I can finally show off my week­end pro­ject! Well okay the vestiges of it star­ted a couple week­ends ago and it bled into this morn­ing by a couple hours, but I think it still counts as a week­end project.

Jasna and I don’t have cable or an antenna for our TV, which means we down­load everything we watch, or bor­row it from friends on rare occa­sions. My Mac­Book was start­ing to run near the end of its use­ful life as my main work com­puter — the track­pad was becom­ing unus­able which meant I couldn’t depend on it when trav­el­ling — but it’s still got some life in it as a server. It was wire­less net­work­ing (no cables to string around), uses very little power, is com­pletely silent, comes with media soft­ware (Front Row) and comes with a remote con­trol, is really small (less than 2cm tall), which makes it more or less the per­fect media server.

The only down­side is it was a pain to get shows onto it to watch, as you have to search for the shows manu­ally, down­load them, then copy them manu­ally over to the server. So, I decided to make a web interface.

Check here for screen­shots of the new web inter­face for the media server. EasyN­ews, our Usenet pro­vider, provides very handy ser­vices like global searches, thumb­nails and AutoUn­RAR­ing. A big bene­fit to this is not hav­ing to wait until some­thing has fin­ished down­load­ing it before watch­ing it. So far I’ve got ser­vices for down­load­ing from Usenet — which is where we get almost all of our TV shows to watch, down­load­ing CFL games from TSN and just upload­ing indi­vidual files from your browser. At some point I need to set up schedul­ing so that it auto­mat­ic­ally down­loads new epis­odes of shows when they’re released, but I guess that’s for another weekend.

I’m kind of embar­rassed at how proud I am to have actu­ally fin­ished it in a week­end like I’d planned, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing I haven’t done any web devel­op­ment in years and years. The astute of you may have noticed I used straight-​​up CGI instead of tech­no­lo­gies the cool kids are using: no love from me for PHP or RoR or Ajax or any­thing. Since I haven’t put any pass­word secur­ity in yet — that’s for another week­end yet — and the box is pub­licly address­able via IPv6 I’ve had access to the web inter­face to just within our local net­work, but if IPv6 takes off some day it’ll be cool to be able to down­load movies while I’m away from home.