Mac Mini to HDMI with HDCP and digital audio

http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=104&cp_id=10428&cs_id=1042802&p_id=6331&seq=1&format=2

This is great, a solution for connecting your newer Macs, including the Mini, to your TV, without losing the HD video and surround sound audio.

There have been other solutions for connecting Mini DisplayPort, which is the video port connector for newer Macs, to your TV. You could convert to VGA, DVI, or even HDMI. However most of the adapters available cost you HDCP, the content protection mechanism required to pass true HD video to your TV. Even if they did support HDCP, Mini DisplayPort does not pass analog or digital audio, so no audio was passed over the HDMI connection. You were stuck with PC sound, or certain adapters might pass in analog (stereo) audio via USB audio. But this adapter actually uses the TosLink connector (same as the analog stereo connector but a digital connection) to get the surround sound audio and patch it into the HDMI connection to your TV. Wild! And if you know monoprice, you know that this is rock-bottom cheap to boot!

Snow Leopard clean install for the Windows guy

I wound up with an Apple computer by accident. That is I got an iPhone, and thought it was so great that I decided to write some programs for it, and it turns out you can only do that on Apple computers.

So I bought the cheapest one they had, a Mac Mini. It’s been an ok computer hardware-wise, but getting used to the MAC OS has been a bear. Perhaps in another post I will describe my trials.

This post is about my Snow Leopard (from regular Leopard) upgrade experience though. I didn’t know what to expect. I put the cd in while the machine was already running. There was a button to click to start the upgrade. So I ran the upgrade. That all seemed to work ok, though it took quite awhile. But when it came back up, while successful, it was clear that a clean install was not done. I still had programs and preferences.

So I went a-googling and found that the clean install options had been slightly hidden in this version, and I needed to boot the disk, which I did, and then wiped the drive, followed by the install. That also went well, but took a long time.

When the computer came back up, it was once again clear that something was wrong. The GarageBand, iMovie, and iPhoto applications my Mini had come with were gone.

It turns out they aren’t part of Snow Leopard (nor are they part of Leopard). They are part of a software suite from Apple called iLife, and they came free with my computer. So I was wondering if I was going to have to reinstall whatever cd/dvds the computer came with, and then reinstall Snow Leopard. But when I dug out the disks, I found that there was one for Leopard and one for other software. Guess what that other software is? iLife. I am happy to report that it installed ok right on top of Snow Leopard, and as far as I can tell, I am good to go.

Apple Leopard blue-screens

http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2007/10/29/sometimes-hubris-comes-back-to-bite-you.aspx

Paul comments on some ironic behavior of the new Mac OS update.