One month with the Mini

I switched (cold-turkey) a month ago, to the day. Got a Mini, 1.25ghz, 256MB of ram, upgraded the ram, myself, to 512MB. OS X is the best thing since sliced bread. The mini has been running for 11 days straight. In that time I've put it in sleep mode several times. And it wakes without a hitch. With windows, it was hit or miss.

I just found out yesterday that the text editor TextEdit, can read text to you. Notepad couldn't do that, I don't think. Today I found out that it can even read 4-letter words! All in all, the mini is a perfect fit for my computing needs. :batman:

Actually lots of thing in Mac OS can talk to you, you can set alerts, greeting, etc.

cool, congrats. textedit can do a lot of things. and other apps are very useful too, ical has alarms and scheduler, calculator can convert units of measure and currency.

Windows XP has a "narrator" that reads text in several programs, including IE, notepad, control panel, desktop, and a few others... it's not turned on by default and you have to dig around to find it. It's actually just as good as the mac version, but the mac seems to have more programs built in that enable the feature.

My mini's been up for 5 days now, it rebooted a few days ago after doing a bluetooth firmware update. I leave it on all the time so I can ssh into it from work and transfer files.

OSX is really nice to use, and certainly a refreshing change from XP which I use at work all day, and on my other box at home. Now I only turn on my XP system when I want to play games or do digital audio work.

Here's a cool little thing, open Teminal in the Utility folder
type say and then what you want it to say and it will speak

heres something also cool in that sense, open script editor(for applescripts),
type: say "what you want to be said" using " a default os x voice, like Victoria" voice used must be capitalized, hit run.

benjamindaines said:

Here's a cool little thing, open Teminal in the Utility folder
type say and then what you want it to say and it will speak

Click to expand...

Hmmmm... that could be fun.... if you have SSH access to a remote computer that you know somebody is working on, you can start making it talk to them.

Say they're just working in Photoshop or something, and then you do:

"say -v Whisper I am watching you. I am always watching you."

Or, better yet, if the victim is within hearing distance, see if you can get him/her to start talking to the computer with you typing the responses. Use the "Princess" or "Junior" voice and make the victim think that the mac has suddenly become self-aware and is trying to figure out the purpose of its existence.

lol..

is there a way to send an email that will talk? also, when I open my terminal , the window is so small you cant see the type, I click Window>return to default size, but it does nothing.

Thud said:

Hmmmm... that could be fun.... if you have SSH access to a remote computer that you know somebody is working on, you can start making it talk to them.

Say they're just working in Photoshop or something, and then you do:

"say -v Whisper I am watching you. I am always watching you."

Or, better yet, if the victim is within hearing distance, see if you can get him/her to start talking to the computer with you typing the responses. Use the "Princess" or "Junior" voice and make the victim think that the mac has suddenly become self-aware and is trying to figure out the purpose of its existence.

Click to expand...

heh lol. thats funny. thanks for that command . i'l get someone with it

would there be a way to make it execute at a certain time?

I've been thinking about switching lately. At least on my home machine. I checked out the mini at CompUSA a few weeks ago and was very impressed. Even with the default RAM it ran pretty smoothly. I think the only thing holding me back would be having to forfeit the PC games and applications I already own. Otherwise, I can't think of any reason NOT to switch!

marhan said:

I've been thinking about switching lately. At least on my home machine. I checked out the mini at CompUSA a few weeks ago and was very impressed. Even with the default RAM it ran pretty smoothly. I think the only thing holding me back would be having to forfeit the PC games and applications I already own. Otherwise, I can't think of any reason NOT to switch!

Click to expand...

Well... you don't have to SWITCH exactly... you could keep the PC around for apps that need it. Heck, I bought a mac AND upgraded my PC in the same week.