TiVo Hacks

Credits

About the Author

Raffi Krikorian is an unapologetic TiVo lover and digital plumber. If you look hard enough, you can usually find him putting together a hack for some random and stray idea that sidetracked him from the last project or stray idea. He freely admits that his serious television addiction is probably getting between him and his goal of finally graduating from MIT for the second time, although he claims it’s getting better. When he’s not studying or watching TV, you can find him wandering around or trying something new. In whatever time is left, he tends to his wasted bits on his weblog, http://www.bitwaste.com/wasted-bits/.

Contributors

The following people contributed their hacks, writing, and inspiration to this book:

• Cory Doctorow (www.craphound.com) is coeditor of the popular weblog Boing Boing (www.boingboing.net) and works as a staffer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org). He is an award-winning science fiction author, and his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, can be purchased in stores everywhere or downloaded free from www.craphound.com/down.

• Rael Dornfest (http://www.raelity.org/) assesses, experiments, programs, writes, and edits for O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. He has edited, coauthored, and contributed to various O’Reilly books. He is program chair for the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. In his copious free time, Rael develops bits and bobs of freeware, including the Blosxom (http://www.blosxom.com) weblog application, and maintains his raelity bytes weblog.

• Josha Foust

• Greg Gardner is a software engineer who lives in San Francisco, California. He started hacking TiVos while working on a projece Finance, Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University) is most recently employed as a Vice President in Emerging Markets Research at J.P Morgan.

• Drew Streib

• Jeff Shapiro and Michael Adberg are the guys behind WeaKnees.com (http://www.weaknees.com), an online resource center and Internet retailer for all things TiVo. Before dedicating themselves to helping TiVo addicts, Michael was a computer consultant and Jeff a (gasp) lawyer (although, in fairness, Jeff has a geek grounding that goes back to the AppleCat 212). Both Jeff and Michael graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, and Jeff also graduated from the University of Chicago Law School. Now, Jeff and Michael spend 95% of their time building and upgrading TiVos, and they spend the other 5% trying to convince friends and family that they have real jobs.

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, to my family, friends, and to Kelly Dobson: thank you all for believing in me and giving me the emotional support to make it through writing this book. And Kelly, thank you for being there, being my rock, and reminding me that taking a nap for a few hours is preferable to staying up all night.

TiVo, Inc., thanks for such a great box. If I didn’t own one, my studies would go better, but I’m still glad I have one. I’m sure you hear this all the time, but if you ever need a spokesperson or a beta tester, I’m here.

And, speaking of beta testing, Todd Larason, thank you for beta testing this work and keeping me on the straight and narrow.

Thank you to the communities at tivocommunity.com, dealdatabase.com, and alt.org. It’s been fun hanging out. Thanks for all the ideas, the help, and the code. Also, to my unnamed TiVo friend: thank you.

Many thanks to Tim O’Reilly and everybody at O’Reilly who even considered this a worthwhile topic to write a book on.

And lastly, more thanks than I could ever express to Rael Dornfest. Rael, you’ve been a great friend, a great manager, a great editor, and just an amazing person to work with. Thank you for pushing me to get this done. Thank you for all your help. Let’s do it again sometime.