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palfrey at 01:41am on 09/05/2005
palfrey at 01:41am on 09/05/2005I've crossed it. The line I felt I never would. The one that I would not do, one of the very few personal choices that I would explicitly bitch against those who would choose this path...
...I gave money to Apple (ok, not quite. I gave it to people who will in some way probably eventually hand over most of to Apple, but it's close enough). For those of you not aware of my usual feelings on this topic, go to my page on the iMac, read it and then come back. I will now attempt to reason my way out of this. I bought a Mac Mini, one of the minimum spec machines (1.25Ghz, 256mb ram, 40gb hdd), for use as the latest incarnation of my attempts to build a media box for my living room. Why did I buy the Apple product? Simple: equivalent PC hardware (similar weight/size/noise levels, lower specs) was looking at the fat end of 600 euros for a custom build system that I wouldn't be sure of getting the thermal setup right until afterwards, and the mini was selling for 499.
It's really fricking small. I think I've got an old HDD (very, very old) somewhere that's bigger than this thing. Once I got it back and switched it on, I decided that I should at least have a go with OS X, if only to see if it was customizable enough so I wouldn't have to start from scratch with the machine, and also because I felt I was already deep enough in, so shaking hands with a few more devils at this point was becoming less of an issue. I lasted about an hour. I didn't think it was possible for software to create psychosomatic effects, but after an hour with this thing I felt like a prisoner trapped in a very small box, scrabbling away at the walls.
It's final act was to burn a Gentoo boot cd (normally I'm a Debian man, but this was a special case - low specs, so I wanted to get maximum optimisations. Hence Gentoo, the distro for ricers) so I could start installing Linux. I'd have been done about 36 hours ago if I was using Debian, but I think the end result will be worth it. I'm using Freevo to start with and getting everything setup, and then when I get the TV adaptor (they were out of stock at the weekend, more stock Tuesday) it'll go downstairs and start the testing there.
I'm considering spray-painting the damn thing black, if only to get rid of the Apple logo on the top.
...I gave money to Apple (ok, not quite. I gave it to people who will in some way probably eventually hand over most of to Apple, but it's close enough). For those of you not aware of my usual feelings on this topic, go to my page on the iMac, read it and then come back. I will now attempt to reason my way out of this. I bought a Mac Mini, one of the minimum spec machines (1.25Ghz, 256mb ram, 40gb hdd), for use as the latest incarnation of my attempts to build a media box for my living room. Why did I buy the Apple product? Simple: equivalent PC hardware (similar weight/size/noise levels, lower specs) was looking at the fat end of 600 euros for a custom build system that I wouldn't be sure of getting the thermal setup right until afterwards, and the mini was selling for 499.
It's really fricking small. I think I've got an old HDD (very, very old) somewhere that's bigger than this thing. Once I got it back and switched it on, I decided that I should at least have a go with OS X, if only to see if it was customizable enough so I wouldn't have to start from scratch with the machine, and also because I felt I was already deep enough in, so shaking hands with a few more devils at this point was becoming less of an issue. I lasted about an hour. I didn't think it was possible for software to create psychosomatic effects, but after an hour with this thing I felt like a prisoner trapped in a very small box, scrabbling away at the walls.
It's final act was to burn a Gentoo boot cd (normally I'm a Debian man, but this was a special case - low specs, so I wanted to get maximum optimisations. Hence Gentoo, the distro for ricers) so I could start installing Linux. I'd have been done about 36 hours ago if I was using Debian, but I think the end result will be worth it. I'm using Freevo to start with and getting everything setup, and then when I get the TV adaptor (they were out of stock at the weekend, more stock Tuesday) it'll go downstairs and start the testing there.
I'm considering spray-painting the damn thing black, if only to get rid of the Apple logo on the top.
uncomfortable
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