Ok.. so being the cautious geek i am, i had bought a mac mini a while back before jumping into the OS X waters.. Unfortunately it was probably the last PPC mac mini’s sold, which means it has limited options (unless i convert it to yellowdog or somethign of the sort).

About 4 months ago i bought a (huuuuge) tv.. unfortunately i quickly figured out that the reason i never bothered with one before is that there isnt really anything decent on tv, and deels and i still spent more time watching googlevids than anythign else..

Enter gurgle-tv (gurgle was the name of the old mini)

(gurgle booting – picture in portrait for some reason)

So it sits there, with a little bluetooth applemouse next to it (which is enough for navigating to media and starting it). i do wish that this version of the mini had the little apple remote.. i thought it would which would have been uber..

Instead, i enabled “Desktop Sharing” on the machine.. So now, if i look for it in finder from my laptop i see:

It appears to be using a hacked version of VNC, but for what i need here its perfect.. This allows me to drive gurgle perfectly from any of the other machines..

(note the std flurry screensaver in all its glory)

Now i clearly need to cut some cables so i can hide the vga cable running from the tv to the mini, but it should be pretty easy going.. and i finally made use of my TV this weekend!

This is probably old news for most of the ppl who have been running HTPC’s for a while, but it surprises me how close it takes us to Star-Trek/futuristic sci-fi movie style connectivity..

A decent IM/Voip client and we can have our calls interrupt our viewing and come up on the screen.. Voice to speech means we can relatively easy get around to “computer, find me the address for XYZ” and let google do the rest.. and of course you-tube / video.google have just taken on a life of their own..

ahh.. the things u do when u should be report writing..

/mh