Not a sales pitch!
DirecTv has a new tool in beta that used to be called widgets but now is called TVApps. They are just a frame work to put a 400x300 image on your screen, but a clever fellow can do fairly cool things with this. It does not yet allow for interactivity, but it has an auto-refresh rate. One cool thing to do is to gather some information and then create your own dynamic image that's 400X300 and send it.
I said that to say this. I have a few published widgets and I understand their plumbing fairly well so I can hijack my own widget to display stuff only I want to see. I built a widget to report on my miner. Last night while my miner was out and about he woudl update that silly database thing that I started playing with. Then every 15 seconds my directv widget updates and shows me what he's up to.
I do a little image manipulation so that teh vast majority of teh 400x300 image is transaparent then I write a one liner about the status that is transalucent. So I can still watch TV upstairs while the miner runs downstairs.
If you're a geek, this is kinda cool.
If you're in a guild you can have your guildies run a macro when they log in and then you can push that info to your DirecTv tuner. If you wish then you can go to the computer and play.
