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

THE HASSELHOFFIAN RECURSION (via metafilter).
I mused over linking the picture directly but wasn’t sure that planetrdf was ready for this on the front page 😉

I’ve had a great time this week.
Thursday Craig and Liz had their leaving do before they went to Australia. Martin was there, matt, big james and kath, and Rhona.
Friday was my college’s reunion where I saw my lovely friends Anna and Rachel and Jade, Steve, John, Martin, my excellent brother in law Al, and the very fun Gaz and Raz. And some goldfish
Gaz has a very true writeup of the reunion. Like Gaz, I met (and photographed) the Lib dem MP for Oxford West.
Without stopping for breath, on Saturday we had sean, Morten and Jim staying, and on Sunday we met with nick and dave, jeni and norm, paul, kal, for some lovely food and beer, at a meeting to plot a coup-de-main and taking the TAG hostage. Not really. Well maybe a small demo 😉
Monday brought a trip to the Prince of Wales, a man and his ferret and conkers.
Finally, Tuesday was ILRT awayday, with thinkin’, ‘fun’, and a trip to the Hope and Anchor with paul and others.
Little rest now I think.

My new ring tone is diff’rent strokes theme in French from sitcomsonline found and wav’d by Damian. I thought about making it just Max’s theme, but decided I liked it so much I’d make it for everyone. At least for a bit.