Mac mini March: MacminiCenter.com
First I must make a confession, I do not own a
Mac mini. I have no plans to buy a Mac mini. I love the Mac mini.
With that out of the way, there is something else that I have an increasing affinity towards and that is
the Wiki. Mac mini Center combines both into a
Wiki for people to trade tips and tricks on how to make the Mac mini into one serious home media center.
The Wiki includes tips on:
The best, and worst, part of this website it that readers have total control over what appears in the Wiki. Since
Mac users are nice people who like to help each other out I don’t think will be a problem, but as you know one bad
apple spoils the bunch. At the moment editing pages is disabled until they put the finishing touches on the site.
Keep you eyes on this one, folks.
Do you plan on using your Mac mini as a home media server?
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
jobi said 5:06AM on 12-10-2005
Well, I'm having trouble with, ah, underscan...
When I set the Mini connected to my LCD-tv via DVI to 1280 x 720 (which is the res I want to have) I get about an inch of black border on each horizontal side and about half and inch top/bottom. All other resolutions go "outside" the TV.
It's really annoying. I've tried using DisplayX but to no avail.
Do you have any suggestions, Zeno?
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joe said 4:16PM on 6-16-2005
i'm currently contemplating the use of the mini as a home entertainment center: currently it's a yes because i see a lot of good things happening (HTC developments like centerstage and others) and i can imagine a lot of useful things to be done with a mini and a large tv with a dvi input.
but the verdict isn't in yet... ;-)
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Small Paul said 4:16PM on 6-16-2005
Actually, with a Wiki, the bunch only gets spoiled if the bad apples outweight the apples who go around cleaning up after the bad apples. And, generally, the bad apples totally lose.
Wikipedia wouldn't work if one bad apple spoiled the bunch.
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Zeno Crivelli said 2:27AM on 9-28-2005
Hi, I'm the creator of that site, thanks for writing about it :-)
There're not many users who asked for an account to edit that wiki so far... (actually, at the moment I'm practically the only one who put some content in it, so if someone out there would like to help out....), anyway, look at the Users List:
http://www.macminicenter.com/wiki/index.php?title=Special:Listusers
...I think you'll find someone famliar to tuaw.com...hi hi :-)
(but when will she actually use her account? ;-))
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Mike Krus said 4:16PM on 6-16-2005
Nice site, but how do you create an account. There's a login page but no account creation (I can understand at least)
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Mark Sumner said 3:54PM on 6-20-2005
I've snugged the DVI connector of my mini up to my Samsung 30" HDTV, but I was disappointed by the amount of overscan. Attempting to actually use the Mac left me missing half the dock, a finger-width on left and right, and having to find the menu bar by "feel."
It would be nice if there was a way to convince the machine that, yes, the screen is 1280 by 720, but I need you to tuck everything in a bit from the edges.
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Zeno Crivelli said 2:27AM on 9-28-2005
@#4:
Mike, to get an account, read here: http://macminicenter.com/why.html
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Zeno Crivelli said 2:27AM on 9-28-2005
@#5:
Mark, I'm really aware of the overscan issue, and I'm personally committed to find a solution.
(for the ones who don't know what the overscan is, read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overscan )
I've been discussing the issue with david (of mightydave.com), you can find more info reading our comments to this post: http://www.mightydave.com/index.php?p=20#comments . I think I'll soon create a section in the macminicenter wiki about this damn overscan problem. Now, here are some news:
- Tiger will have a new "Overscan" checkbox in the Display preferences pane, I actually tested it on a beta-build, but for the moment it doesn't seem to work, you can see my "test" here: http://www.macminicenter.com/overscan_issue/
- On the PC-side, there're a couple of users who managed to solve the problems tweaking the PowerStrip settings (a Winodows utility to configure displays and resolutions). There are a couple of Mac-equivalent to this PowerStrip utility: namely SwitchResX and DisplayConfigX. Thus, I think it should be possible to solve the issue playing with one of those utilities, but I've yet to find out how.
more to come....
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