Mac Mini vs. Airport Extreme/Express?

With Apple’s recent release of the Mac Mini for just $499, the following question arises in my mind: Why buy an Airport Extreme ($199) or Airport Express base station ($129) when the Mac Mini can do so much more? Price aside, the Mac Mini soars past the capabilties of the others.

Any Mac running Mac OS X can act as a simple wireless base station if it has an Airport card installed. Most Macs can run iTunes, and have a Modem, Ethernet, and Internet Sharing Capabilties. (as well as firewall capabilties built-right-into the OS) Most Macs can also share Printers with other users on a network… just as an Airport Base Station can.

Well, when I say “Most Macs”… the Mac Mini can do *all* of these things… as well as thousands more! Not only can it act as a file server for Windows/Mac/Unix/the Internet, an iTunes server, an iPhoto server, a WEB server, and a Print server, but it can play DVDs and music… as well as display photos… on a nearby LCD, Plasma TV, or computer monitor. (via a DVI or VGA hookup on most models… Apple also offers an S-Video/Composite adapter if you’re looking to hook it up to any other type of TV)

Why didn’t they call it the XServe Mini? Installing Mac OS X Server brings even more server-related functionality. Plus, using it as an Internet Connection Sharing server for the house places the system in the perfect place on the network to act as a web-based server… accessable to millions if you so desire. (much of this functionality is also available in home versions of Mac OS X as well… such as the ability to run your own website)

But what about the AirTunes functionality offered with Airport Express base stations? If you don’t have a monitor/keyboard/mouse hooked up, throw a copy of “Share My Desktop” (free) onto the Mac Mini and remote control the computer from another Mac with VNCViewer (free). Your Mac Mini can also be controlled from Windows and Unix-based machines with similar “VNC viewer” applications.

You can dock and charge, and sync your iPod in the living room now by just plugging it into the back of the Mac… and sync your music as well by using your iTunes library remotely through a network share.

Who needs an iPod Photo to hook up to your TV when you can just open iPhoto on the Mac Mini and get that Ken Burns Effect? :)

Did I mention that it’s also a full-blown Mac? For all this it seems like a real bargain… especially when considering an Airport Base Station instead.

The Mac Mini is about the same size as the Airport Extreme Base Station… so I guess it just depends on what kind of functionality you’d like, and how much you want to spend.

All in all, the Mac Mini has a LOT of potential. (I’ve heard about people putting them in their cars… more on this later if I end up doing that, too. *wink*)

Told ya’ so…

“Classroom cultures that favor female students and an increase in learning disabilities may explain the academic gap.”

this is exactly why I’m taking time off from school at the moment… who wants to sit in a classroom and be bored when you could be doing other things? I think the current education system is absolute crap and needs to be re-built from the ground up. (see linked article for more.)

follow-up:

“The WAR AGAINST BOYS : How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men” — I encourage you to scroll down and read Amazon’s review, as well as what readers have said near the bottom. Not only has almost everyone given the book 4 or 5 stars, but everyone’s raving with what the author has to say.

“Girls Rule” — Similar to the book linked above, another interesting article.

Why doesn’t somebody do something? This doesn’t seem like a new problem….

“Girl Gets Cabbage Patch Doll With Obscene Message”

hahah computer “randomly generates serial numbers.” hmmmmm… guess what letter’s under the blue post-it thing… :P

the family was reportedly very offended. (everyone else, reportedly, couldn’t keep a straight face.)

confirmed: the new “screen savers” sucks

A few days ago I blogged about how the new TSS (The Screen Savers) on G4TechTV is a disaster. (if you have no idea what I’m talking about, click-here to read my original post) HOWEVER… thank you, dan huard, for exposing all of the bullshit that’s been going on. (he did the live call production, etc.) he also mentioned some of the scandals going on behind the scenes, such as the fake live calls he was instructed to produce. I’ve linked to his blog post at the bottom of this one.

see, what I love about his post is that he also expressed the fact that Chi-Lan Lieu (one of the new hosts) is an absolute moron. The show’s completely ruined… I can’t believe they were actually FAKING the live calls!! Yet, that’s so G4… watch them cancel the show now due to lack of popularity..

Seriously, what was the point of the G4/TechTV merger… all G4 did was take all of the TechTV programming out of production and expect all of TechTV’s viewers to watch their gamer-targeted crap. Now I have G4’s old channel number and TechTV’s channel number displaying the same crap. Everyone’s completely pissed, including me!

I have to admit, I still TiVo the show and quick-skip through it in-case they have something cool on (kevin rose is still producing some segments, as far as I know, so there’s bound to be SOMETHING interesting) but other than that the show, and the network (for that matter), completely suck and I really don’t think that they’re going to make it.

thank you amazon. you made my day.

I’ve never had a hard drive fail, and yesterday I decided that since a lot of the critical data for my project is stored on my laptop, I’d better start backing this up. I bought the original 17-inch powerbook available from apple so I was blessed with Firewire 800 (twice as fast as the original firewire 400)… and boy was it time to start using it.

I was originally planning on getting Maxtor’s OneTouch backup solution (250GB), but none of maxtor’s products had Firewire 800… so I ended up going with a LaCie 250GB USB2.0/Firewire 400/Firewire 800 drive. Can’t go wrong there… that’ll hook up to about anything. What kind of sucked was that I didn’t have Maxtor’s “OneTouch” backup software, but I later found out that LaCie offered a freeware backup solution that was fairly similar, so I was set.

The LaCie drives were hard to find… every CompUSA across the country was sold out of every size but the 500GB one… which was WAY too expensive… but I later learned that the Apple stores had every size in stock. The problem was that yesterday I had no car because my brother took ours to work. Damn it!

So I ended up ordering it from Amazon yesterday afternoon with overnight shipping. By the end of the evening, it hadn’t shipped yet according to their order status page (it was listed under “shipping soon”, and I was pissed.) I assumed it was a mistake because I’d ordered it so early in the day with overnight shipping and they had it in stock, and it seems I was right because I woke up this afternoon (hah) and it had shipped from their warehouse in PA. Nice! It’ll be here tonight.

how long do YOU have to live??

yeah so according to www.DeathClock.com I’m underweight and I’m going to die in 2061… August 23, 2061 that is. At this time of posting I have about 1,787,556,240 seconds left to live!! maybe I shouldn’t be watching this dumb movie…. it’s wasting precious seconds! oh no!

the screen savers…nope.

everybody was quick to bash the G4TechTV merger when it first went down, but I held off before the results were clearly visible. I decided I’d give the new hosts a shot, check out the changes, and then make appropriate comments a little later on. Here’s my rant.

I wouldn’t call myself the most diehard TSS fan, but it wasn’t a bad show. I remember buying a ReplayTV just to tape the episodes (and a few other things as well). I actually found out about ReplayTVs from TSS. funny.

here’s a history… if you know all about the G4 merger and that kind of thing… skip down to my rant.for those of you that have no idea what I’m talking about, TSS is a show on TechTV (now called G4TechTV) that generally has gadgets, tech tips, and answers live calls.. that kind of thing.

this show used to be great, but I have to say that even I’ve stopped caring about it. the show has a lot of history, though. for a while it was filmed in “the basement” set, before it was moved to san francisco. for those of you who don’t know the story, a few months after the brand-new set G4TV “merged” with TechTV to form G4TechTV. G4 realized that they couldn’t have a TV network *just* about gaming and decided that merging with TechTV was a good call.

I think that the merger was a good idea in theory, but I could not believe the results. First of all, it seemed like G4 became the controlling party in the situation and decided that it was going to get rid of most of the decent TechTV programming and force the G4 stuff upon us loyal viewers. First of all, they torn down the *new* TSS set and build *another one* in Los Angeles and moved the show there. They fired the entire TechTV staff with a few exceptions… mostly being some members of the cast of TSS.

TSS remained normal for a while with the new co-host Alex Albrecht (working with the remaining Kevin Rose, who took Leo Laporte’s place after he left the show….I never really liked Leo, and it seemed like Kevin knew a lot more than he did anyway), but later on they decided to fire Alex. Why? No idea. Kevin Rose decided that he didn’t want to host the show anymore… so G4 brought in these two newbies: Kevin Pereira and Chi-Lan Lieu.

Okay, here’s where my rant starts. So everyone was bashing Kevin Pereira which I thought was kind of sad, but he just isn’t TSS material. I can’t say it any better than that. I think Kevin Rose and Sarah Lane should host the show and those guys should work in the nook or something. That would be a lot less crappy.

Now that the live audience has disappeared… the show seems completely dead. I have no idea why they ditched the audience, but it’s gone and so is the show’s charm. The new hosts have got to go. I feel so bad for the TSS veterans like Yoshi and even Dan Huard who just got fired like that. It sucks! I would have been mad pissed if some new tool CEO comes in and just bounced everyone like that.

The G4 programming sucks. TechTV’s was *much* better. As far as I know, The Screen Savers and X-Play are the only shows still in production that are left over from the TechTV days… even though TSS is totally different. What was the point of this merger? G4’s attempt to gain viewers failed miserably. Now I have two channels on my cable box with the same crap. I don’t give a crap about gaming except for an occasional PS2 title… and now I have to listen to morons talk on shows like Judgement Day… which in my opinion is nothing but a crappy spin-off of X-Play with no hot Morgan Webb on it.

In conclusion, the balance at the old TechTV was good… one or two shows about gaming (X-Play), and then the rest about other “techy” things like gadgets, tech tips, live calls, and cool stuff. Now, we’ve got another channel full of crap gaming footage. I mean come on… they have a show where all they do is show footage of gameplay. That’s just so stupid. What a waste. TechTV RIP.

new apple store being built

I was at the mall buying some kicks and I noticed that Apple was building a new store at a nearby mall, South Shore Plaza in Braintree, MA. Sweet. Now maybe I can score a job while working on my latest project. Better update my resumé…

I happened to take a picture:

ipodlinux installer 0.3a

I saw a post on slashdot about the latest version of iPodLinux being reviewed on xlr8yourmac, so I’m giving everyone a heads up that you can dual boot into linux mode and keep the original Apple iPod OS on there… a good call. Hoorah. I’ve got it on my iPod… it’s got some neat features. Check out the linked review for download locations and other features.

moby tracks

I’ve been listenin to some tracks by moby lately, and I can really recommend several on both his “18” and “Play” albums… including the originals and the “B Sides” remixes. check out some previews on iTunes:

Play:

Porcelain

Natural Blues

Inside

18:

Fireworks

Extreme Ways

Sunday (The Day Before My Birthday)

Play (B Sides):

Flower

Sunday (Remix)

Whispering Wind

18 (B Sides):

Landing

Bed

ISS

Check those out. (Plus, I get a few pennies for the referrals if you buy anything. heh.) If you don’t like iTunes, Amazon’s got the full albums as well: Play, 18, Play (B Sides), 18 (B Sides).

Enjoy. *listens* Check back for a review of some tracks by Dirty Vegas.