This Mac mini concept from Victor Anselme‘s Apple Addicted blog looks fantastic. Now that an impending Mac mini update is more that just a rumor, I am really wondering how it’s gonna look. It will definitely follow the new design language that started with the iMac and followed by the Macbooks and this concept conforms to that language beautifully.

Victor designed another concept sans an optical drive, which I would very much prefer. Thanks to Plex I am done with optical media. In addition to Plex, the new mini will make a decent gaming machine as they will be equipped with the same NVIDIA chipset that can be found on the new Macbooks. The Mini Display port is the biggest issue though as Mini Display -> HDMI cables are hard to come by, but I am sure that will change when the new Mac minis are introduced in January.

The demo video I did for Plex with Aeon skin is also part of the paper as the featured video for CenterStage+Plex.

You can get it here.

This new skin was released for XBMC a couple days ago. MediaStream by Team Razorfish is a community effort that has been going on since October 2007. It’s is a very polished piece of work as you can see in the video and need nearly no configuration and tinkering to get it working right.

This skin has replaced my other favorite Aeon for now. One other skin that I am looking forward to is the new default Plex skin. The Plex team has teamed up with the CenterStage team to bring a default skin for Plex in the coming weeks. Judging by the preliminary demos and screenshots, it is going to be a cracker.

To watch it in HD, just click the HD button on the right to jump through to Vimeo and make sure you go full screen.

Plex is an indie fork of the popular Xbox Media Center for OS X Leopard. Aeon is an outstanding skin in alpha stages for XBMC. You might have heard about both of them and you might have also seen many galleries and screenshots.

Well, I’ve got a video demo. And it is in HD if you wish to watch it that way. Just click the HD button on the right to jump through to Vimeo and make sure you go full screen.

This video which is not as smooth as the real thing, probably due to the screen casting software; showcases the system I’ve been using for the past 3-4 months. I have a Mac mini hooked up to a Sony Bravia and the experience has been nothing short of fantastic. So much so that I have deleted Front Row.

I am currently using the Movies, TV Shows and Music components of Plex. I use the Music component only to listen to Shoutcast radios–especially Dinamo 103.8 and Soma–and Last.FM stations since Plex developers haven’t gotten round to integrating iTunes and iPhoto yet; but judging by the speed they’ve been crunching at, it is just a matter of time. Plus, I have about 17,000 songs in my iTunes library and trying to navigate them with the remote is a big pain.

Plex scrapes IMDB for movies and TheTVDB for TV shows and grabs the director/writer/cast listings, ratings, genre, year, runtime, plot overviews as well as posters. There is also support for various python scripts developed for the original XBMC. I especially like The Apple Movie Trailers script which provides streaming trailers to nearly 2000 movies within the Plex interface.

There is support for the Apple Remote as well as Harmony Remotes, Universal Remotes and XBox360 controllers.

The Plex community and developers are ever helpful over at the Plex forums. Get yourself a Mac mini and head on over to Plex to meet Elan and the rest of the team as well as Barkley. ;)

There’s something odd about reviewing a camera that just works: There’s not that much to say. Sony’s former Minolta team has hit on a design with all three of the latest cameras that is so easy to approach and use that it’s hard to come up with anything clever. It reminds me a lot of the switch between PC and Mac. I used to love tweaking MS-DOS and Windows to eek out a little more speed, but the Mac just worked, and worked well. Suddenly I had to focus on getting stuff done with my computer, rather than messing with settings to make a window pop up faster. The consumer Alpha cameras are a lot like that.

-Shawn Barnett of Imaging Resource

Sony Alpha 350 DSLR Review

The photo above was taken in Pupa Apple Store, Mayadrom Shopping Center, Istanbul. They are also bundling a copy of Vista Basic with every Mac purchase. How about selling Pepsi in a Coke fridge?

This one above is from the Bimeks weekend paper insert. It says Virus free with OS X. You can load Windows as well!

And the prices are so cheap(!), aren’t they? 2197 Euros + 18% Tax for a 2.4 Ghz 15″ MBP. That’s 4 grand for a Windows laptop. ;)

Link

If you would like to delete a particular calendar in Leopard’s iCal, you get the dialog box that’s pictured above. If you choose the “Delete and Notify” option, Mail.app launches and starts sending messages to people who you have events scheduled with.

Why can’t I just delete a calendar without notifying the whole friggin’ world that I am deleting a calendar? Hello? Apple?

Well, with a simple hack you can: Using iCal Reply Checker from John Maisey. iCal Reply Checker is an iCal add-in that gives you options for how replies to meeting invites are dealt with. Just click Add to install, then select the Do not send reply emails option, as pictured below.

Go back to iCal and try to delete the calendar. It will pop up the same dialog box, but it will not send notifications when you click Delete and Notify.

Boom! ;)

Calendar gone.

If you wish iCal to return to default behavior, just click Remove on iCal Reply Checker.

David Heinemeier of 37signals says on his post titled The MacBook Air could easily be the only machine:

But what I continue to be impressed with the most on the Air is simply the build quality. The MacBook Pro has OK build quality, but the regular MacBook frankly blows in this department in my mind. The plastic feels too cheap, it creaks and bends, and the black surface gets permanently smudged way too quickly. It just doesn’t feel tight in the same way the Air does.

What most people are complaining about the Air is the non user replaceable battery; right?

On the other hand it feels very well built, very tight; right?

Have you ever heard of structural rigidity?

The fact that the underbelly of this thin piece of gorgeous metal structure is one solid piece plays an outstanding role in the way that it feels so tight and well built. Most people would be complaining that it creaks and flexes and it was built like crap if it had a big deep hole at the bottom.

This is very much like the big difference in handling between a two door sports car and the convertible version of the exact same car. Most of the time, the convertible version handles like crap, because it flexes due to the absence of a roof. Oh, and it also makes all sorts of crackling noises when you run over a pothole.

To overcome this, engineers tend to equip the convertible one with extra bracing elements throughout the chassis which helps the structural rigidity, but also increases weight.

And weight helps neither handling nor portability.

Someone pinch me!!

Props to Geohot. Instructions can be found on his blog and on hackint0sh.org as always. Will try this on a few OTBs beginning of next week… Just wanna wait for the early adopters to report back their findings over the weekend.