The End of an Era – Selling the Mac Mini!

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Tonight I finished cleaning all of my personal data off of my first Apple Macintosh.  The hard drive was wiped, and the operating system reload is in progress.  It’s time to put the little beastie up for sale, and get some more modern hardware!

This was a big purchase for me back when I started messing around with my Canon HF100 HD video camera.  iMovie ’09 worked great with my video camera, and it made sense to purchase a Mac Mini (and then upgrade it) to handle all of my video editing and storage duties.

The machine I purchased was a Mid 2007 Mac Mini, which had an Intel Core2Duo 2.0Ghz processor, 1GB of RAM, and a 120GB internal hard drive.  I immediately upgraded the system to 4GB of RAM and installed a 500GB Western Digital 5400RPM SATA drive.  Massive improvements in speed, video editing capabilities, and storage in one easy afternoon.

The system has served me well as a workstation in general, and working with video through iMovie.  Sadly, the time has come to upgrade to something more modern, with a little more RAM and some more CPU power to handle the longer videos I’d like to shoot.  Also, the 500GB drive was full, and I’d rather not try to stuff a 1TB drive in the system.  External drives work great, but are much slower.  I have outgrown this system.

What will I get to replace this system?  I doubt I will get another Mac, since video editing capabilities under Linux have caught up to (and surpassed in some areas) iMovie, and i can get a LOT more storage space, CPU, and RAM by building my own system instead of paying for another Mac.  I’ve had a lot of success editing the raw files from my video camera under a couple different video editors in Linux, so I’m comfortable leaving the Mac behind at this point.

Not sure what the specs will be on the new system.  I have to sell off the Mac Mini first to help fund the new hardware.  That will be another blog post in the near future.  :-)

More SPARC hardware!

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Thanks to a good friend who was thinking of my love for older Sun Microsystems hardware, I now have a few more SPARC based systems to add to my stable of computers!  I have gained a two more SPARCStation 20 systems (both dual CPU), two more SPARCStation 5 systems, and a SunBlade 100.

None of the systems came with RAM, so I’ll have to hit eBay and locate some used memory.

What to do with these systems?  I really need to get some kind of FreeNAS system online, and perform network based booting with all the SPARCs.  I have plenty of Fast Ethernet SBUS adapters, so I won’t be limited to 10Mbit/s for “disk” traffic.  I dare say, running off of a modern NAS setup may even be faster than most of my SPARC systems’ onboard SCSI interfaces.  It would be nice to not have to deal with old SCSI drives, the added power consumption, and the added heat as well.

With all that said, I’m considering moving this site onto a NetBSD platform, based off of the SPARC hardware.  Should be an interesting diversion from things at work, and give me some opportunities to pick up more scripting and possibly programming.

More updates to come as I play around with the hardware!  If anyone out there has RAM for SS5, SS20, Ultra2, or SunBlade 100 systems, and you’d like to donate to the cause, please let me know!

Cleaning up the YouTube channel

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I’ve been working on cleaning up my YouTube channel, and adding better descriptions to all of my videos.  Now that I have the super battery for my video camera, I hope to add a good number of off-road videos this coming summer.

Recently I linked both my YouTube and AdSense accounts, and can now place ads in the videos.  AdSense on this site has been doing fairly well (thanks for reading!), considering how infrequently I post new content.