Tag: Mac Mini

Old year, new Mac

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
It’s an early Happy New Year for Herself …

Herself has been upping her MacGame this holiday season.

First she scored an iPhone 13, a Christmas present that replaced a beat-up 7 (unlike Your Humble Narrator, Herself works a phone like a rented mule).

And now, with the New Year climbing in our window with a dagger between its yellow teeth, she’s acquired a new M1 Mac Mini to supplant her 10-year-old MacBook Pro.

… assuming the migration goes as intended.

The MBP still functions. I had long since maxed out the memory and dropped in a 512GB SSD, but this was like adding a spoiler and a flame paintjob to a Datsun B210.

A rat’s nest of cables hooked to this, that and the other — an ancient ViewSonic monitor, USB hub, label printer, and so on and so forth — the MBP took up more space than a fat cat but rarely purred.

Neither of us is exactly a power user these days. I get by with a pair of 2014 MacBook Pros and in my Golden Years don’t really need anything with more oomph. But Herself is a big earner with her eBay sideline, and who wants to watch The Spinning Beach Ball of Boredom when you’re busy trying to skin some bargain hunter?

So, after briefly considering a pricier iMac, we pulled the trigger on the Mini. What the hell, someone has to keep Tim Cook in NFTs and Krugerrands.

So, 12 monkeys walk into an Earth Day. …

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 22 Comments
“What’s wonderful about the air, James?”
“Very fresh. No germs.”

They tell me today is Earth Day, and indeed, it seems we still have one.

An earth, that is. No thanks to us.

Yesterday I bicycled out to inspect the property and it looked pretty a’ight from just below the intersection of Tramway Road and Juniper Hill Road.

It probably helps that fewer people are motoring pointlessly around and about lately. I only start the Subie every other Wednesday, for purposes of replenishing the pantry. Though I did take the Vespa out for a spin yesterday, too (sorry about that).

The Mad Dog Media Entertainment Complex, featuring a Toshiba TV from 2008; a Mac Mini from mid-2010 (right); and an Apple TV from 2012 (left).

Today I celebrated Earth Day by not spending $150 on a new Apple TV box. HBO Now is dropping its support for older Apple TVs like ours (third generation), and so it was either buy a new one; try AirPlaying HBO Nowto the old box from an iOS device; or use the Mac Mini to stream the sonofabitch.

The last would have been easiest, if the wee beastie weren’t running an OS from 2013 (Mavericks). That dog won’t hunt, sez HBO Now. You gotta have Yosemite at bare minimum, and either Chrome or Firefox (ixnay on the Afarisay).

So I burned a little daylight this morning getting all those ducks in a row. If you monkeys smell smoke, well, that’s why. Ook ook ook.

Looking west from the foothills on Earth Day.

All systems normal

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments
So far, so good. Two more OS updates and we'll have a casual relationship with the 21st century.
So far, so good. Two more OS updates and we’ll have a casual relationship with the 21st century.

One down, two to go. I forgot we also have a Mac Mini in need of an OS upgrade. But the cute li’l Cupertino doorstop only has 2 GB of memory, which is the bare minimum, so I’ve ordered up some mo’.

The MacBook Air install went smooth like butter. The whole process took a shade over two hours, with a long-ass download, a couple-three restarts and six app’ updates. But that’s my newest machine, a mid-2012 model, so it should be open to new experiences; the Mini dates to mid-2010, and the iMac to 2009.

The Air is for lightweight road trips when an iPad won’t cut the mustard. For heavy duty I haul an old black MacBook, ’cause it has software I don’t care to upgrade, like Word and Photoshop and all the other high-falutin’ gewgaws, thingamajigs and comosellamas a fella likes for professional rumormongery of the finest quality. That beast is too long in the tooth to run Mavericks; it’s pegged at Snow Leopard.

The Mini is for watching TV at Chez Dog, and I back up work-related items to it whenever I get The Fear (I also use SuperDuper and Time Machine with an external Firewire drive for regular clones/backups).

And the iMac is The Main Device. It’s how most of the Mad Dog media is generated, save for the cartoons, which get done the hard way — drawn in pencil, then inked, and finally scanned into a superannuated 1999 G4 “Sawtooth” AGP Graphics Power Mac, where I apply color using Classic mode and a full CMYK version of Photoshop (4!) that I got for free with a scanner about a thousand years ago. Hey, it still works.

I thought I might do the iMac today, too, but wimped out. Paranoia strikes deep, as the fella says, and I’d like to fiddle with the Air a bit to make sure it didn’t lose a kidney to Somali pirates or something during the operation.