Palfrey's life

I'm not sure whether to be happy or panic right now. I've had this idea kicking around in my head for quite some time of a "media box" - a small, fanless, solid state computer suitable to play *any* media I throw at while sitting in my living room. Intended core of this box was going to be the MS10000E board from Via - first small fanless board I've seen that could play pretty much anything I'd throw at it - which has got delayed and delayed, hence my not building this yet.

Now, and here's where the shameful guilt kicks in, I heard a few days ago about this. The Mac mini. Yes, an Apple product. The creator of the "iMac Must Die" page is considering buying an Apple product. Oh, the irony.... Ok, at least I'm not paying normal Apple prices for it, and that hard drive will get rapidly pulled and replaced with a Compact Flash card that will have Linux on it, but still. Ok, they've built a quiet, light system that has everything I want. I won't have to deal with potential issues re: building my own compact system with little knowledge of decent cooling. And the lure of having a different architecture is significantly tempting... I will have to wander into the realm of the thrice cursed enemy (aka an Apple store), control my shudders of revulsion, and find out just how quiet this thing is. If we're talking literally whisper quiet (preferably with a passively cooled CPU), then I think I'm gonna have that. Damnit. Why do those bastards have to build exactly the right combination of hardware for me. Damn their eyes!

In the buffer
Response to /. story on a look inside the BBCs network: Man holding teacup: "Nigel, what's that sudden whirring noise?". Made me laugh.
Cool wired story on synthetic biology. There's a guy on page 3 building a metabolic pathway from scratch. That's very cool.
Good grauniad cartoon on the Blair/Brown situation