One of the coolest things about using a Mac Mini as my HTPC is that I get to use the Apple Remote to control the content on it, and I don’t have to worry about any buggy or inexistent drivers for it. I’m not entirely sure why an Apple Remote is included in almost all Macs, it seems like it only works well as a remote for when the system is hooked to a TV.

No, the Apple Remote isn’t a universal remote — it can’t control my TV or stereo receiver. It only has 6 buttons, how could it? This thing is as small as a remote could comfortably be, 4.5″ x 3″ x 0.25″; unfortunately small enough to fit in a dog’s mouth, and in every crevasse in the living room.

We lost our Apple Remote the other day, scoured the entire house looking for it. I was not looking forward to fronting $29.99 $29.97 on a brand new one. In the interim, I’d been using VNC to navigate through video files (what a pain!).

After two days of looking, it was in between our couch cushions; where we’d looked many times already. Man I’m glad it’s back.

I’ve been using OSX for about 9 months now, and for the most part I find it “acceptable”. I came into it with the idea that I want it to be able to do everything I can do in Windows, with a few acceptable exceptions. For the most part there haven’t been any problems.

One of my main gripes is with their window manager, the OSX equivalent of Windows’ “Window Explorer”; it is extremely lacking in customizability (if that’s not a word, it really should be), and features. I think Windows Explorer is a great application, and I can’t think of any improvements. Now, if OSX would only follow suit and start copying features from a system that got it right, we might see some progress…

Also, selecting applications to open extensions, or file types. If you “Open With…” in OSX and select “Always open with this application”, it will always open THAT FILE with the selected app, not always open the extension (which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me). If you “Get Info” on a that file, then go to “Open With”, “Change All”, you get a message like this:

Very poorly (and inaccurately) described, but that does what I want.

Since my new TV came, I wanted to get a move on this HTPC project. So, I ordered the Mac Mini!

It’s the base Mac Mini setup “MAC MINI 1.66/2X256/60/COMBO/AP/BT-USA”. I was originally going to wait for the Core 2 Duo (instead of the Core Duo this comes with), but alas, I got impatient . I may eventually swap a 256MB stick for a 1GB stick, depending on how slow this is.

It’s my first Mac, so I’m pretty stoked. Thanks Danny Rhoades at the Apple store for his help!

Gabe is letting me test drive his mac laptop to see whether or not I want to ‘make the switch’. I have a bunch of apps and games I want to try out to get a feel for how it would feel to be a mac user primarily.

And why not? I’m not big into gaming, and the only game I DO still play installs natively on OSX. 9/10ths of the apps I use currently have OSX versions, and the other 1/10th has a similar app on OSX.

We’ll see how it goes .

I was searching through some of my old stuff, and I found an Apple Powerbook 540c. It’s working but it has intermittent lines on the display. If I remember correctly, it has OS7.5, 12MB RAM and a 250MB hard drive. I’ll probably give it away on craigslist or something, because it has no real use to me…