My Home Setup

In November 2005, I bought a mac mini to use with my iPod nano ( kind of backward I know ) and I love it. I followed that purchase with a MacBook in the summer of 2006. The MacBook is now my main machine. OpenOffice for Mac only works with X11 so I am using NeoOffice, a port of OpenOffice to the Mac that uses Cocoa.The mac mini specs are:

• 1.42GHz PowerPC G4
• 1 GB DDR333 SDRAM
• ATI Radeon 9200
• 32MB DDR video memory
• 80GB Ultra ATA hard drive
• SuperDrive (DVD±RW/CD-RW)
• DVI or VGA video output
• Built-in 802.11g AirPort Extreme and Bluetooth
• Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger

At first I connected the Mac mini to my existing Dell Trinitron monitor, keyboard and mouse. Later I bought an Apple Wireless Keyboard and Apple Wireless Mighty Mouse because I liked the design so much. Since my “office” was in the unfinished unheated basement of my home I was only able to use the computer during the summer. The cold winters made it challenging to use the mini for more than 20 minutes at a time. After purchasing the MacBook I used the mini less often so in the spring of 2007, I decided to move the Mac mini to the family room. The Mac min is now connected to my Sony KV-34HS420 34″ FD Trinitron WEGA HD-Ready CRT TV via an XtremeMac XtremeHD cable. The display resolution is 720p.Connected to the Mac mini is an HP Photosmart C3180 All-in-One Printer, Scanner, and Copier. The printer was a promotional item from Apple when I bought the MacBook. It was $99 with a $99 rebate. With Bonjour for Windows installed all the Windows computers and Macs can print to the one printer. Bonjour uses industry standard network protocols to allow devices to automatically discover each other without the need to enter network addresses or configure servers. Printing from any Windows computer is now as simple as installing Bonjour for Windows, running the wizard, and selecting print from any application.I yanked the second 160GB drive from the old Dell XPS Windows XP SP2 machine and placed it in a NewerTech miniStack (FireWire/USB2.0 Enclosure Kit with Integrated FW/USB hub) for storage of all my media (photos and music). With all the media in one external Firewire drive, backups are easier, and I can connect the drive to another machine should the Mac mini need to be replaced.The Mac mini is running iTunes and iPhoto with the Bonjour service providing access to the music and photo library to all the other iTunes and iPhoto enabled machines in the house. The Mac mini also has an iPod dock so that my wife and I can update our iPods.The MacBook specs are:

• 2GHz Intel Core Duo
• 2GB RAM
• SuperDrive (DVD±RW/CD-RW)
• Built-in 802.11g AirPort Extreme and Bluetooth
• Built-in iSight camera
• 80GB HD

I took the old Dell XPS Windows XP SP2 machine and turned it into a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. I installed FreeNAS. FreeNAS is a BSD based NAS supporting all the major networking protocols including Windows CIFS, Network File System (NFS), and Apple File Protocol (AFP). The remaining Windows computer all have their “My Documents” folder mapped to the NAS. Backups have become much easier now and saving accross the wireless network to the NAS is fairly quick.

• Dell Dimension XPS 4100
• 733 MHz Intel Pentium III
• 512 MB RAM
• 40 GB on primary drive
• 80 GB SATA on secondary

With the exception of the NAS all the computers in the house are connected wireless to the Internet via a Linksys WRT54G wireless access point (WAP). The WAP has WPA security enabled and is connected to the cable company’s (Patriot Media) cable-Ethernet bridge.