Mike Jutan's World: My new Mac Mini!!!!!

Saturday, July 30, 2011

My new Mac Mini!!!!!

I LOVE THIS THING ALREADY!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I just got my new Mac Mini today and it is super awesome. I brought it home tonight and started working away getting things set up. First off I tried plugging in the ThunderBolt-to-VGA cable and it didn't seem to take so rather I used the supplied HDMI-to-DVI adapter and plugged it into a DVI port on one of my monitors. That worked and took me to the Mac setup screen.

Setup was pretty quick and easy, and I didn't have an extra Cat5 cable sitting around so it just used WiFi and it seems really fast. From there I loaded up the Mac App Store and it's a super slick way to deliver software updates... and on that note I updated GarageBand, iMovie and iPhoto. Cool stuff.

From there I installed a few things like Chicken of the VNC and Skype, and then read an article online about how to install DMG files on a Mac, cause if you haven't done it before, it's really confusing because it's so different from Windows. I got Logitech's Command Center program installed so my extra mouse buttons work but I can't figure out why the vertical scrolling on Mac is upside down! Gotta figure out what's going on there. [Edit: It's due to the trackpad settings. Here's how to fix it: http://www.demacshop.com/tag/fix-vertical-scrolling-mac-os-lion/]

I played around with the new Lion features like LaunchPad and Mission Control and they are really awesome. This is some cool and slick stuff. I updated iTunes and started an Xcode download from the Mac App Store too.

From there it was time to try and fix the monitor setup. I plugged in the ThunderBolt-to-VGA cable again and rebooted the Mac and then it picked up the 2nd monitor!!! It looks really solid but I was hearing a slight buzzing sound coming from one of the monitors... as it turns out that sound has always been there but the Mac Mini is SO SILENT that I can hear a bunch of other stuff going on. Hilarious. Comparing the whirring super loud fan in my desktop to the Mac Mini is pretty amazingly awesome.

I then got my Windows machine up and running again but the monitors were reversed, whoops. I tried swapping the cables on the end and for some reason the signals were still the same. I guess Windows wants the primary monitor to be the DVI connection? Anyway I got the monitors switched in the Display settings on Windows so now the mouse and monitor positions are correct for both machines.

Sweet. Just got Xcode installed as well and it looks really fancy. It's like iTunes for programming :)

I'm still waiting for my KVM to arrive from Amazon so then I can hookup my Logitech camera and other stuff to the USB hub and swap that via the KVM so they will work on both machines. Till then I'm just using the Mac cause it's super awesome!