Where’s the peanut butter?!

Ryan once said I needed a hobby and by golly, I’ve got one now. I
recently mentioned that I got a Nabaztag ( href="http://www.psoul.com/index.cgi/computers/mrbun.html">Mr.
Bun) and tonight I spent a little time hacking href="http://nabaztalk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=342">the API and
finished my first application which (to no one’s surprise) is Yet
Another MyBus wrapper. Of the
various things you could do to a cute electronic bunny to completely
suck every last ounce of appeal right out of it, I think “make it tell
you in a dull electronic voice whether a bus is on time or projected
to be late” has got to rank pretty high - but I’ve done it!

The setup is pretty simple
• Start with a location and bus that href="http://mybus.org/metrokc/avl.jsp?id=5506&route=48">you ride
  somewhat frequently

• Then whip up some php to scrape that page and parse out the
  buses going in the right direction, the scheduled time, and the
  estimated time (and maybe the route in case you’re visiting a page
  where href="http://mybus.org/metrokc/avl.jsp?id=5506&route=71&route=72&route=73">more
  than one bus can get you to your destination)

• urlencode() the resulting message and send it through Violet’s API
  to your rabbit to make your rabbit tell you whether some buses are on
  time or not.

• Set up an at job to make your computer hit that page
  whenever you’d like your rabbit to announce that the bus is coming.

Et voila! Now you have somewhat a somewhat ambient announcement
letting you know whether you need to hustle in the morning or not.
I’m satisfied with this test but not incredibly excited about it
because I already have a bunch of other mechanisms for getting that
data - but I am excited with the relative ease that I was able to add
this new small piece of practical functionality to my rabbit. They
recently also added a fix that allows shoutcast streams to be played
indefinitely (or, it seems, until another announcement preempts it),
which is also really cool. I love my bunny.