Friday Dust Mite Blogging™
Dust Mite inspects the new jukebox.
I finally snapped and (thanks to someone buying a fork + a rack from me) bought a mac mini to replace the first gen macbook air I’d been using as a music server after it suffered the pepsi syndrome (an all too regular occurrence with macbooks in this household!) and was no longer usable as a workstation.
This one is a 2012 mini that I got cheaply (for a mac; those things cling to their resale value like you wouldn’t believe) because the video chip had blown up and took the video output with it when it died. So this thing works (see the friendly little light!) but can only be managed by telnet and or vnc (and if I need to try and modify the disk I need to put the thing into firewire target mode and pretend it’s an external disc for another mac.) But it’s a music player, so it doesn’t need a head, and once I got it set up I could just plunk it over by the stereo cabinet and leave it be.
It’s got a 2.5ghz I5 (2 hyperthreading cores), 8 gb of core, and a 500gb SSD and no big graphics display to slow things down, so it flies (itunes playback takes ~3% of a single cpu thread) and doesn’t act like a little space heater while doing it. No pockets, but pockets (CD slots) were discontinued after 2011 and I can plug an external one in if I need to load a cd.
(And now I need to get a replacement keyboard for the macbook air so I can use it as a emergency backup macbook for the next time my main one suffers from the pepsi syndrome.)