My Delicious Bookmarks
Tuesday, May 30th, 2006I setup and am going to start using Delicious to keep some good bookmarks.
http://del.icio.us/bryannielsen
Archive for May, 2006
Inventing
Tuesday, May 30th, 2006A good article outlining what it takes to invent. I’ve always been interested in the part serendipity plays in the discover process or how discovery requires “tinkering” with failures along the road to success. We shouldn’t under estimate the importance of allowing our creative people time to tinker. Some great discoveries have evolved from that process, and the companies who allowed it profited greatly. e.g. google and 3m.
A nice Workstation, Home Theatre Combo
Thursday, May 4th, 2006A nice write-up from Lee Campbell on building a home theatre system with a Mac Mini and an LCD screen, which doubles as a workstation in the living room while you sit on the couch. 
lee wrote:
I’d recommend the $799 Mac Mini with intel dual core. http://www.apple.com/macmini The computer ships with two 256 MB memory sticks. I would spend the approximately $170 to upgrade the memory to 2 GB. I bought two 1 GB DDR non-ecc memory sticks at Fry’s Electronics for about $170. The computer has 2 memory slots and both slots must have the same size memory stick. If you plan on running Windows and Mac OS X at the same time, you will certainly need 2 GB of ram. Apple charges $300 per GB and you need two of them, so I don’t recommend buying memory from Apple. Upgrading the ram in a mini is a little tricky.
When shopping for an LCD TV, I valued how the TV displayed the computer image the most. The picture quality for TV/Cable signals wasn’t as important for me. I chose a Polaroid 32″ LCD because it was the only model I could find that displayed the computer image perfectly. A similar 37″ Polaroid is availabe. Sony projection, Sony LCD, Panasonic, LG, Samsung, and Mitsubishi all clipped the image so that the Windows task bar or Apple menu was not visible. Of all the models I tested at Best Buy, Sears, Circuit City and Tweeters, the Polaroid was the only model that worked well as a computer display. The picture quality for TV/Cable is perfectly acceptable but not the best. I found this TV at Circuit City for $900. The Apple store uses a NEC LCD display that looks beautiful, but I could not find any NEC TVs to test. The Polaroid LCD defaults to using a color profile that makes the computer image look dark and very high contrast. To fix this problem, use the “Apple RGB” Color profile in System Preferences | Display | Color.
I recommend an Apple Bluetooth keyboard. So far, I have not needed a wired keyboard at all, even for use when the Mini is booting or in the bios. For example, holding down the C key to boot from cdrom works with a Bluetooth keyboard.
I’m using a Microsoft bluetooth mouse and it’s lost its pairing a couple of times. I tried the Kensington mouse that the Apple store sells, but found it difficult to pair and jumpy. I’d recommend keeping a USB mouse handy.
You’ll need to connect your computer to the TV using an HDMI cable. Circuit City had only one cable for sale and it cost $125. Fry’s had a slightly cheaper looking cable for $25 (yes $100 less!) that works perfectly.
You will also need a sound cable that has headphone jacks on one end and the red/white RCA jacks on the other end. I bought mine at Radio Shack, but any electronics store should have one.
To run Windows XP or Linux at the same time you’re running Mac OS X, you will need this software: http://www.parallels.com/
To dual boot Windows XP and Mac OS X, you will need this: http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/ With these components, I now have a full Windows and Mac workstation with almost no footprint in my living room.
Technorati Tags: OS X, Home Theatre, Workstation