blog.erik.rainey.name

Over at The Street, a video indicates that standard Mac users are snobs. Lets see how I match up!

• Perfectionist? - Check
• Feel self-important? - Check
• Use a Notebook Computer? - Check
• Use Teeth whitening products? - Nope
• Drive station wagons? - Nope
• Pay for downloaded music? - Check
• Go to Starbucks? - Triple Hit Sugar Free Syrup Grande Check
• Care about "green" products and the environment? - Nope
• Own a hybrid car? - Nope
• Buy 5 pairs of sneakers in a year? - Nope
• Buy organic food regularly? - Nope
• Politically Liberal? - Nope
• Satisfied with purchasing a Mac? - Check

I guess I'm not the standard snob?

If you're like me, you're hesitant to plunk down 300 bills for an AppleTV, when that old Mini you got back when the switchin' fever was high is just sitting there under your desk, acting all lazy. So it's time to put that PPC has-been back to work! To the end of teaching this old dog new tricks, I've scoured the 'net looking for some information from those brave souls who went before me, in order to reduce the normally arduous task of re-purposing into a Saturday afternoon sort of hack. Throughout this little adventure I've kept an eye on the grand total, making sure that I'm still on the right track.
First we have to talk about prerequisites. I already have a Mac Mini. It's already been upgraded to 1GB of RAM. It already has an external hard drive to supplement the internal drive. All the media I have will be stored on the external drive. I already had the ATI Remote Wonder. These are all sunk costs in this venture and don't factor into the buy or reuse argument. Now, on to the good stuff.

1. I bought a DVI to HDMI cable at Fry's for $14.
2. I checked out Mighty Dave's guide to pimping out the Mini with the Remote Wonder software and it's related information about DisplayConfigX. Cost: $12 (optional if you don't care about overscan/under-utilization of the screen).
3. Installed Matinee. Cost: Free
4. Installed Democracy. Cost: Free
5. Installed FrontRow for Mac Mini PPC (via Enabler 1.5). Cost: Free
6. Then I mapped all the FrontRow keys to keys on the ATI Remote Wonder using this guide.
7. Then I installed this startup script which allow automatically boots the Mac Mini into FrontRow and does some other AppleTV mimicry.

Grand Total: $26.

Now, there are some drawbacks. The Mac Mini is not really a go-er if you know what I mean. It's a bit lacking in the horsepower department. When playing back full screen HD content, it's a bit pokey. When the USB disk is being used by another application, such as a torrent client, lets say, the playback is rather poor, even for smaller vids. So in the end it appears that I'll have to use this much like a really AppleTV in that I'll have fixed transfer or sync times or at least stop the possibility of updating podcasts or torrent downloads while playback is active.

If you are a Mac user and haven't yet seen the new Leopard site, complete with videos of the new features, I recommend that you head over right away. They have some really neat sutff that I can't wait to get my hands on, like the iChat Presentation software and the To Do Lists in Mail (I'm a bit OCD about To Do Lists). I'm also very impressed by the Time Machine. A single-line version controlled filesystem is nothing new, but the interface to this one is what's impressive. The only downside is that I think of is that we'll need 200GB HDD's on the new laptops to have a decent history backlog. Head over and check it out!

I just got OpenVPN working on my MacBook Pro and I thought I'd share how it's done.

1. Download TunnelBlick 3.0 RC2 or better and install in /Applications/
2. Create your Root Certificate and Key, and all your client keys on the OpenVPN server (reference).
3. Copy the required files ca.crt and the client keys to ~/Library/openvpn/ on your Mac
4. Create a .conf file in that directory which will serve as your connection description. If your familiar with the Windows versions, be sure to name your dev items (usually "tun0") and your dev-node items (usually "/dev/tun0") correctly (see reference again for sample config files). Be sure to match the type of tunnel as with the type on your server (tcp to tcp, tun to tun, etc).
5. Expose the OpenVPN port (which is configurable on the server) to the outside, beyond the firewall.
6. Add entries into your hosts file to support name resolution over your tunnel, or setup a Split DNS Server.
7. Connect!

I can taste it.

Order Info Web Order Number order number omitted Shipping Address Erik Rainey address omitted Shipping Method 2-3 Day Shipping Shipping Preferences Ship each item when available.

Order Items Quantity Item Price Item Total Mac mini 1.25GHz Part Number: Z0B7 Accessory kit 512MB DDR333 SDRAM - 1 DIMM 56K v.92 Modem Mac OS X - U.S. English 40GB Ultra ATA drive 4x SuperDrive (DVD±RW/CD-RW) Estimated ship: 2-3 weeks Delivered within 2-3 business days after shipping 1 $633.00 $633.00 Order Subtotal: $633.00 Shipping Charge: $14.00 Estimated Tax*: $53.38 Estimated Total: $700.38