Thoughts on Sci-Fi Channel Shows

I have two observations:

1. Holy Cow is season 2 of Eureka darker than season 1! I still like the show, and it still has some humorous elements, but there's been a lot of nasty stuff in the first few episodes. Henry's erased memories, Beverly has run off, Carter has lost his future with Allison . . . .
   
2. How good is David Tennant in the new Doctor Who? He's just amazing! I'm not somebody who was a huge Doctor Who fan, but I've watched the new series, starting with Christopher Eccleston and through series two (with Tennant). But the series three episodes so far - Tennant has just done an incredible job of emoting the loneliness of being the last Time Lord, and the responsibility of all his actions.
   

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Tags: television, ScienceFiction, DoctorWho, Eureka

Horton Hears A Who

In a comment on the last post Tony suggested that I should go with a large god name for the Mac Mini. I though that was a good one, but as I kicked it around I decided that what I really wanted an elephant. It's a file server, so the elephant appealed to me. So I've named the machine Horton after Horton Hears A Who. An elephant never forgets, don't you know? I grabbed a nice Horton image from the web and embarked on some basic setup. I got Quicksilver, installed, along with Firefox and Flock. I'm posting this from Horton - an inaugural post as it were. At the moment it's busily copying a metric ton of data from my linux box. I'll get all the files moved over, then worry about moving the software services. I might get to mail tomorrow, but I doubt it. Web probably won't happen until mid-week. Among other things in order to move the web stuff I'll need to get Ruby and MySQL running on Horton. I'm still debating about trying to upgrade to MovableType 4 as part of the move, I might go ahead and just install MT4 on Horton and then see about moving the content across.

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Tags: OSX, MacMini

Upgrading a Mac Mini

A few posts back I mentioned that I was buying a Mac Mini to replace my often-maligned Fedora linux box. I also had a brief blurb about Apple overcharging for RAM and pimped Other World Computing as a good source of Mac RAM. I stand by that but I have to say that upgrading a Mac Mini isn't for the faint of heart. I thought it would be like the Powerbooks where it's either underneath the battery (as in my 17" Powerbook) or under a special "RAM goes here" hatch (like the 12" Powerbooks). It's not - the Mac Mini has "no user serviceable parts" as the manual tells you. Other World has a video about it, but to get at the RAM starts with using a putty knife (!) to open the case itself and then a lot of fiddly screw-removal and connector-disconnecting. I dug it open before the replacement RAM arrived, but it took about forty minutes to put it all back together when I got to it.

But it did work - the Mini (which doesn't have a name yet - Mini-Me is too obvious and I've gone and used TinyGod as the machine name for my big Mac Pro) is now running happily with it's expanded RAM. At the moment it's downloading software updates, but I'm not in the mood to start wrangling software onto it tonight. Maybe tomorrow I'll spend some time with it. It's so green right now - it doesn't even have QuickSilver!

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Tags: OSX, upgrade, MacMini, RAM

Yick!

Karin and I try to sit down and have a "movie night" on Fridays where we watch a DVD, usually from Netflix. We often make popcorn, but we don't use a silly popper or microwave popcorn or any such. No, we just make it in a quasi-old-fashioned way using the recipe from Good Eats. I haven't tried any fancy "gourmet" popcorn yet, we usually just use Orville Redenbacher's (because that's what the grocery store carries). The other day I was putting the plastic jar of popcorn away when I noticed there are instructions on the back of the label. They basically use a pot and a lid, which isn't as convenient as Alton Brown's metal bowl and vented foil technique but whatever. What bothered me was this part:

"Measure corn and oil into heavy-bottom pan or popper. Using Orville Redenbacher's Popping & Topping Buttery Flavor Oil is recommended.

The bold and italics are in the original. But why would you go to all the trouble of making real popcorn and then involve "Buttery Flavor Oil"? Blecchhh!

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Tags: popcorn, food, GoodEats, yuck

You have failed me for the last time.

This morning I found that my mail server was down, as was the web server, and in fact everything that my Fedora Linux box does. (The one that I just fought with the CPU fan issue that I mentioned in this post.) It's now complaining that something is wrong with the power supply - a line that should be +5V is only +4.89 or something to that effect. Oh joy, oh rapture. Now in theory I'm supposed to be shutting down my standalone Windows box, and I could scavenge the power supply from that. But I need Karin to review her files and she's visiting her parents, so that won't happen for at least a couple of weeks. And within the last couple of months it's begun to exhibit the classic "Oops, Fedora Core 5 isn't getting all the updates anymore is it?" behavior that means it's not long until I'm forced to update the OS. So I pulled the trigger I've been threatening to pull and bought a Mac Mini. This Mac Mini will be my main file server (TinyGod can't fulfill that role because I reboot TinyGod into Windows sometimes.), my web server, and my mail server. I looked, and I have about 100 Gig of files on my linux box, so I sprang for the biggest drive that goes into a Mac Mini - a 160 Gig SATA drive. I don't need a separate backup drive for that, I can share the drive I use for my laptop.

This shouldn't really impact anybody in any meaningful way, there might be some brief outage when I flip the switch, but I doubt it will take very long. I already known how to run Apache on OS X, and I doubt setting up mail will take much longer. (Although . . . MOVING my IMAP mailboxes may be more complicated. Hmmm.)

For the curious, I bought the low-end Mini, but bumped up the drive space from 60 Gig to 160. This does mean that it won't have a DVD burner (the low end has a "Combo drive" which is a CD burner and DVD-ROM), but seeing as both of my other Macs have DVD burning I think I can live with it. I bought 2Gig of RAM for it from a 3rd party vendor, because Apple overcharges for RAM - going to 2Gig would have cost $250 from Apple, but only costs $100 from Other World Computing, and I can actually get a rebate by sending the 512 Meg that Apple will ship to OWC. Since it's mainly a server I don't need the extra CPU step-up - it will be a huge boost from the 1.2 Ghz Athlon that the linux box has anyway (the Mini will have a 1.66 Ghz Core Duo).

This also marks the end of the transition from build-my-own PC hardware to Apple. Once I shut down scribe and jester (the linux and Windows boxes respectively), all of my computers will be Apple. I still have plenty of non-Apple peripherals, but all of the main iron will be from Apple. Tasty, tasty Kool-Aid. Of course, that wouldn't be possible if it wasn't for the fact that modern Macs run Windows, but it's still a bit of a milestone.

EDIT 1:38 PDT Turned out about 15 minutes after I posted this the linux box died again. Turned out I did have to cannibalize the power supply from Jester to get Scribe to boot. Jester will just have to sit power-supply-less until the Mac Mini arrives.

technorati tags:Linux, OSX, PC, MacMini

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