August, 2, 2003 archives

netflix doesn't have any proper web services, but that's nothing a little perl magic can't fix. there's a "now viewing" section in the sidebar on my site's front page now, and you can see the gory details of my netflix queue, updated daily.

i'll add the history once i get it from netflix. (they only display the most recent three months, and send the full history via email.)

it could be interesting to generate an rss feed of netflix's recommendations.

oh, and this answers the question: how the heck do you get 100 movies in your netflix queue? there are only two (maybe three) movies in my queue that i have previously seen.

as threatened, the full list of discs i've rented from netflix are now online. unfortunately, the list by email didn't include links to the movies on the netflix site, so only the most recent ones have working links. i should go back and make links from the movies to my reviews of them.

i've gone through about 211 films in the roughly 37 months i have been a netflix subscriber, or 5.7 per month. that works out to a little under $4/disc.

i finally popped the hard drive out of my tivo again to enable telnet access. i haven't decided what fun stuff to publish from that. i'm not sure if i want the number of episodes of trading spaces and various cooking shows i have saved on my tivo to be public knowledge.

so i wrote some code to spit out tivo data in xmltv format, so you can now see (assuming you can read xml) what is playing now on my tivo and what is currently saved. the info updates every five minutes and hourly, respectively.

there's more interesting info that could be added to the now playing data (like whether what is playing is live or not) and the saved shows (such as whether why the tivo recorded them).

and, of course, some sort of html transformation of the data would make it easier for puny humans to laugh at me. maybe next weekend.