Yesterday, I’ve finally received my new computer, a Mac Mini (with an Apple Wireless Keyboard and .Mac for the curious). First thing I did was obviously to take it apart (a little), remove the measly 256mb and replace it with 1gb from DSP. Opening the case is neither terribly easy nor terribly hard as long as you take your time, don’t try to rush things and have the right tool for the job (a sharpened putty knife (plastic ones won’t work as they are too flexible)). That done, I hooked up the Dell 2005FPW display and booted it up. The set up procedure is easy, but I was impressed that it found the Bluetooth mouse and keyboard without me having to connect wired ones to set them up. Also very useful is the Firewire Target-Disk mode to copy all the settings and applications from my iBook.
That left me with about 3 weeks of accumulated data to sift through (external OneTouch II Firewire drive from Maxtor…). The only problem was how to install the iLife’05 applications from the MacMini install DVD on the iBook (which you are obviously not allowed to do ;)). The top-level installer will — correctly — refuse, but inside a hidden directory on the DVD are the installers for the individual applications, which work fine…
Exposé is a bit choppy (probably due to the lack of free video memory at 1680×1050), but overall the system feels a good bit faster than the 12″ iBook, which may be related to the faster CPU (1.42 vs. 1.2 Ghz) or the faster bus-speed (166Mhz vs. 133Mhz).
Oh, and the thing is quiet. The only thing I hear is the external hard-disk and the seeking of the hard-disk of my (passively) cooled server. Pictures:

After rebooting twice for seemingly no reason yesterday evening, the PSU of my PC seems to have given up. That put me in some sort of dilemma as I had planned on buying a new machine some-when in the April timeframe, and spending €150 for a new PSU (as I don’t feel entirely comfortable with the really cheap PSUs and a Dual Athlon (2×1800+) with 4 hard-disks, huge RAID5 controller, and a Radeon 9800xt simply needs a lot of juice) just did not appeal for a single month.
I was leaning towards getting either a nForce4 Shuttle w/ an Athlon64 or a Mac mini. These machines couldn’t be more disparate, could they? I realised that I simply don’t need that kind of computing power at home (not to speak of the energy bills) and the Shuttle is not available yet.
I have thus ordered the faster Mac mini, an external drive (which I will now have to back-up separately as I don’t have a RAID anymore) and some more RAM. I still need to get a working PSU for getting all the data off the disks, though.

Major :(. It looks like the new European Software Patent Directive is here to stay, in spite of plenty of opposition.
I had a feeling something like this may happen (stretch the vocal opposition until demonstrants are tired / confused, meanwhile lobbying enough support for the bill to pass). Getting an absolute 2/3 majority to do anything about it at the 2nd reading in parliament is impossible, so welcome to the brave new world…
Fucking idiots!

Addendum: It may not be as bad as I made it out to be — yet.