TiVo Blog Widget Hack.

I have a cool new widget on my blog sidebar on the left.  It's a marvelous hack from MrBalky that shows an up to the minute listing of the Now Playing List on my TiVos.  Kind of a lifestream of TV crap.. I love it.

A while back MrBalky created the TiVo Now Playing Widget using his own resourcefulness, bits and pieces off the Internet, and parts of old Toys from his collection.  I immediately loved it for the hack it was and wanted to install it on my blog.  Alas, it was not to be until recently when TiVo turned on the API that allows HTTPS query's of the HD Models (it's worked for a while for the low resolution models). 

TiVo Blog Widget is a fun hack that has several moving parts.  Here is a graphic to help understand the data flow.

Here at the Barbie palace where I live I have a new home automation computer (a MacMini) that recently replaced my Linux box.  It runs a Curl script that MrBalky hacked together to get an XML program dump from each of my three TiVos and upload them to MrBalkys box, deep in his subterranean lair.  I setup a cron job (my contribution) on the MacMini that runs the Curl script every 30 minutes.  While that seems like a small contribution to the project, it took me an hour to get it right (I'm not the hacker I once was).  When MrBalky gets the XML dumps he parses them with a nifty PHP script that feeds the JavaScript widgets on my blog and creates full listing accessible by clicking the title of each TiVo.

Some things you build, just because you can :-)