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Far Away Mac is a weblog by Macminicolo.net about using your Mac as a server. We offer tips, application reviews and tutorials on setup. Let us know if we can be of any help.

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Our current inventory of used Mac minis.

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We know we have quite a few folks who are planning to get a Mac mini hosted with us soon. For them (and any others) we’re having a Macminicolo Black Friday Sale. Anyone who signs up today will have their December charges waived. Just mention Black Friday in the comments section when you sign up.

(This can also apply to any machines added by current customers.)

We hope your holidays get off to a good start.

We try to help the common man set up a Mac server. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

We get messages all the time asking about Mac minis and their future. Well, the short term future is much like the present since Apple has confirmed no new products thru the holidays.. But have no fear, we are still certain of the future of the Mac mini.

But there is some good news in the mean time. Apple has lowered the costs for upgrades on the Mac mini. For instance, when the Mac mini was first released, it cost $150 to upgrade to 2GB of RAM. It was later lowered to $100 and just recently changed to $75. This is great news for those who run mac mini servers and we’ve updated our prices to be in line with Apple.

In addition, we’ve updated our inventory list of used Mac minis.

If you’re reading this blog, you probably have a Mac server setup somewhere that requires your attention occasionally. For those of you with an iPhone, I hope to help you out.

Over on the Macminicolo.net site, I’ve put together a list of seven iPhone applications that I use every day to work with the Mac servers and IT work in general. You can read it here.

The other day, we saw a pretty good spike of traffic going thru one of our switches. We’re always happy to see this because it usually means that someone is doing something worth talking about with their minis.

It turns out, the traffic was heading to the box hosted by Venice Arts. I talked with the admin of the box and he told me about the great project they’re doing. It’s moving photo gallery called “The House Is Small But The Welcome Is Big.”

The day the traffic came rolling in, it was due to being highlighted on MSN.com. The article was titled AIDS victims show their stories — in pictures and here is a short excerpt talking about the photos:

The photo gallery, online and traveling in the United States and overseas, is unlike others about AIDS and Africa: The images are both joyous and wrenching, and they were shot by women and children who are caught in the pandemic that has killed and orphaned so many.

Photographers from the outside often capture only unrelieved tragedy; those inside can tell a fuller story, say the Los Angeles-based founders of “The House Is Small But the Welcome Is Big,” created to focus attention on the AIDS crisis and promote action.

The pictures were taken by 18 AIDS-orphaned children from Maputo, Mozambique, and 15 HIV-positive women in Cape Town, South Africa. An exhibit opens this week at a Denver art gallery, Gallery M, and will be seen in New York, Los Angeles and internationally.

This article brought 11k unique visitors in just under three hours. Surely each of them were loading page after page of these photos and the Mac mini held up great. From what I’m told, there is a whole lot more ahead with this great project including a photography research institute at USC and a pulitzer nominee as the creative director.

Do you have an interesting way you’re using your Mac mini server? Let Us Know about it.

As I frequent different Mac forums, there are often threads asking where to get used Mac minis. Craigslist and eBay are the obvious suggestions. Also, Apple will sometimes list refurbished Mac minis on their site, though they don’t last long.

The amazing thing is that Mac minis (like most other Macs) keep an incredibly good resale value. Even the original G4 minis that sell on ebay are often just $100 less than when they were new. It’s amazing.

Since we have a lot of Mac minis coming in and out, we’ll often have extra ones that are available for purchase. We decided to keep a page of Mac minis that we have available. And as a bonus, we have a $75 discount for anyone looking to purchase one of these minis for use here in our data center.

So, take a look at the used Mac minis. We’ll keep it current as inventories change.

Update: I know we just posted this post and the minis a couple days ago, but they’ve already all been bought. It’s amazing the interest in used Mac minis. We’ll update the page as more come in.

I know there are quite a few customers (and potential customers) that keep an eye on this blog. I thought you might enjoy this article that was recently published about the facilities that we use for Macminicolo.net here in Las Vegas. The facility is quite impressive.

Welcome to Las Vegas - Home of the technology superpower you’ve never heard of

(Thanks to Greg for the heads up on the article.)

It’s been a very interesting few weeks. The ideas have been plentiful and wide ranging in the My Mac Server Contest. Before we announce the winner, a few notes:

• There are a lot of Mac users who are interested in helping others. The non-profits and service oriented projects were intended to help so many different people. It’s refreshing to hear.
• For those who entered but didn’t win, we do hope to work with you still. As mentioned earlier, anyone who entered the contest is eligible for one free month for whatever machines they colocate with us from now until the end of April. Just make a mention on signup that you were a contest entry.
• I feel like I have a pretty good handle on the different technologies, but I learned so much from the entries. So many of you are working with such interesting projects.
• We did receive some notes for moving the contest up a bit and that’s understandable. As I mentioned to those who wrote in, the sole reason was that the entrants were so plentiful that it was taking a lot of time to sort thru them and we were afraid that our current customers weren’t getting the attention they deserved. I think the 6000 entries contained most who wanted to enter, but if you were left out just let us know before the end of the month and we’ll still offer the colocation special to you.

So without further wait…the winner is Nathan Brennan in Cambridge, MA. As you might expect with any great business idea, Nathan asked us to keep this one private until he is ready to go. My guess is that it will be of interest to many of you so we’ll be sure to announce it here when it’s ready.

So Nathan, your Macbook Air is on the way and your Mac mini is ready to go.

For the rest of the entrants, thank you so much for participating. I hope we’ll get to work with many of you in the future.

The entries for the “My Mac Server” contest continue to roll in. (We’ve just hit 5,500 total entries.)

In an effort to maintain some possibility of being able to go thru them all, we’ve moved the end date of the contest up. As noted on the official contest announcement, the deadline for entries is now March 24th at 11AM PST. We’re going to spend the weekend going thru entries and the winner will be announced on March 27th.

Thanks for all the great entries. And thanks for all the recommendations of different software for Mac servers.

We are now one week into the the My Mac Server Contest and just this morning we reached the 4,000 entry mark. There have been so many great uses put forth from people all over the world. Here are some things we’ve learned so far.

• There are a lot of Mac users that want to take over the world. If any of you do, please remember the little people.
• There are so many great business ideas brewing that just need a spark to light them. If the contest doesn’t end up with you as the winner, please continue in your dream. Build that app, start that non-profit, find a way for your family to keep in touch, get your business going. We’d love to help any way we can.
• The Macbook Air is looked at as a great computer AND a self defense weapon. I guess it is a little sharp on the sides. Luckily, I’ve been using mine for over a month now with no flesh wounds to show for it.
• The Mac community is officially worldwide. So far, we’ve seen entries from 44 different countries.

If you haven’t yet entered the contest, we look forward to hearing from you.