Recent Happenings

Well I’m still unpacking from my move.

I’m sharing a house with my friend Candace, or rather I should say I’m living in a house in which I have a bedroom and an office and she has a pottery showcase area(living room) and studio(two bedrooms joined together). We share the bathrooms, living room and kitchen. She lives with her boyfriend.

Shortly after my stuff arrived I found out my media center was broken, which is a major bummer, we got it all put together and hooked up to the TV and it wouldn’t boot. I’m in the process of trying to get the moving company to pay for sending it off for repairs.

My media center also used to be the host for a few virtual machines which hosted some of my basic network services, and the virtual machine software I’m using didn’t support using a wireless network adapter. So I had been using a long ass network cable to connect it to my router in my previous house. When Candace saw that setup for the first time I got an evil look and said the word “No”  in a tone of voice where you knew it wasn’t open for debate. I guess that was a little too much geek for her.

So I had to find a solution where I could host my virtual machines and not cost an arm and a leg and what I found was this beauty Mini-Box M300-LCD. So in the not to distant future I’ll be picking one up so I can reclaim my notebook and use it for what it was designed for.

One of the things I really like about this mini computer is that Mini-Box released the technical specs for the LCD display, which means anybody can write some control software for it.

Well after playing around with their stock toolset I decided I needed to write my own. Their stock toolset requires you to be logged into the machine so a system tray applet can run before you can change any of the text on the display.

I’m launching the HID LCD Service Toolset for Windows project, HIDLCDTools for short. My goal is to have some software that runs as a service which you can use to control that LCD display. In my case I will want it to cycle threw the virtual machine software statistics and display useful information.

I’m really excited about doing this.

—– Rom

[Update: Candace felt the picture I had up here wasn’t very flattering, so I removed it at her request.]