I recently bought a Mac Mini to hook up to my HDTV, so that I could watch TV and videos that I recorded on my Media Center PC. I had been using an Xbox 360 to do this, but it died from the "Red Ring of Death", and while the 360 was being repaired I thought I would try the Mac Mini.

On paper the Mac Mini seemed to be a good choice:

• Very small
• Fairly quiet
• Very powerful Core 2 Duo CPU.
• Not too expensive
  
• Comes with a cute little Apple remote control
• Can run Mac OS or Vista, or both.

Why not an AppleTV?

The AppleTV is specifically designed for the purpose of connecting a computer to the TV and playing back videos. Why didn't I choose it?

• Primarily intended for buying TV shows through iTunes.
  
• Only a few codecs are supported, so you are restricted as to which downloaded videos you can watch.
  
• No integration with Windows Media Center.
  
• Not expandable
• Difficult to program.
  

Connecting the Mac Mini to an HDTV:

• It's easy to hook up the Mac Mini's DVI to a HDMI-compatible HDTV. (I bought a $7 DVI-to-HDMI cable with free shipping from an Internet store - it works great. I also used an old PC audio jack to RCA converter cable I had laying around.)
  

I tried using it with the Apple OSX operating system, but it was frustrating for these reasons:

• I have a Windows Media Center that I use as a Tivo to record and watch TV. Apple OSX doesn't interoperate with Windows Media Center very well.
  • First try was Front Row
    • Front Row has a nice UI, and works with the nifty Apple Remote control, but has two fatal flaws
    • Takes a very long time to enumerate media on remote disks. (45 seconds for 100 files)
    • No out-of-the-box Quicktime support for many codecs.
    • The Perrin plugin helps a lot with most codecs
      
    • Couldn't find any way of playing ms-dvr files in QuickTime
  • Second try was VLC
    • Good news: supports all media types, including ms-dvr
    • Does not work well with Apple Remote Control. (Can't easily browse file system, choose media.)
    • Fundamentally the Apple Remote Control has too few buttons to be useful.
    • And the shareware apps for using the Apple Remote are not very good.
  • Third try was Elgato's Mac specific DVR software
    
    • For this I was going to bypass Media Center, and use the Mac Mini as its own DVR
    • Lacks a 10-foot UI, designed mostly to be used with a mouse.
      
    • Biggest problem: no keyword recording. (i.e. can't say "record all occurrences of figure skating")
  • I briefly considered alternative DVR products like Myth TV and Sage TV
    
    • Complicated to install and maintain.
    • No record-by-keyword feature
    • Concerns about having to pay a fee for TV listings, or have to futz endlessly with screen-scrapers.
• OS X talk to my existing CX-3800 All-in-one scanner/copier/printer.
  • The Epson site claims to have Mac support the CX-3800, but upon closer inspection the support is only for a utility program, not for a printer driver or a scanner driver.
  • Apple's printer drivers don't support this model.
• I briefly considered ditching Vista Media Center in favor of DVR software that would run on Mac or Linux. But that didn't work out either:
  • It's very difficult to get a free TV listing service for OS X or Linux DVR applications
  • Apple OS X and Linux support for the HD Home Run remote HDTV tuner is weak.
  • Even the best Mac DVR software, from ElGato, is feature-poor compared to Vista Media Center Extender.
    • In particular it's missing the keyword recording feature that allows me to record any occurence of "Skating" or "Gymnastics" for my wife, who is a big fan of these sports.
      

In the end I gave up on using OS X for a DVR. I went back to using an Xbox 360 and Vista Media Center.

I need to use Linux for my new job, so I decided to try and install it on one of my home computers. I chose my Apple Macbook as my test platform, which was risky because Linux is much more mature on desktops than on laptops. Since I'm addicted to beta software, I tried the latest Ubuntu 7.10 Tribe 5, which is a beta version of the popular Ubuntu distribution.

Some good impressions

• The new Compiz window manager is enabled by default and is very nice. Like Vista Aero, but simpler.
• The Macbook was almost completely supported out-of-the-box.
  • Both graphics and wireless worked.
    
  • I only had to make two changes, both related to the trackpad:
    
  • I had to turn off the tap-to-click. It's just too sensitive, kept thinking I clicked when I was just moving the mouse around the screen.
  • I had to install the mouseemu package to make F11 be the middle mouse button and F12 be the right mouse button.
• The whole Linux package installer approach is great. It makes it very easy to install software, even easier than on Windows.
  • However, it's harder to find software than on Windows. There ought to be a way of clicking on a link in a web page and automatically starting the install process, like there is on Windows or Mac.
  • And there's still too much politics about licenses - it's more difficult to install Java, Flash, and media codecs than it should be because of this.
  • Speaking of codecs, I liked how the Ubuntu media players would try to find and install codecs to play unknown media file types.
    
• I was able to find Linux programs for most of my needs:
  • Web surfing / Email / Documents: Firefox with Google apps
    
  • Bit torrents: ktorrent
  • CBR reader: qcomicbook
  • IDE: Eclipse
  • Videos: VLC
  • Photo editing: Nothing good here yet. Gimp sucks. Paint .NET may be my best bet.
  • I haven't tried printing yet. We'll see how it goes.
• So far I haven't had to edit a single text configuration file, and I only had to mess with the command line a couple of times. It's almost possible for a non-programmer to configure Ubuntu, at least if nothing goes wrong.
  

Some bad impressions:

• There's lots of out-of-date information on configuring Ubuntu the web. I guess this is the unavoidable result of frequent releases, but it makes solving problems much more difficult than it needs to be.
  
• The Ubuntu brown color scheme is ugly. It's too bad it's such an integral part of their branding, because it is a huge turn off.
• The Ubuntu gnome desktop menus are poorly organized. They're also full of crapware applets.
  
• The default Ubuntu desktop UI has bars on both the top and the bottom of the screen, which steals too much vertical screen space on an 800-pixel-high laptop screen.
• The synaptic application installer sometimes puts up dialogs that are more than 800 pixels high, making it impossible to hit the OK or Cancel buttons on a small screen.

Conclusions

In 12 to 18 months I think Ubuntu is going to achieve usability parity with Vista. There are already ahead in some areas, such as application installation. Of course, that won't do anything to help with compatibility with Windows applications, so Vista will remain the OS of choice for many people. But if the trend towards web-based applications continues, I can see Ubuntu becoming a viable choice for many computer users in the next two to five years.

Right now, if I were a Linux zealot, I think I would work on

• Improving laptop features, specifically power management, and suspend/resume, and trackpad support.
• Providing a good-UI free alternative to PhotoShop, possibly based on Paint .NET
• Continuing to improve the desktop UI experience.
  

My Xbox 360 is back, or rather, they sent me a new Xbox (built in May 2006, so no Falcon HDMI love), which unfortunately means my cool green side panels are lost forever.

The new box seems louder to me, but my wife says the old one was just as loud. She may be right.

...just in time for Halo 3 (Woot!)