Oh, sorry, you’ll be wanting some context.  Ahem.  Allow me to back up and start again.

I now have a second person on my insurance policy, and much to my wife’s disappointment it’s not her.  My friend Sarah has another driving test coming up next week and wanted to get as much practice as possible before zero-hour, so I put her on my insurance for a week as an additional named driver.  Of course, that’s meant that I’ve had to actually take her out in the car, which was pretty scary, for both of us.

Our first outing was on Tuesday, and was a first for both of us – for Sarah it was the first time she had driving any car other than her instructor’s, and for me it was the first time I had let someone else drive my car.  It took a while for Sarah to get to grips with the car, being larger and heavier and more sensitive than she’s used to.  In fact, that first trip out was pretty hairy, narrowly missing several cars and leaving me digging my fingers into the passenger seat and pressing my right foot firmly into the footwell where the brake pedal ought to be.

Thankfully though today’s outing was much more encouraging.  We went a little further afield, did some higher speeds (on the dual-carriageway), and Sarah was much more confident with her control of the car.  Which was encouraging because it means that a significant proportion of my worries from last time were down to the car rather than her driving ability.  So all is good.

It got me thinking though – could I actually be a professional driving instructor?  I do have a passion for driving, and lots of patience, and I’m usually fairly good at explaining things.  On the other hand, I am a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to driving, and I’m not sure I could cope with just sitting there and letting learner drivers ruin the clutch and the gearbox.  To be honest, I’d prefer to be in the driver’s seat than the passenger’s.  Maybe I should be a chouffeur.  Or a rally driver.  Or maybe I could sit at home and make pretty web sites.  Oh wait, I already do.

One final thing.  I can’t remember exactly how I stumbled across it, but today I found a YouTube channel that I felt compelled to subscribe to.  I’m not a huge YouTuber, and I’ve never subscribed to anything before, so that just shows how good it was.  From what I can tell it’s just this guy in Bath who films himself doing random things.  It’s absolutely hilarious, just my sort of sense of humour!  He’s got a video about how to make the perfect cup of tea, which (appropriately) I watched while drinking a cup of tea.  So if your randomness levels are on a temporary low, check out charlieissocoollike.  It’s worth five minutes of your life.  It really is.

The first gem I found was directed to is a mick-take of the age-old Mario Bros video game that grew to popularity with the advent of the original Gameboy.  This video takes a look at the scene at the end of the level where Mario saves the princess.  Hilarious.  A little gory right at the end, but nothing too graphic.  Definitely worth a watch.

My second offering is the epitomy of cute, and despite the complete lack of verbal script the story it conveys is brilliantly executed.  The animation is simplistic – line drawings only – but is carefully and wittily crafted into a short animation that’s beautiful and hilarious.  And so true.  Also worth a watch are the three other animations by the same artist.

And finally, a bit of silliness, courtesy of the end of the world.  Yes, someone’s gone and done a rap about the Large Hadron Collider.  Silly, silly, silly.  They’ve even put the words up on the video so you can sing along.  I’ve no idea how accurate it is from a scientific standpoint (but then how much of science is completely accurate anyway?), but it’s the sort of thing I can imagine physics teachers would like to use in class to give the impression they’re cool, and undoubtedly prove otherwise in the process despite their efforts.

So there we go, a selection of video clips I found amusing today.  Not my own work, but never fear – normal service will resume presently…

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.

My own conclusions seem to run along the following lines: PCs are cheap and familiar and make good home computers, but tend to get easily overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of software available and it susceptibility to viruses; Macs are beautiful and easy to use once you get the hang of them, but the insistence on top-quality hardware pushes the prices up; Linux is great for getting down and dirty with networking and programming and suchlike, but lacks the intuitive user interface for most normal people.

I was slightly dubious, therefore, when I came across this video entitled “Mac vs. PC”, inwardly groaning at the thought of yet another OS-bashing video.  However, this one takes the idea a step further, drawing inspiration from a cartoon/toy/movie franchise that claims to be “more than meets the eye”.  This video is definitely worth a peek!

Many thanks to The Unofficial Apple Weblog for this particular link.  Good stuff.