But.. is it "really" that expensive?

-=-=-

The Nintendo Switch 2.
A console that, quite frankly, looks lovely, and Mario Kart World also looks lovely.
And..

The prospect of revisiting old games with slightly newer skins.
And..

I've always had a Three Game rule for consoles. If I can't name three "Must Have" games, I don't buy the console. This is one of the reasons I skipped PS2. Everything that I could name, was also available elsewhere, and I didn't find myself drawn towards it, all except for Parappa 2.
I mean, literally, that's the only game I can still claim that I'd like to buy a PS2 to play.
.. But even that's available elsewhere, nowadays.

So, I'm looking at the Switch and thinking to myself.

Maybe later.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to drive around in Mario Kart World's Free Roam mode, but when all's said and done, I think I might as well just wait it out for a bit.

So that's decided, then.
I'll wait.
I'll be sensible.
I'll not spend my money on something I ultimately don't need, and I definitely won't..


Oh no.

A Crazy Purchase

I've been thinking about this for a few weeks, now, and as the Switch 2 looked more and more like something I oughta pick up *later*, I started to be swayed more towards a new Mac Mini, instead.
On Monday, Wade McGillis let me know he was getting a new Mac Mini whilst the price had temporarily dropped on Amazon to 529, from 599. (I believe he's in the US)
I checked on Amazon UK, and .. indeed, same here, though it's 539, rather than 529.

Could I afford it, though?
Well, if I'm not buying the Switch, that'd help.

I also chose to use Amazon's 5 Month payment plan, so it's actually just under 110 a month, which isn't too bad, really.. .. Right?!

A.I.

We'll call this ALBox. It'll be the A.I. brains for AGameAWeek going forward.
I've already installed a few Local A.I. tools onto the thing, and it appears to be coping fairly well with them.

Quite how well it copes after a few weeks of having to churn out AGameAWeek content. .. Who knows!
It may explode!!!

Today's AI Greenie pic, as well as the AI Codas episode (click reveal under the Greenie pic of the day) are both generated by the ALBox. They both came out reasonably well, though the picture took more than a few attempts to get it just right. (Duplicated pupils and such)

DrawThings

Linkage

DrawThings seems to get worse the more things you add to the prompt, so I'm going to have to stick to smaller prompts in the future.
I'm currently playing around with all the different resolutions, samplers, scalers and such, in the hope of finding just the right settings that are fast and don't end up heating up the poor little Mac Mini too much.
So far I've seen it at a high of 72c, which is actually about what the MacBook's hitting, too. DrawThings seems to be taking roughly the same time, and heating up the CPU to the same sort of temperatures, on everything I've tried it on, although I'm gradually increasing from 256x256 images a couple of years ago, to generating at 960x640 with 4x upscaling, today.

It is nice, though, and this is it using the Flux Schnell model, along with the Derek model that Replicate generated for me a while back.





I think I'll probably end up spending a bunch of time faffing around with the different scalers and such, trying to find a new favourite style that doesn't go crazy!

For comparison's sake, these images are taking around about a minute and a half to generate, each. Replicate can do 4 of them in about 12 seconds.
So, um...
Yeah...

LM Studio

Linkage

I discovered this app, today, mostly by mithering CoPilot until it gave me an answer that wasn't obviously an advert.. (That's getting bad, lately! Microsoft are definitely trying to commercialise it as much as possible)
It eventually suggested LM Studio, which is a VERY easy to use LLM manager for Mac/Windows/Linux.
You simply download it, then you can choose from tons of LLM models, it auto installs them, and then you get a nice chatbot context window, with tons of options at your disposal.
Honestly, this is a lovely way to do it, and I wish I'd known about it sooner.

For the Codas episode, I had to copy+paste newer episodes into a "Here's what Codas is" training .txt file, which I've been neglecting to do for a while, and then attached it to the chat. I then had to give it a few attempts, but it seemed to get there in the end. .. Though I did do a fairly heft rewrite, too.
It'll be interesting to see how well (or badly) that manages in future, as the length of the chat gets sillier and sillier!! I might need to keep my text file up to date, and reinitialise the chat from time to time.

Conclusion?

So, yeah, that's quite a nice set of things that it can do, so far.
I'll be playing and tweaking over the next couple of days to see what else I can do on it.
It really has to be said that this little MacMini, especially at its price, is quite frankly outstanding.

Would I recommend?
If you're after a new computer, maybe. If you're used to Windows and haven't used Mac.. .. It's a big difference. It's taken me years to get used to MacOS, and now I'm not really sure I'd switch back, mostly because I'm comfortable with it, now.
It's a big difference.

But if you're already on the Apple bandwagon, there's nothing to complain about.
It's fast, it's powerful, and it's tiny!!!!
And it's currently a little bit cheaper on the Amazon.

.. I think I need a new monitor, though. Trying to use MacOS but only using a 720p TV is doing my eyes in!!

A.I. Corner

Lyrics : .. These are barely lyrics.
Sound Imported : Sheepishly Fresh
> Reveal 🔎

: Download | Suno Link

Alternative version
: Download | Suno Link
Sung by Suno


"Cartoon Derek tidies his desk to fit a tiny new Apple computer on it, Apple logo" by Flux

> Reveal 🔎