How I spent Friday night

Arlene and Thomas were off to some huge craft store in Monroe, so Thomas, Matthew, and I went out for pizza and ice cream. Both were excellent. We then came home and played on the Xbox; Matthew won every game, oddly enough. In the background, I was struggling to get Panther running on my dual G4 downstairs. The first time I booted, the machine hung at the pale blue screen; after I unplugged my Powermate and my external DVD burner, the boot worked OK. For some reason, though, the stuff on CD #2 (printer drivers, languages, etc.) wouldn’t install. I manually installed everything I wanted (French language files, additional voices, and a few printer drivers) and bang! it worked. Several other folks reported getting a Panther Server CD #2 in their Panther packages, so I shouldn’t complain. Kasia and Mike have pictures of their installations, and now I do too. (For you non-Mac users, here’s a partial list of cool new features.)
After some more Xbox, and flush with my Panther success, I put the kids to bed and popped a Western Digital 120GB drive into the TiVo, using the fastest and most dangerous upgrade method (BlessTiVo, which just requires you to bless the new drive and then bolt it in place). I had good guidance from two separate books: Keegan’s Hacking TiVo and Krikorian’s TiVo Hacks. Keegan’s book includes a ton of material that isn’t in the slimmer O’Reilly book; I’ll post a more detailed review later. Unfortunately, when I plugged everything back in the TiVo happily booted without paying the slightest attention to the new drive. According to the Hinsdale how-to, this is probably because I forgot to change the jumper on the factory drive to master from cable select… oops. I’ll open it up again this morning and fix it.