forking

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Bill Gates will grant you $100,000 to invent a next-gen condom.

- "Now That's What I Call Music" documentary coming soon.

- Dongle jokes and a tweet lead to firings, threats, DDoS attacks.

- And of course, a silver lining: http://forkmydongle.com.

Bathroom break video: NHL celebrates 20-year anniversary of NHL '94 in awesome throwback fashion.… Read more

LAS VEGAS--Does your mom's lasagna taste better if you savor each bite as if it were your last?

It might or might not, but if you slow down when eating, chances are you'll eat less. That's the idea behind HapiFork, shown off at 2013 CES Unveiled.

The fork vibrates if you take a bite less than 10 seconds after the last mouthful. That will teach you to slow down, enjoy each morsel, and allow your brain to rein in your appetite.

After all, it takes about 20 minutes for your brain to start sending out signals that … Read more

The city of Grand Forks, N.D., recently got a popular Italian chain restaurant and a viral food columnist. Everyone on the Internet seems to be talking about Marilyn Hagerty's earnest review of the Olive Garden. So what's the fuss about?

The 85-year-old Grand Forks Herald columnist posted a review Wednesday detailing her experience at the first Olive Garden to open in Grand Forks. According to the Herald, the review received more than 230,000 views by Thursday evening. In comparison, the second most-read story got 5,500 page views.… Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which we answer questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week people wrote in with questions about a change to system colors, how to access lost e-mails in Time Machine, cursor repetition not working after upgrading to Lion, and DiskWarrior not being able to fix damaged file resource headers. We continually answer e-mail questions, and though we present answers here, we welcome alternative approaches and views from readers and encourage you to post your own suggestions in the comments.

Question: Restoring system colors MacFixIt reader Margo asks:

Programmers have released the first version of LibreOffice for Windows and Mac, the product of a rebellion against Oracle's open-source office suite called OpenOffice.org.

A group called the Document Foundation--unhappy with Oracle's control over OpenOffice after it was acquired along with Sun Microsystems--forked the software into the group's own version in September. LibreOffice 3.3 is the first stable release.

LibreOffice has won support from longtime open-source allies such as Red Hat, Novell, and Ubuntu. But it's got rivals aplenty: while the Document Foundation focuses on separating from its Oracle and Sun roots, the larger … Read more

Cute. Clever. Whimsical. No, no, I'm not talking about me, but how sweet of you to think that! I'm referring to ForkedUpArt's iPhone stands made of forks and spoons. I think the photos speak for themselves; these things are just adorable.

(Um, did I just use "sweet" and "adorable" in the same paragraph? I meant to say "killer" and "bitchin'." There, manhood restored.)

As you can see, there are two versions, the aptly named Fork Head and Spoon Head. Both use a combination of forks and spoons, and both … Read more

Twirling spaghetti around a fork is a skill that can require a little practice, but you can speed up the process with the Twirling Spaghetti Fork, which costs around $10. Slide it into a pile of spaghetti and turn it on: the Twirling Spaghetti Fork is motorized and will wind your pasta around the tines of the fork. It requires two AAA batteries (which are not included) to operate. They seem to last for quite a while, considering that you really should turn off the fork in between bites. Leaving it running could make getting the spaghetti back off the … Read more

The European Commission must be feeling a bit silly right about now. Despite insisting that Oracle has not responded to its requests for comment and concessions in its planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems (and the open-source database MySQL), Amazon.com recently offered the EC all the proof it needs that MySQL competition remains alive and well.

For those who missed it, Amazon announced last week a fork of the popular MySQL database, called RDS (Relational Database Service). RDS is essentially a hosted version of MySQL, one that developers can write to at the minuscule cost of pennies per hour.

Oracle … Read more

Brian Behlendorf of Apache fame once declared the freedom to fork the cardinal rule of open source. He is right, though it's a freedom that is rarely exercised, and even less rarely exercised to good effect.

But on Wednesday a group of developers announced ICINGA, a fork of Nagios, the popular open-source network monitoring tool.

While it's too early to tell whether the fork will succeed, the action already demonstrates both the health and disease of the Nagios community.

Health, because a fork or spin-off of the original project, demonstrates that there is an active community of users … Read more