Month: February 2006

Partially Surprised

I didn’t even know about today’s announcements from Apple until I saw a “hey, it’s starting” forum post somewhere. The cases and Hi-Fi are kind of underwhelming and are really just more expensive and underperforming accessories.

The new Mini is a bit more interesting to me though. I’ve been thinking of putting together a home theatre PC for a while now, and this Mini slides into that role fairly nicely. The only sticking point is that it still doesn’t have video capture built-in, so it wouldn’t entirely replace my MythTV server, but it could act as a front end to it. It’s also not clear if it’ll be quite powerful enough to decode HD video, but that’s more of a future concern and there are still a bunch of other unsolved problems surrounding HD anyway.

Then it’s just a question of whether a home theatre computer is worth the cost…

Backups, Finally

A new hard drive is on the way, to resolve my current disk woes. Apparently it’s been generating these bad block errors since at least October, so it’s not exactly dying rapidly, but better safe than sorry.

I was tempted to just go ahead and upgrade the whole system while I was at it since it’s now on the lower end of gaming performance. Especially with the new monitor and its much larger number of pixels to fill, which often requires me to turn down or disable higher-quality video options. After putting together a list of parts though, a bit of sticker shock convinced me that I can probably make do with what I have for a bit longer yet…

There is one thing I can do now that I should have done long ago, though: put a proper backup solution in place.
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