After our little scare with the Mac Mini last week, the little boxen that could is quickly becoming my favorite computer (still can't wait to get one with Leopard on it). So seeing cool applications of it like this one thrills me to no end: Andrew sent us his writeup of putting a Mac Mini into a Corvette (complete with touchscreen monitor) as a music player.

The whole process looks pretty complicated to me-- the most I've done with my car stereo is install an old CD player, and by install I mean "watched my friend do it." But Andrew's writeup is really thorough, and he goes through everything from choosing components to creating a layout, to potential problems during installation, and what he plans to do next. Apparently the Mini is almost tailormade for car systems like this-- not only is there a special cable built to power it in the car, but there is even a special version of Front Row designed to be controlled from a touchscreen. Not everything worked well, however-- the Mini had a grounding problem, apparently, and Andrew had an issue with the Mini's volume setting reverting after a restart, but he was able to punch out an Applescript to fix it.

The end product looks great-- Andrew says he's still working on the mounts, but considering he's got a working touchscreen controlling a Mac Mini in his Corvette, that's good enough for me. Very nice.

It appears the just-released Windows Vista RC2 and the latest Boot Camp 1.1.1 don't play well for some reason. I just tried installing it to round up that Vista + Intel Mac post I've been working on, but the Vista installation process kept telling me it wasn't happy with the drive Boot Camp creates, and thus wouldn't touch it even after formatting.

This is extra strange, as the RC1 installed and worked on Intel Macs just fine, and as far as I know, Boot Camp 1.1.1 has been updated for full compatibility with the latest Intel Core 2 Duo iMacs like the one I'm typing this on. What broke since RC1, how and whodunit (it was Ballmer in the meeting room with the office chair!) are a mystery to me, but what about you guys? Anyone else know what's going on?

I managed to get Vista running on my MacBook Pro in both a copy of Parallels Desktop and Boot Camp, but this post is only going to cover the Parallels side of things; my Boot Camp post is still in the kettle.

For the most part, I would say Vista runs in Parallels Desktop just 'ok,' as opposed to 'really well' or 'it made an un-switcher out of me.' Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to offer full support for high-end graphics cards yet, so you won't get any of the fancy 3D effects or what I like to call Translucent Everything Technology™ (TET) that Vista boasts.

Read on for a walkthrough of setting up, installing and running Microsoft Windows Vista on your Intel Mac via Parallels Desktop, including some catches to watch out for and just how far you can actually push this software, given Vista's still more or less beta/RC1 status and Parallels' as-yet experimental support.

MacOSXHints has a short and sweet how-to for creating a hard drive-based installer for OS X. Using a CD/DVD is fine and dandy, but if you're in a hurry or you're working with a machine who's optical drive is less than cooperative, the sheer speed and convenience of a hard drive install can't be beat.

The how-to basically has two steps. The first uses NetRestore Helper to create a Master Image of your Mac OS X install disc for the second step, which is using said image in Disk Utility to apply your install disc to an actual hard drive or partition. A few good considerations are listed at the end of the how-to, and I'd suggest reading the whole thing over if you're going to create a handy tool like this.

Mac OS X Hints has a new hint up today that shows you how to make your iPod a bootable Tiger install disk. This involves erasing your entire iPod, so you'll probably want to make sure you have backups of all the music crammed in there.

After you've erased the iPod, it is really a simple matter of using Disk Utility (located in /Applications/Utilities/) to an image of the Tiger DVD on your iPod. Cool little tip for the DVD-less Mac users among you. It should work with any iPod save the iPod shuffle (which doesn't have enough room). It's not necessarily iPod-specific either. Any bootable external drive will do.