When we had our house, our music collection was stored in the basement on a clunky old PC with a noisy fan. Our pictures were stored on my laptop along with our home movies. We played DVDs on a regular DVD player.
Living in an apartment without a basement, big noisy PCs are an annoyance. Having all the pictures and movies on my laptop is a pain because to show them to a group involves hooking it up to the TV and if Jen wants to look at pictures when I’m not around she’s out of luck. Playing DVDs on a regular player just means one more piece of ugly kit in front of the TV.
The solution to all these problems? A Mac-Mini! I ordered one online last Monday and it arrived on Friday. It now has pride of place in front of our TV, hooked up to it with a DVI to HDMI cable. And it really is Mini, about the size of a box of teabags, and quiet to boot.
It now holds all our music, pictures and videos and plays our DVDs too. It even comes with a teeny tiny remote control for casual use, and I’ve hooked up a wireless keyboard and mouse for more serious usage.
All that remains is to install some decent email software (Postfix, Fetchmail, Procmail, SpamAssassin, imapd and Mutt) on it, then I can use it as my mail server too, eliminating the other big noisy PC we have sitting in our dining room.
