I took the plunge and ordred a Mac mini to power the living room. It’s not the perfect media center PC, but at least the best on the market. Especially now that I’ll be able to dual-boot into Windows for the rare case that I need use it. The deciding factor was definitely seeing Front Row in action at a friend’s–almost the perfect way to go through music. It also picks up the music of whoever has their computer nearby, so that will be fun at parties (bring your laptop!).
I bought a build-to-order mini last night (1GB ram, 120GB HD) and Apple said it would ship in 2-3 days. It shipped about six hours later and I’ll have it in a few days. Impressive considering I went the free shipping option.
Just because I can. Nothing too crazy, we’re still on the ground, but nice nonetheless.
Curved escalator at the Wynn
Originally uploaded by jonknee.
While wondering through the Wynn (casinos are designed to piss you off enough to start gambling instead of getting to where you’re going) I passed a curved escalator. It called for a doubletake and photo. A first for me!
I finally bit the bullet and got an EV-DO card from Verizon Wireless. I use the term EV-DO exclusively thanks to covering this stuff every day for years, but the sales staff call it BroadbandAccess because that’s what VZW’s marketing team came up with. The flacks at the store looked at me a bit cockeyed when I asked for an EV-DO card, and even more so when I said that I use a Mac. But long story short, I now have broadband (130K/s) internet access anywhere I’m at.
I got the Audiovox PC5740 which doesn’t expressly have Mac support, but that doesn’t mean it won’t work. The PC5740 that I got has a much better antenna than the Kyocera KPC650 which has native support with OS X. I know people with both cards and it’s definitely worth the trouble to get the PC5740 working. Both cards install easily on Windows. I followed the directions here and they worked fairly well. The only snag was that the card needs to be activated in a Windows laptop which might be a deal killer if you have no friends.
I had to search around quite a bit to be able to find the directions for free, several shops seem to sell a Mac “BroadbandAccess” support package. It’s completely unnecessary. You don’t need any extra software to connect. I just open Internet connect and hit one key. Now the question is what will I do when I upgrade to a MacBook Pro?
In case the site that I got my directions from goes away, I have an abridged set of the instructions below. Remember you need to activate your card before this will work. Read more