This Mac mini concept from Victor Anselme’s Apple Addicted blog looks fantastic. Now that an impending Mac mini update is more that just a rumor, I am really wondering how it’s gonna look. It will definitely follow the new design language that started with the iMac and followed by the Macbooks and this concept conforms to that language beautifully.
Victor designed another concept sans an optical drive, which I would very much prefer. Thanks to Plex I am done with optical media. In addition to Plex, the new mini will make a decent gaming machine as they will be equipped with the same NVIDIA chipset that can be found on the new Macbooks. The Mini Display port is the biggest issue though as Mini Display -> HDMI cables are hard to come by, but I am sure that will change when the new Mac minis are introduced in January.
The Telematics Freedom Foundation has just released their Media Center Comparison paper, where they compared the 10 most prominent FLOSS (for Free/Libre/Open Source Software) Media Center Projects. The projects compared were XBMC, MythTV, Boxee, Elisa, Neuros OSD, Freevo, My Media System, Entertainer, CenterStage+Plex and MediaPortal. The 20 page paper might be of great interest to many who are looking to take the next step and integrate their media in their living room.
This new skin was released for XBMC a couple days ago. MediaStream by Team Razorfish is a community effort that has been going on since October 2007. It’s is a very polished piece of work as you can see in the video and need nearly no configuration and tinkering to get it working right.
This skin has replaced my other favorite Aeon for now. One other skin that I am looking forward to is the new default Plex skin. The Plex team has teamed up with the CenterStage team to bring a default skin for Plex in the coming weeks. Judging by the preliminary demos and screenshots, it is going to be a cracker.
To watch it in HD, just click the HD button on the right to jump through to Vimeo and make sure you go full screen.
Plex is an indie fork of the popular Xbox Media Center for OS X Leopard. Aeon is an outstanding skin in alpha stages for XBMC. You might haveheard about both of them and you might have also seen many galleries and screenshots.
Well, I’ve got a video demo. And it is in HD if you wish to watch it that way. Just click the HD button on the right to jump through to Vimeo and make sure you go full screen.
This video which is not as smooth as the real thing, probably due to the screen casting software; showcases the system I’ve been using for the past 3-4 months. I have a Mac mini hooked up to a Sony Bravia and the experience has been nothing short of fantastic. So much so that I have deleted Front Row.
I am currently using the Movies, TV Shows and Music components of Plex. I use the Music component only to listen to Shoutcast radios–especially Dinamo 103.8 and Soma–and Last.FM stations since Plex developers haven’t gotten round to integrating iTunes and iPhoto yet; but judging by the speed they’ve been crunching at, it is just a matter of time. Plus, I have about 17,000 songs in my iTunes library and trying to navigate them with the remote is a big pain.
Plex scrapes IMDB for movies and TheTVDB for TV shows and grabs the director/writer/cast listings, ratings, genre, year, runtime, plot overviews as well as posters. There is also support for various python scripts developed for the original XBMC. I especially like The Apple Movie Trailers script which provides streaming trailers to nearly 2000 movies within the Plex interface.
There is support for the Apple Remote as well as Harmony Remotes, Universal Remotes and XBox360 controllers.
The Plex community and developers are ever helpful over at the Plex forums. Get yourself a Mac mini and head on over to Plex to meet Elan and the rest of the team as well as Barkley. ;)
This video has been floating around the web for a while. I realized that some peeps were looking for a subtitled version. Well, here you go..
Info: After much taping, editing, deleting, drinking and swearing we are proud to present… Sales Guy vs. Web Dude! A mashup of true and mostly-true stories from IT hell. If you’ve ever called tech support and wondered what the hell they are doing down there… well, this should answer some questions for you.
Quicksilver: First thing I install on a new machine. It’s an application launcher, keyboard commands ninja… You might say “Whadda fok?” in the beginning due to the steep learning curve, but you will get used–sorry, married–to it.
Adium: A multiplatform chat client. Skins and plugins galore. Don’t need to look anywhere else, this is the app you need.
Growl: A system notification thingy. Windows don’t growl. Get it and set it.
Disc burning: Toast for kamasutra, Disco for quickies.
There’s something odd about reviewing a camera that just works: There’s not that much to say. Sony’s former Minolta team has hit on a design with all three of the latest cameras that is so easy to approach and use that it’s hard to come up with anything clever. It reminds me a lot of the switch between PC and Mac. I used to love tweaking MS-DOS and Windows to eek out a little more speed, but the Mac just worked, and worked well. Suddenly I had to focus on getting stuff done with my computer, rather than messing with settings to make a window pop up faster. The consumer Alpha cameras are a lot like that.
