Macintosh - Mac Mini aficionados please help


I'm thinking about purchasing a mac mini for my wife's system. One of her favorite websites is gamerival.com. Can somebody please tell me if this site is compatible with the mac. If it's not, then I'm going to have to look elsewhere for a small and quit system. I've been wanting to try a mac for some time and this gives me a reason to jump over the windows XP fence and see what's on the other side.

Thanks,
prpixel

Showing 14 responses by gunbei

PrPixel,

I've found many of those "Dummies" books to be quite good. That obviously reveals my level of learning and problem solving. Heheh.

Getting the SuperDrive was a good move. It will allow you to burn DVDs, something a ComboDrive won't.

Your MacMini should come with iLife which will include iMovie, iDVD, iTunes, GarageBand and iPhoto. Using that free stuff I am able to create DVDs with menus and chapter indexing on my Cube from my Tivo content. It's great for saving all those documentaries I love!

Have fun!
PrPixel,

Mlbattery is right on regarding resale value. I got my Apple Cube on Ebay after they were discontinued in 2001 and it wasn't cheap, but I love it! Still going strong with the 1.25GHz processor I shoehorned in there along with the bigger clear case and fan.

If you go to the Logitech website you should be able to download drivers for your mouse, just in case they aren't already pre-installed on the Mac Mini or G5 iMac. The new iMacs are pretty cool. I have a couple friends that have them and they love 'em.

When my friend was looking for a new home computer his wife didn't want him to get a full blown G5 tower. But once she saw the iMac she fell in love. WAF. Heheh.
PrPixel, I just went to the website and played Dodge City Darts on my G5 running OSX 10.3.5 at work. It runs fine, but I suck at darts.

Go get the Mac Mini Me!
PrPixel, I know you're very knowledgeable when it comes to the Windows operating system, so I'll be interested to hear your opinion of Mac OSX. Have fun!
Hey PrPixel,

I use a Logitech 3-button optical mouse. I got started on it during my Quake 3 Arena Days and have found it to be indispensible for my retouching work.

Remember, no right clicking in the Mac domain, heheh.

The Logitech has two buttons and a scroll wheel in the middle. It;s very useful for scrolling through windows or especially when switching weapons!

Any new Mac comes with that translucent click mouse. It's a good back up, but certainly not a "power" mouse. The mouse thing is less an issue for me, since I mostly use a Wacom Tablet.

PoolJam, huh? I'll have to look into that.
PrPixel,

If you have any questions about Macs in general, feel free to e-mail me.

Dean
PrPixel,

Your friend probably removed his Tivo hard drive and placed it in one of the bays of his PC, then used 3rd party software to make the transfer. There are some similar hacks for the Mac, but they involve going root and getting into the Unix terminal.

I use a little box called the Canopus ADVC100 which takes the analog output of the Tivo and has a codec for translating it into digital. From there, it's a Firewire hookup to my Apple Cube right into iMovie. I stitch everything together, set the chapter indeces[?], find some nice frame grabs for the DVD menu, then transfer it to iDVD and finish the DVD. Have a look at it here:

http://www.canopus.us/US/products/ADVC-100/pm_advc-100.asp

I've compared the Tivo/iDVDs I've made on my Mac against the original digital video on my Tivo and it's very acceptable. The loss in sharpness is 5% at the most. There is a noticeable loss in overall color saturation, but if you don't compare them side by side, it almost doesn't matter.

It's a really nice little unit and the audio and video never get out of sync like some of the other similar boxes.

Something to look into maybe? Heheh

Dean
Prpixel,

I'm sure iLife will come with your new computer. So you'll have all the goodies I mentioned above.

Overall, iMovie and iDVD are quite simple to use and after tooling around you may think all that is needed is common sense. I found the iLife tutorials at the Apple site very helpful.

http://www.apple.com/ilife/

I should mention that I am still using the previous version of iLife which I believe is 4.0. The new version is 5.0 and will have new features such as HD support.

One odd thing I did find when choosing photos to use as background images for my iDVD on screen menus is that I needed to import all my frame grabs into iPhoto before iDVD would see them. I don't know if this is still the case, but it may be something to remember.
Pomegranate, LOL!

I think that would be pretty neat looking too. Maybe like all the different fruit fllavored colors Apple used on the early iMacs, heheh.

MacWorld is probably the main Mac magazine. It has reviews and multi-product comparisons. They've been around awhile. THese days I don't keep up on the zines, and am always surprised by the various Mac dedicated journals I find at my local Borders Bookstore.

You might want to look into some of the websites like Mac Central and Mac OS Rumors. They're great places to check up on the latest rumors and recent releases of software.

http://www.macworld.com/news/

http://www.macosrumors.com/

Also MacWorld has its own site:

http://www.macworld.com/

Here are some websites of Apple retailers:

http://www.macmall.com/

http://www.maczone.com/cgi-bin/zones/site/home/index.html?zone=mac

http://www.cdw.com/default.asp

And if you or anyone you know is a teacher you can get great discounts here:

http://www.academicsuperstore.com/

Have fun with your pomegranate!
Edesilva, I'd love it if my Tivo had Firewire out, then I'd be able to avoid using my Canopus AVDC100 altogether, but all in all it's a great piece of equipment.

For my work and doing fun stuff on my Mac at home, Firewire has been a real blessing. Great transfer rates and much more reliable than USB.
Prpixel,

That's pretty damn impressive and good news to boot. I guess with your prior knowledge, set up was a snap. For a non-networking retouchers like myself, setting something like that up takes a lot of trial and error and manual page flipping. Were you able to find everything you needed by accessing the Networking module in the System Preference pane?

For someone new to Macs, I think getting used to and learning to like OSX might be another matter altogether. I'll be interested to hear what you think. I stay so focused on my small section of Mac-userability that I'll just wait for you to figure everything out and report it to us, heheh.

Thanks and have fun!
What 's going on with yor machine? Did you have to deal with customer service for the set up?

Their customer service isn't very good and their tech support can be even worse. You'd probably do better with problems by searching the Apple Chat Forums. Some hidden bugs and defects that Apple doesn't want the public to know about pop up there. And after time the fixes get posted as well.

Good thing I've always had access to knowledgeable Mac I.S. guys.
Prpixel,

Does the Mini-Me-Mac have a powerful enough video card to run a Cinema Display. Just wondering aloud. I know my CUbe doesn't, but then again that's a four year old G4 based machine.

If you ever need Apple tech support in the future, here's a heads up. Their tech support staff is the typical tiered-based system where you get the dumbshit with a step-by-step fix-it manual sitting in front of them, then youget passed on to someone more experienced if everything they tell you fails.

When I was at Sony, we found that the tech guys we dealt with at MacWarehouse which is an Apple mail order retailer really knew their stuff. Sometimes you'd have to go "root" and get into the Unix underpinnings but they always seemed to have a intuitive feel for what we were experienceing on the other side of the country.

If you own any or plan on purchasing any Adobe products, their tech support isn't much better than Apple's. It's a good thing I haven't had to call tech support in years.

I wish everyone's customer service and tech support was as good as what I've experienced with Earthlink.
Actually, my criticism still holds. I haven't personally called Apple tech support in nine years, but I know many Apple I.S. guys that deal with them all the time and still to this day hate Apple tech support.

I'm not talking about the 'why doesn't my Mac's cupholder not pop out anymore?' type of questions. Apple support won't tell you or even know why we had to allocate exactly 67.19% [something like that, heheh] of our available RAM to Photoshop to get it to run right. We found that out in an either an Adobe or Apple forum. When some of friend's Firewire drives were getting erased after installing the newest OSX Security Update from Apple, guess who didn't have the answer? You betcha! There's no way they were gonna let this one out. Another time the forums had the answer for us. Maybe Apple tech support is fine for telling you how to install, set up or troubleshoot basic things, but when it gets to the real stuff they're AWOL and you're SOL.