silly

Playing around with applescript last night I suddenly realized I could have my ichat status as what I was watching on the tv. We have a 4 year old Tivo with a web interface (Tivo web project) and from with our LAN it’s straightfoward to grab the channel name being played and the title of the program. With a couple of lines of applescript you can then set the iChat status to be whatever it is. heh!

There are a few problems of course. I can’t see anything about a web version of whatever is actually playing back on the Tivo, and Tivo doesn’t know if I’m actually watching the TV or watching a DVD or am just nowhere near the telly.
As Jim put it:
22:46:51 <JibberJim> hmm, so what happens if your tivo is recording Debbie Does Dallas for its own pleasures whilst you’re watching a futurama DVD, people will get entirely the wrong idea.
…
22:59:42 <deltab> JibberJim: I imagine it’d be more interested in Debian Does Dells
Still, the whole thing entertained me greatly
Fwiw, here’s the shell script:
while true
do
curl http://10.0.2.15/info/ > tivo.html
nowwatching=`./gettitle.pl tivo.html`
#gettitle is a tiny perl script that grabs the title and channel from
#http://our.tivo.ip.address/info/ html file
/usr/bin/osascript < < END
tell application “iChat”
set status message to “$nowwatching”
end tell
END
sleep 200
done