Two Hacks

Over the summer I was asked by an editor at O’Reilly to write a couple of essays for an upcoming Hacks book. I’ve lost track of what’s happening with the book, but in any case part of the agreement was that I could publish the works to my own site. So without further ado…
RSS Powered Tivo To-do Lists (RPTTL) is about what happened when I decided to build an RSS reader into my TiVo. Pretty soon after getting the basic reader working, I realized that adding a few simple namespace extensions could open up the TiVo for others to add content. The result was Program My TiVo!, now written up in detail in the RPTTL essay.
iPodder Overview is a writeup of the iPodder software that I work on in my Copious Free Time(tm). It covers the basic idea of podcasting and has a section specifically for programmers that want to download our source code and have at it.
As a not so aside aside, one of the limitations of Program My TiVo! is that it takes quite a lot of specialized software and knowledge to get it running for yourself. But the basic idea of letting Person A add to Person B’s incoming media stream is general and ought to be available to anyone. Podcasting, wholly a child of the Internet, opens this capability up in a real and concrete way. GigaDial offers that capability for podcasting, opening up the Program My TiVo! idea to anyone with podcatching software. I haven’t written this one up for O’Reilly. Ssssh! Don’t tell!