Safety Fork, the

I stayed up way too late tonight…at least, I should have gone to bed the better part of an hour ago. But really, my sacrifice is your gain, as I’ve been putting the major work into a new and improved version of Same OSX. I’ll put it up tomorrow, but probably not until after work, as I need to make sure that there’s nothing really embarrasing in the source and mark it all up for GPL distribution, as promised.

I am finished furnishing my apartment. When I moved in, I knew that I wanted to get a bookshelf, DSL, and a television. Now I have all three.

I realized when I was looking at apartments in March that I would be in the position, for the first time, of having a room which would need a screen. In the dorms in college, I just used my computer. Last year, Darren had a television for the living room. Now, however, I have another room for my computers and no roommates to cover my shortfall.

Yesterday, I bought one of these (a 32-inch LCD screen, in case you don’t care to follow the link). I had fun confusing the girl who was ‘helping’ me (I actually liked one of the other sales guys better, but she was the one who kept hanging around me asking questions). I don’t think she knew what to think of me, especially after I responded to, “Do you have HD cable already?” with, “Oh, no…no, I don’t watch television.” I could just see her trying to figure out why some guy who doesn’t watch television wanted one (movies and computers, of course).

It’s quite nice, of course, but somehow the most geek-exciting thing for me is that the screen comes with an RS-232C port. I don’t have an extra cable right now—my only serial cable is currently the console for my server—but I’m looking forward to having some fun controlling my TV from my computer. The protocol is simple ASCII command/response, and is even fully documented in the manual.

Somehow, my VHS tapes just don’t look so good anymore.

I finally released a version of Same OSX. If you’ve a Mac and you’re bored, feel free to take a look.

I got to work this morning and thought, “Hey, I wonder if anyone’s checked out safetyfork.net yet,” so I whipped out Firefox. Lo and behold, I can’t make a connection. I knew it worked fine yesterday, but I couldn’t really do anything about it from work. (I can’t even SSH out, because the network guys there block even most outgoing connections, for reasons I haven’t been able to ascertain.)

When I got home this afternoon, I found the machine waiting serenely at at the OpenBoot prompt; there must have been a power outage during the night, and I’d forgotten that when I first got this machine I told it not to boot automatically when powered on. It’s all taken care of now (although I think I’d like to get a UPS for this machine at some point).