Once you go Mac...

May 14, 2007 8:23 PM

What cool things can I do with a G4 Imac in the dining room besides music and picture slide shows?

I scored a G4 Imac (800 Mhz, OSX Tiger) cheap. I have it set up in my dining room. I plan to use it for music/ spur of the moment web surfing. I'm also interested in setting up photo slideshows and using dashboard to have weather and news stuff constantly updating. What other key functions can I have it take of?

posted by cosmicbandito to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Response by poster: Bonus question: what to name it? All other machines are characters from Neuromancer. I've got Wintermute, Neuromancer, Molly Millions, and Ono Sendai. The router is named Sense-Net. I was thinking of calling it Tally (for Tally Isham, the media starlet).
posted by cosmicbandito at 8:23 PM on May 14, 2007

Electric Sheep screensaver is always an eye-catcher and conversation starter. Check their website for tips on how to set it up to run smoothly on older hardware.
posted by kuppajava at 8:44 PM on May 14, 2007

What CAN'T you do with it? Seriously. I have one and it does everything that a computer needs to do. Does it have a DVD player? Watch movies or concerts as background. Have a Digital Video Camera? Edit your own movies. You can use iTunes for streaming internet radio, and turn the Visualizer on full screen. (I like Radio Paradise and Radio Wazee) Set the screensaver to be an RSS news reader. Hook up a webcam and launch iChat AV so your friends can spy on your dining room. Make it your recipe machine.
posted by The Deej at 9:00 PM on May 14, 2007

If it will be turned on all the time, you might want to have it set up as a backup server for your other machines.

Set up a isight camera to randomly capture photos of you watching TV over the year.

Video Chat

Turn on speech and see if there are some interesting things to automate
posted by bottlebrushtree at 9:36 PM on May 14, 2007

I'm not too creative with the names myself as I only have one Computer and haven't gotten around to naming the printer/scanner/tablet yet, but my computer's name is Karoshi - Japanese for 'death by overwork'.

*grins*
posted by Phire at 9:40 PM on May 14, 2007

Turn on speech and see if there are some interesting things to automate
posted by bottlebrushtree

Ya that's an impressive demo for friends. Also you can play chess by voice.
posted by The Deej at 10:28 PM on May 14, 2007

I've got seven macs on my wireless LAN and find it easier to simply name them their model with some abbreviation for clock if I have to (e.g., MacIntel, PowerBook 125, PowerBook 15, iBook 300, iBook 466).

In terms what else you can do with it; I like to replicate my home dir to other machines just in case. Depending upon the hard drive size, sometimes I have to drop Music (22GB) and Pictures (10GB) but this works.

I also have .Mac, so I sync contacts, calendars, etc across all the machines. Having complete email on all boxes is nice as well, keeping in mind that if you use POP3 one will have to be the master (as sent mail will live on single machines only).
posted by Mutant at 11:05 PM on May 14, 2007

One word...

recipes.
posted by emptyinside at 11:07 PM on May 14, 2007

Empy inside beat me to the punch. A recipe database is a must for something that convenient to your kitchen.

Also, in addition to automatic news and weather updates, look for traffic and gas price updates.
posted by nita at 5:57 AM on May 15, 2007

A second vote for Electric Sheep. Mine also acts a a web server.
posted by KimG at 1:10 PM on May 15, 2007