Jake Savin

“Have no fear of perfection—you'll never reach it.” – Salvador Dalí

Hacks and Mash-Ups

  • How to Read and Send Gmail Using Fastmail

    I’ve been using an email and file-storage service called Fastmail.fm for about the last three years. I like it because it’s cheap (about $50/year), has lots of storage (10GB), and other perks like photo albums and web hosting on custom domains. They also have great spam filters, and they’re almost never down. I prefer it… Continue reading

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  • Backing up stuff: Netflix Ratings

    I recently purchased a new big disk (500GB), and a NAS enclosure. My goal here was to simplify my home network storage setup, and turn off some of my always-on computers. These were using about 450 watts of power together, which costs a couple hundred dollars a year, and is generally bad for my carbon… Continue reading

  • AudioFaucet: Not Super New, But Definitely Super-Cool

    I think this is just about as cool as it gets these days, even though AudioFaucet is already well over a year old: To give you an idea of what’s going on here, ponder this for a moment first: iTunes is running on my Mac in a different room from my TV. Some big drives… Continue reading

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  • So Much For Low-Tech

    Alright, it had to happen eventually. Netflix changed something and my IMDB/Netflix movie mash-up stopped working the way it was supposed to. It turns out that their URL scheme changed, but only on what were formerly displayMovie pages, and only on the main site (not the mobile site). The upshot was that my script couldn’t… Continue reading

  • Update To My Good Flicks Mashup

    I spent a little time last night on a small upgrade to my Good Flicks Netflix+IMDB+RSS mash-up. Now each movie goes up as its own post, instead of all the week’s new releases going into a single post. This has the dual advantage that the RSS feed has an entry for each movie, which renders… Continue reading

  • IMDB + Google + Netflix + RSS = Goodness?

    I did a short programming project over the long weekend, building on a script I wrote last summer — it’s an IMDB+Netflix mash-up. Once a week, typically on Tuesdays, my computer at home goes through all the new DVD releases for the week, looks up the user ratings on IMDB, and then builds a post… Continue reading

  • How I finally freed myself from spam… for now…

    I had written back in October about OnlyMyEmail.com, and how great it was. Well I’d been meaning to write a follow-up for quite a while now, and here it is: OnlyMyEmail.com sucks. No really, they really suck. Really. Here’s the problem: Because I have so many email addresses, some of them going back more than… Continue reading

  • TiVo Streaming with VLC 0.8.2

    Tonight, while checking to see if there were any new updates to TiVo Tool, I stumbled across this thread on the DealDatabase Forums (where all serious TiVo hacking seems to get discussed), about the inclusion of a tystream demuxing module with VLC 0.8.2. Also linked on the thread is a module for streaming from TiVo… Continue reading

  • TiVo Hacked, and Transferring Video to Mac OS X

    Last weekend, I finally pulled the A drive from my Series 1 Philips TiVo, and set it up for shell and FTP access over my LAN. More interesting to me, and maybe to you, I also now have a way to transfer video over the network, to MPEG video files on my Mac OS X… Continue reading