January 2005

I stood in line at 6AM in Valley Fair in January 2005 to be one of the first
people to get the original Power PC Mac Minis, and was rewarded with a
fantastic computer that became the computing hub of the house. After attaching
two 250GB Firewire hard drives (mirrored using the RAID software built-in to
Mac OS X), it stored all of our music, photos, videos, and coding projects.
It was the house’s music server, web server, mail server, and file server. I
would use Photoshop to work on images, Live and Reason to compose music. It
did it all, and now they are telling me that the new one is four times
faster?!?! Where do I sign up?

February 2006

src="/pictures/20060318-mac_mini/images/CRW_0429.jpg"
width="300" height="200">I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time.
Steve Jobs answered my prayers and unveiled the Intel-powered Mac Mini today.
A call to the Apple Store at Valley Fair mall reveals that they have not yet
received any units, so I will have to order one online. After slogging through
the now-hammered store.apple.com site,
where it took their heavily burdoned servers more than a minute to verify my
credit card, I had a new Mini configured and in their system.

I selected the $22 “overnight shipping” option because I’m impatient, but later
got it refunded because the system was built in China and FedEx’d to my house. There
is no overnight FedEx from China ;-).

The machine is wicked fast. It just smokes the G4 PPC Mini in anything, except for
when it runs apps compiled for PowerPC using the Rosetta translation utility, then things are
slightly slower than the old Mini. Not a big problem, since most things I use are compiled
now for both Intel and PowerPC. A notable exception is Photoshop, but I can work around that
for now.

April 2006

“duomini” has been a pleasure to use each day. It makes my G4 PowerBook and old Mini
feel sluggish. The Lightroom
beta is my new favorite software. I really don’t feel the need to use Photoshop for
anything but making new graphics or icons for the web site or really messing
with digital photos.

Aperture 1.1 should be in stores in a couple of weeks, so we’ll see if it will
knock Lightroom from the champion’s spot.

Today, I wrote a little bit of code to combine stories, photos, and videos into a single RSS feed.

Previously, there was a feed for stories and a feed for pictures. With Marina, driving events, the DV Cam, our Macs, and iMovie HD, we’ve been making and sharing lots of videos. I thought about making a feed just for videos, but that seemed like a worse solution than just rolling a single feed.

So from now going forward, there is just a single feed from the Nobot. The old photos feed will still work for a long while, but you only need to subscribe to:

http://thenobot.org/rss.php

Ok, that’s all for me. Back to the fun…