Me and my Mac

Posts Tagged ‘broken’

Media Center Mac Mini – Software Fail!?

With the addition of the Mac Mini Server i bought earlier this week i now have a spare Mac Mini to toy around with.

A 1.5Ghz Core Solo with 2GB Ram.
Given that my Lacie portable broke just before christmas. Or rather, the controller board of Lacie broke (Like so many other Lacie drives) i did some swapping around with disks here and there and suddenly had a 250GB 7200RPM disk spare.
Earlier today i built that thing in into the Mac Mini. But damn was that fucker noisy! I quickly removed it and after some more swapping of disks it now has a 120GB disk at 5400RPM. Which is dead silent. Yay! Originally there was a 60GB disk in there.

Anyway, i wanted to try out the media center idea i’ve been having for weeks now. So i installed Snow Leopard on that machine, installed Plex and got hopelessly lost in the labyrinth of poorly designed settings. After toying with that for a few hours i didn’t even get to play movies properly. The DTS Sound was broken (which is a bug in Plex for the last 6 or so versions) and embedded subtitles do not work. 2 very much required features. That and the total lack of user-friendliness made me decide to look for something else.

Boxee seems very nice, and it is. Apart from its lack of home screen customization, broken DTS downmixing , missing embedded subtitles and poor streaming capabilities i liked the interface a lot! However, since i don’t want to synchronize the mac with my server but just want boxee to look in my movies folder and stream them on demand. It kinda failed. Mounting shares is easy enough, which strangely goes via SMB and not AFP. But then accessing it in a decent matter is a whole different adventure. Every time i would have to go back to the home screen which has the latest online stuff from other users. Something i want to turn off since i’m not at all interested in it. And then find the share under ‘local’. Which lists a ton of other folders and paths you cannot remove. But are not at all familiar too. Another way is to use the browse feature which kinda lets you wander the harddisk and attached devices (including network disks) but that’s confusing too. So if your data is not local, it’s difficult to find. Add broken DTS downmixing and no support for embedded subtitles and you pretty much have a failed software package.

Another thing that didn’t work out well, despite several sites reviewing the Mini saying it was “totally doable”, is that HD content, say anything 1080i and similar, will not always play smoothly. 720p no problems there, streaming it over a 11g Wifi connection. But 1080i often went with a stutter. I’m not sure if it’s because of the wifi, or because of the CPU. But when i copied a file over it wasn’t much better. Just less frequent. So i guess the CPU is on the edge of being capable playing a 1080i movie that is h.264 encoded with AC3 5.1 sound.

The Time Capsule is a lie!

You probably have heard about it. Apple’s time capsules dying by the billions after about 18 months of use. There has been many angry writings about it and some folks even opened a register for deceased TimeCapsules.

Apple so far has taken no action on the matter. But at work we did. We found the cure! Indeed there is one. Yup we can fix them, no i’m not saying how. Have it checked and repaired at our technical service if you want.

Another discovery we did is that apple’s so called “server grade” harddisk is a mere Fujitsu Small and Home Office (Soho) disk. It even says so on the label on the disk. What does this mean? That it’s a default regular non-special disk found in any iMac for the last 3 or so years. Nothing server grade about it. And thus as “unreliable” as any other disk.

That, plus the Time Capsules dying because of some poor components makes me think this thing is kind of a lame product after all. I rather see an Airport Extreme with an e-Sata bus next to the USB port. More scalable and reliable that way.

Snow Leopard Server == fail!

Or at least on my Mac Mini is it… It’s very good at 2 things so far…

And that’s about all it did for the past 30 minutes. Sooooo I’m gonna re-install now. Maybe i just did something wrong or something. It’s not like installing Snow Leopard Server is easy or anything. Anyway, we’ll see!

So my Mac Mini is all fixed up!

So after todays adventure with the Mini and the soundcard i finally got around to getting some software on it. Turns out Eve Online, the game i wanted to run from it, doesn’t work on the Mac Mini. The videocard pooped it’s heatsink.

Boohoo!

Events 2.1.1

WIth the introduction of 2.1 last night a minor bug with the translation feature prevents you from activating the plugin. As reported by several people.

This is now fixed with Events 2.1.1 which has just been submitted to the WP directory.
Sorry for any inconvenience!

More information:
http://meandmymac.net/plugins/events/

Downloads:
http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/wp-events.2.1.zip