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Mac mini Built Into Wall
Lilmuckers writes "I have just completed a project to build a Mac mini into the wall of my kitchen. It is hidden and everything works perfectly."
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He couldn't find space for an Mac mini? It's only 6.5 inches wide and 2 inches tall.
If space was such a critical factor just get the iMac with the computer built into the monitor. Add a wireless keyboard and wireless mouse and you can store them in a drawer when not needed.
Quality Hosting e3 Servers
This reminds me of an old story at the Univeristy of Iowa where they moved a computer department into a new building wherein years later they are trying to find a server. It is still serving packets and no one can seem to find it. Suddenly someone realize that it was probably left at the other building years before when they moved. They go over there and are looking around when someone says 'well the server would have been right here where this wall was. On a hunch, they rip open the wall and sure enough, there is the server still serving packets... 4 years later!
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
The submitter really asked for it, didn't he?
...for an underpowered box. Shoulda rolled a household server. Meh.
Blar.
and do it in two weeks with a $100 budget.
http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/ec82a64b93fc80051 9411ac2b6ea8a9b/index.html
Also, a hint: If you have a G4 Cube you wish to hide in your kitchen, merely replace the current heating elements in your oven with the ol G4 Cube. It is both sightly and functional this way.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Just the wires are. The MAC is under the cabinent.
This isn't innovative at all.
have just completed a copy of SpaceShipOne built entirely in Lego... It is hidden, but I tell you that everything works perfectly..
Sorry, this sig is beneath your current threshold
http://www.caffeine-junkies.com/?mode=articles&pag e=print&id=7 seems OK, and is all on one page.
Manta
Here [Next] is [Next] my [Next] Mac [Next] Mini [Next] in [Next] a [Next] wall.
For everyone who just wants to skip to the chase and see "a Mac Mini in someone's kitchen wall", which is what I wanted to see (not pictures of an effing butter knife)...completed Mini in the wall.
Also, I think the entire W3C group has a simultaneous conniption with the author's use of "Clicky" to note an image that is also a link. That's the purpose, astoundingly, of a BLUE BORDER around an image...along with the cursor change, the tool tip, AND the display of a URL in the bottom of the browser window. I think it's probably worse than the usual "to see a picture of me and a llama, click here. To find out more about llamas, click here."
I know I had a conniption, thanks to the atrocious grammar....
Please help metamoderate.
For alllll that effort he went through, this was the final result.
I was expecting to see something beautifully plugged into the wall like an ATM or whatnot, but this just looks like a regular computer. If he'd just put the Mac Mini under the table it'd look the same. Haha.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
The kitchen strikes me as somewhere where there's often water, and from my limited experience with water and computers, that might not be a good thing! Of course a Mini is bordering on being cheap enough to be disposable...
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
That's nothing - I used to use a VAX 9000 as a wall. And a furnace.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
His next project involved building it into another spot. That is why the page could not be displayed!
The solution is to make sure that the MacMini has Aqua pre-installed. You have to do it the proper way with the installation disc. Merely splashing it on the case will cause trouble.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Apparently, he built his webserver into the wall as well, and his house in on fire.
Here's another nice use of a mac mini, it's even easier to install:
_ us.html
http://www.w3sh.com/archives/2005/05/enfin_un_bon
about their iSeries and such
n ds/index_flat.html
d ex.cfm?fuseaction=viewarticle&CO_ContentID=13885
http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/iseries/lege
It also includes the "server" lost behind the wall. The reenactments are cute and somewhat based on "true" stories.
Another set of stories is at...
http://www.iseriesnetwork.com/nodeuk/ukarchive/in
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Here: http://www.caffeine-junkies.com.nyud.net:8090/?mod e=articles&page=print&id=7
That funny comment reminded me of something I saw years ago touring the old Commodore plant in West Chester, PA.
Somewhere in the piles of stuff I have accumulated over the years I have a picture. It's a picture of a picture frame encompassing an internal floppy drive embedded in the drywall behind it.
The story goes that an engineer was up all hours of the night trying to debug a problem with his new floppy drive circuitry. After hours and hours of fruitless troubleshooting, he discovered that the problem wasn't with the circuitry, it was with the drive itself. The frustrated engineer picked up said floppy drive and whipped it at the wall - where it became one with it. The picture frame was later added for decoration.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
That sort of things irritate me. Sure, I'm all about standards compliance, but there's no need to make it a religion as this asshat has. There is NO need whatsoever to interrupt a user and lecture him for using an 'inferior' browser.
Yay, your code is standards compliant. Good for you. If you're that worried about complaining IE users, you obviously don't know how to code a standards-compliant website that doesn't break non-compliant browsers. So good of you to publicly reveal your web programming shortcomings.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
I put the thing in the friggin' silverware drawer.
Problem solved! Next!
I just bought this monitor a few days ago and finally hooked it up last night. It works great with my powerbook, and the picture is fantastic.
If you are going to use it with the mac mini, you might consider attaching the mac mini itself to the back of the display. If you use a wall bracket to mount the display to the wall, there would be sufficient space. You can bolt a piece of metal between the monitor and the mounting bracket to serve as a mounting plate for the mac mini.
Incidentally, as far as choice of computer goes.. the mac mini will drive the display fine at native resolution (so long as you use the DVI 1 input) and is a fairly cheap alternative way to watch DVD at 1080p, as an external scaler capable of doing this runs about $2000. It also makes a great display for photo slideshows as the resolution is fantastic.
It's also worth noting that the display itself has a pretty decent scaler in it as well. If you attach a decent progressive scan player to the screen via component, the picture you get will be very good - I found it's at least as good as the picture from the powerbook playing a DVD.
The one drawback for using a mac mini on this display is that you won't have anywhere close to the horsepower needed to play any HD content. I doubt the mini is capable of playing 1080i MPEG2 TS much less H.264 at 720p or 1080p. My powerbook is a 1.4ghz G4 like the mini though, and I have an HDV camcorder that I can get 1080i MPEG2 TS from, so if you want to know the results of my testing on the mac's ability to do MPEG2 HD, drop me a line.
Didn't the current iMac design appear before or at the same time as the mini? Seems like that's exactly what he was looking for.
He could have taped one of the firewire TV tuners to the back of it for the TV function (or streamed it over the LAN from some location with better reception than the kitchen).
get laptop sheeesh
Not only do they claim that the site is not compatible with IE (which renders it fine) But they claim that the website is w3 compliant.
After the page loads I get a nice JavaScript error, and also decided to check the w3 validator and found 24 errors, not making the website compliant.
If your going to complain about " standard compliant browsers" you should at least make your site compliant to THE standards you claim to enforce.
TruePunk | Games
I more or less view it as the internet workstation. It can sit in mothers room, and have a nice LCD flat screen monitor and be small and out of the way. The traditional computer desk with its bulk and size needs not be. It can easily fit on the side end table by the couch with its wireless keyboard and mouse.
pickup a big enough LCD monitor and it could easily be your wireless multimedia center for TV, dvd movies, and internet surfing in the living room.
Did it mention the power consumption of the entire unit is less than what the average intel cpu alone uses?
Yes, for the love of God.
Stop the world; I need to get off.
Yeah, I'm thinking the same thing. Then he also wouldn't have the mess of cabling on the counter which looks absolutely awful (as does, for that matter, the display he/his father chose to use). One power cable from the iMac and you're done. Or the power cable and one ethernet cable, not this goofy-looking "bunny hop" nonsense.
I'm going to presume dear ol' dad is a widower or divorced, as I have yet to meet a woman who would allow that in her kitchen.
Moreover, I'm waiting for that Mac Mini to get toasted. Under cabinets (where it's dusty) with a heater? Best location evar! Dust only settles when it's not disturbed, and now he's gone and thrown something with a fan in a dusty, closed space. This should go swimmingly.
Upon investigation, I found that the powerbook and probably the mini also are capable of MPEG2 1920x1080 ... probably because the graphics cards can accelerate the decoding. They aren't particularly fast enough to do deinterlacing though, so you'll have to rely on the monitor to do that part. ATI has H.264 acceleration in their next chipset, but it's still up in the air as to whether or not current ATI chipsets will get any H264 accleleration or whether or not quicktime will end up taking advantage of it.
I am pretty sure that the 1.42GHz mini could do the 480p H264; my 1.5GHz powerbook does fine with it.
using a short patch lead on show like that seems totally braindead to me when he could just take the incoming network cable straight to the mac
he used a bus powered hub for all the USB ports, frankly i'm surprised he made the dvd drive work on that at all and he himself admitted that it didn't work on the usb hub with the new led connected.
also he doesn't mention the power of the heater but i wonder if he has thought about the rating of the wall socket that he has connected everything to. some heaters basically use up the entire rating of a standard 13A socket.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
- That he was so obsessed with the goal of hiding a computer in a wall that he went out and bought a computer that's so small there's absolutely no point in hiding it in the wall. And to make matters funnier, he didn't make the CD drive accessible and had to buy an external one... about the same size as a Mac Mini and a lot uglier.
k itchen/cut5.jpg
- This quote: "Since the Mac is designed in america, it's most convenient to measure it in their units, Imperial units, goodness knows why they can't use SI units like the rest of the world, probably their bias against the french."
(Hahaha. He has a point.)
- This picture: http://www.caffeine-junkies.com/images/articles/i
Just screams out 'M-m-m-mac mini!'
He should've scrawled labels on it with black marker pen...
- The whole "I'm so cool, I own a computer made by Apple Macintosh" (it's Apple, retard), "and I openly show how much I hate IE" (annoying) and "Let's deliberately get to a stage where I have to test it's still working as an excuse to show an Apple desktop" thing he has going.
- This unnecessary comment: "NOTE FOR LAYMEN: it's imperitive that the wires for the LED are kept the same way around, because an LED is just that, a DIODE, and thus it will only work if the current is going one way."
Well, no shit Sherlock! I'm glad your university degree taught you *something*. Personally I learned that in Science class at about age 12.
- The excessive use of CAT5 for everything just to look cool to a Slashdot audience. Ironically, ends up looking a complete pratt by using a patch cable *outside* of the wall. I have no words!
- At the end of the day, all he did was plonk the Mini on the floor and create a wall-mounted port replicator, and even end up wasting money on an external optical drive!
Got to love it. You have to be sorry for him, he's obviously just trying to look cool. He's also fallen for the old pitfall of obsessing so much about solving a challenge that didn't even exist, he ended up creating more problems and overcomplicating the whole thing. But it's so funny.
I'm all for DIY, and clever uses of technology. This however, was not one. The mini is a pretty little pc. It's tiny, aesthetically pleasing... heck it's something to show off, not hide.
So this guy cut it up, added a couple plates to his wall, cluttered his table top with some wires and.. for what? Saving less than 1 square foot of countertop.
We should have awards for best misuse of good technology.
Gives a whole other meaning to 'FireWire' doesn't it?