At the end of January, we picked up a Mac mini to use as our Home Theater PC. We thought long and hard about getting one and if we should get a Mac mini or an Apple TV. The Apple TV seemed a logical choice but I wanted it to have a DVD player plus I wanted to be able to do some gaming (even if it’s VMWare’d in Windows). That meant Mac mini.

It was a breeze to hook up. We have a DVI -> HDMI converter and i hooked up a simple mini-jack to Composite audio and we were good to go. The screen is beautiful bright, crisp, and 1920×1080 and delivers a great picture.

We added our existing Bluetooth Keyboard and Mouse to the mix and had a nice full computer/HTPC experience. I wasn’t crazy about using the mouse though and decided to do some looking and found a new solution to the problem. The AirMouse.

The AirMouse is an application for the iPhone that turns your iPhone into either a giant trackpad or a gyroscopic mouse. As if that wasn’t enough, it also has a built in keyboard and a set of screens for controlling a Web Browser or Front Row. You need to buy the app from the App Store and install a small server on your Mac or PC, that’s it. It even lets you choose between different machines running the server. All this for $6. You can’t beat that! Check it out if u get a chance.

I finally got my copy of iLife 09 this week and I’ve had a chance to play around with it. Here are my thoughts, if you really don’t care what I think (and I wouldn’t blame you) you can skip this post !

Even though all of the apps in iLife have been updated, iPhoto has always been the main draw of the iLife upgrades to me and this time is no different so that’s what I’m going to focus on. Last update added a feature I personally do care for called Events, but now iPhoto 09 continues that trend and adds Faces and Places. I don’t think I need to recap what these features do, you can just head over to Apple.com for that, but I will talk about how they work with my library.

At first I didn’t think I cared a wit about Places, I don’t have a GPS enabled digicam and I keep location services off on the iPhone 3G, so why would I care about geo-tagging. Well I have to say I’ve been converted. I love to manually tag my photos. I don’t tag each photo but it was nice to tag our Disney trip photos (yes I know I still need to get my photo section back up) with Disneyland AND with Disney World and be able to look at all the pics we’ve taken throughout the state of Florida (Orlando, Key West, Miami) etc. I am not going thru every photo but I’m hitting up our major trips and evening going as granular as which hotel each photo was taken at in Vegas. In addition to this extra sorting functionality what I like is that a photo does not HAVE to have a “Place” unlike the fact that every photo does have to belong to an Event. This still irks me as some photos are just photos and not events. I have a “No Event” event but it pisses me off that i have to basically create an event on import and then merge it with the “No Event” event. I wish Apple would let me disable Events.

Now where I just like Places, I adore Faces. First of all it makes total sense to me to sort my photos based on who’s in them. This past Christmas when I was making iPhoto books and Calendars it would have been really great to be able to just grab all the photos of my niece and nephew in one swoop. The facial recognition does take a little bit of work from you. First iPhoto will go thru your library and try to find all faces. I have noticed that the faces have to be pretty much straight and looking at the camera. It does not like faces that are cocked to one side. After it’s done dive in and start identifying people in your pictures and iPhoto will start guessing and come up with a list of possible matches. Click once to confirm that it’s the person, twice to reject the photo. It did a pretty good job on my library and it almost always catches every new face I put into my library. I think the thing that impressed me the most is that age really does not affect the ability for iPhoto to guess who’s who. For example, we have over 600 photos of my nephew from the first two years of his life and it got him from the most recent to his actual birth photos. It always seems to know him. This was further proved true by the fact that this weekend I scanned a few hundred photos of me and my siblings from our births to our teens and it did a very good job of guessing each of us based off the recent (past 5 years) photos I already had identified.

Well it took some doing , some trial and error and some missteps but I got OSX, Windows XP and Windows 7 beta loaded on my MSI Wind. Each OS runs really well

XP… This was the easy part, well sort of. I had to actually use the restore discs that came with the Wind, my normal XP Pro discs would not work. The downside to this is that the restore disc insists on reformatting the hard drive.

Windows 7… Again a very simple and actually quick install on the Wind. It works flawlessly and even downloaded the drivers I needed for the Wind’s Hardware

OS X… This also was very easy to install. The hardest part of installing OS X was making it live nicely with Windows 7. Windows 7 does not use a boot.ini but something called BCD. The trick was installing Windows 7 last so that the BCD did not get confused.

Now you might ask why a triple boot? Well the answer is that I really wanted to try a dual boot XP and OS X setup. The Wind has a generous 120GB hard drive (especially as it’s not a primary machine) so there was plenty of space for both but then Windows 7 Beta came out and I wanted very much to try Windows 7 but I didnt know how it would run on the Wind and I know that installing WinXP means wiping the hard drive… Triple Boot was the answer. In all honest, I think at this point I’d go dual with 7 and X.