on different virtual screens, keeping things a little more organised.

I discovered today (or rather, confirmed) that the likely cause of the sluggishness is the lack of memory. The old G3 had a nice 800Mb of RAM, which was enough for the design work I was doing (it was the processor power that held that computer back most of all). My PPC Mac Mini only has 512Mb, which apparently isn’t enough for what I want to be doing. I checked out the memory usage with vm_stat today, and discovered that a fair amount of effort is going into performing page ins and page outs, where the physical memory is so overloaded that the OS has to swap stuff in and out of hard disk space to keep going. Not only is this an extra strain on the processor and hard disk, but it takes time – hard disks are much slower than RAM.

Upgrading a Mac Mini isn’t going to be easy, but it is possible. The most I can put in is 1Gb apparently, and the hardest part is getting the case off. I’ve found a few tutorials on how to do this, and a new 1Gb RAM chip (it can only hold one at a time, unfortunately) will set me back about £30. So that may be another expense to put through the business accounts soon. I’ll let you all know how it goes. Assuming the computer survives the ordeal…