I know it’s been a while, but I’ve been forgetting and procrastinating, of course! (though is that very surprising?) in that time, I’ve hardly made much progress in Minecraft, though I’ve done almost half the ocean monument draining. I’ve also upgraded my Mac Mini 2,1 in that time, so that’s what this is gonna be about!

So, as I’m sure you’re aware, I bought a mid-2007 Mac Mini back in January. When I bought it, it was running Mac OS X 10.7.4 Lion, and only had an 80 gb HDD and two 512 sticks of DDR2 RAM. After I got it home, I swiftly installed Mac OS X 10.6.8 on it instead for performance reasons. I was initially hesitant to open it up since I didn’t have a proper metal prying tool and I didn’t wanna damage it.

Welp, I didn’t wait any longer past late February/early March. I took a kitchen knife (a fairly dull one at that), and I stabbed it in the bottom. Well, I didn’t stab it of course, but I used it as my prying tool. Now that I had it open, I replaced the RAM with the two 2 gb sticks from my broken Toshiba Satellite X200, and I replaced the hard drive with the 120 gb drive from that same Toshiba. While doing this upgrade, I realised that the CPU was socketed and that the better Core 2 Duos available weren’t too pricey, so my plan is to upgrade that at some point to the higher clock speed model.

After the upgrade, I had to fight with it some to upgrade to Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. A direct upgrade was off the table since it just didn’t work, so what I ended up doing was using the 2010 MacBook Pro to make a Time Machine backup, and I used that to restore to a fresh OSX Lion install. After shuffling some files around, it all worked! It’s a shame though that I lost Rosetta in the upgrade, since I had Adobe CS2 all set up and working.

Another thing I had tried in the time since I got it was trying to install Gentoo on the Mac Mini. This went all well and good until it came time to install the bootloader. The preceding steps were all fine, and even fairly quick since Gentoo started shipping binary packages, but the bootloader just wouldn’t install. I tried all the bootloaders on the install guide to no avail, and I can only theorise this is thanks to the strange quirk with early Intel Macs; They have a 32-bit EFI while being a 64-bit system. Since I could do little about this, I gave up for the time being.

I think that sums it up for the Mac Mini, so I don’t have much else to say on top of all of this.

I guess I should say that after my article about Webfishing, I kinda just stopped playing it, but I have since picked up Kerbal Space Program, and I rather swiftly racked up 90 hours on it (and still rising).