Ajira.eu

Isn’t she cute? Nope... I’m not talking about the 8-port gigabit Ethernet switch... I’m talking about my brand new, ultra smooth ’n sexy Mac Mini

I was in Amsterdam with my mom ’n cousin today, and we parked the car at the Amsterdam Arena transferium. On the way back to the car we decided to pay a visit to the local Media Markt (large electronics retail store), which is right next to the Arena. The Mac Mini’s were on sale for € 399,- , and I just had to have one! Unfortunately, they didn’t have the “normal” 1-button Apple on stock, so I had to buy a 2-button “Mighty Mouse” and an Apple keyboard to go with it. It’s a rather expensive mouse (€ 60,-), but it’s a nice one at that. It’s not the first Mac I’ve had...

I’ve also got an older Mac LC III standing in the attic, which I bought a couple of years ago, but never got around to playing with. On a previous job I had some first-hand experience with MacOS-10, and my first impression was very positive. I didn’t buy the most expensive type strait away, since this probably isn’t going to be my main workstation anyway. For experimenting and playing, the 1.25 GHz, 256MB memory and 40GB hard drive are more than sufficient. It does the job and runs smooth, that’s all that matters imo.

Aside from the 1.25GHz PowerPC G4 processor, the 256 MB memory and the 40GB hard drive this tiny box also features an ATI Radeon 9200 with 32 MB memory, 1 Fire wire 400 port, 2 USB 2.0 ports, a 56k modem, a 10/100 MBit Ethernet adapter, a DVD-ROM/CD-RW and a nice built-in speaker with pretty decent sound output. In other words: it’s a very complete package at first, I was thinking of putting an USB KVM-switch on my 20” widescreen, but then again... I’ve also got an old 17” LCD standing around doing nothing. I figured I’d use that one for the Mac instead, so I can use the Mac and my main PC at the same time.

”So, what the hell is a KVM-switch?” you might wonder. Well, it’s just a little box that allows you to use one keyboard, mouse and monitor on 2 (or more) computers. KVM simply stands for Keyboard, Video & Mouse.