UPDATE: One change from the original… It now only selects photos with a Creative Commons license. This means there are less than 250 new photos each day. To maintain the 250 photo set, it adds all the new photos and drops the same number of the oldest photos. That way there are always approximately 250 photos. For example, if there are 30 new photos one day, they will be added and the 30 oldest will be removed.

When at home, I listen to most of my music through AppleTV. This means the TV is on a lot, so I’d like an interesting screen saver. Unfortunately, AppleTV falls a little short in this area. It can rotate a set of photos as the screen saver, but you can only choose from a small group of Apple photos, your own iPhoto collection, or photos from a specific Flickr account. I like my photos, but don’t want to look at them all the time, and I had a hard time finding a Flickr user with a large enough album to keep things interesting.

What I really wanted was a way to display the Flickr interestingness collection. Interestingness is a pool of, you guessed it… interesting photos, that changes all the time. Unfortunately, since AppleTV only provides the ability to link to specific Flickr accounts, you can’t access this dynamic collection.

After searching for a solution, and inspired by this post, I finally came up with workaround. It’s a script that queries photos from interestingness via the Flickr API, then adds them as favorites to a special Flickr account I created called dailypool. The script runs every night, so there are always fresh photos. Since this Flickr account can be viewed by anyone, you can easily link to it on your own AppleTV.

Here’s what you need to do to set it up. This assumes you’re using AppleTV v2.

Add the dailypool Flickr account:

1. On your remote, press Menu to get to the main menu
2. Select Photos in the left menu, then Flickr in the right menu
3. Select Add Flickr Contact, then type dailypool using the onscreen keyboard

Set dailypool favorites as your screen saver

1. Press the Menu button on the remote until you get back to the main menu
2. Select Settings in the left menu, then Screen Saver in the right menu
3. On the Screen Saver screen, scroll down to and select the Slideshow menu
4. On the Choose Photos screen, select Flickr, then select dailypool, then favorites
5. Press the Menu button on the remote until you get back to the main menu

That’s it! Next time your AppleTV goes into screen saver mode it should display interestingness photos that will be refreshed every day. Enjoy!

To help, I created a Ruby script for automatically processing codes. Every day, it reads 10 codes from a text file, then submits them to mycokerewards.com and logs the result. That way, I could just add all my codes to a file and it would take care of the rest.

I’ve provided the script below, as well as instructions for configuring it on a Mac (should be similar on Unix/Linux). If you’re using Windows, you can do the same thing by downloading Ruby and setting up a scheduled task. This isn’t the most user-friendly process, so a little development and/or command line experience would be helpful, but if you don’t have that you should be able to work it out by stepping through the instructions. Good luck and happy redeeming!

Here’s the code

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require 'xmlrpc/client'
require 'logger'
 
class McrSender 
  @@SERVICE_URL = "https://secure.mycokerewards.com/xmlrpc"
 
  def initialize(codeFile, logFile, readCount, username, password)
    @codeFile = codeFile
	@logFile = logFile
    @readCount = readCount
    @username = username
    @password = password
    @logger = Logger.new(@logFile)
  end
 
  def send_codes
    i = 1
    # read file into an array
    lines = File.readlines(@codeFile)
    lineCount = lines.length
 
    if(lineCount > 0 and lines[0].strip.length > 0)
      # login
      if(login == true)
        @logger.info "Successfully logged in."
 
        puts lineCount
 
        # process items and remove them from the array
        i = 0
        while (i < @readCount && i < lineCount)
          code = lines[0].chomp
          send_code(code)
          lines.delete_at(0)
          i += 1
        end
 
        # write array back to file
        File.open(@codeFile, "w") do |file|
          file.puts(lines.join())
        end
      else
        @logger.error "Could not login with username '#{@username}' and password '#{@password}'."
      end
    else
      @logger.info "No codes found in code file (or the first line is empty). Exiting."
    end
  end
 
  private
    def send_code(code)
      args = {'emailAddress' => @username, 'password' => @password, 'screenName' => ' ', 'capCode' => code, 'VERSION' => '3.0'}
      service = XMLRPC::Client.new2(@@SERVICE_URL)
      result = service.call('points.enterCode', args)
      if(result[0]['ENTER_CODE_RESULT'] == "true")
        earned = result[0]['POINTS_EARNED']
        @logger.info "Successfully entered code '#{code}' Points earned '#{earned}'. "
      else
        message = result[0]['MESSAGES']
        @logger.error "Error entering code '#{code}'. Error message: '#{message}'."
      end
    end
 
    def login
      args = {'emailAddress' => @username, 'password' => @password, 'screenName' => ' ', 'VERSION' => '3.0'}
      service = XMLRPC::Client.new2(@@SERVICE_URL)
      result = service.call('points.pointsBalance', args)
      result[0]['LOGIN_RESULT'] == "true"
    end
end
 
sender = McrSender.new("codes.txt", "log.txt", 10, "YOUR_EMAIL", "YOUR_PASSWORD")
sender.send_codes

How to install

1. Make sure Ruby is installed on your Mac. (It is by default in Leopard). You can open terminal and type the following to check. It will return the Ruby version if it’s installed.

   ruby -v
   

2. Download the zip file containing the script, code file and log file.
3. Extract the archive, the move the McrSender folder to the desired location. I’ll use /Users/doug for the remaining instructions. Replace /Users/doug with your own path.
4. In the bottom two lines of McrSender.rb, change “codes.txt” to the full path to your codes.txt file, “log.txt” to the full path to your log.txt file, “YOUR_EMAIL” to the email address you use for My Coke Rewards, and “YOUR_PASSWORD” to the password you use for My Coke Rewards. (NOTE: All of these values should be surrounded in double quotes)
5. Add your My Coke Rewards Codes to the codes.txt file. There should be one code per line.
6. Open terminal then type the following commands to change permissions on the Ruby script to make it executable and on the codes.txt and log.txt files to make them readable and writable.

   cd /Users/doug
   chmod 755 McrSender.rb
   chmod 666 codes.txt
   chmod 666 log.txt
   

7. Create a cron job to run the script every day. Again, in Terminal type:

   EDITOR=nano
   crontab -e
   

   Your cron file will open up in the nano command line text editor. Add the following line to run the script at 6:00 am every morning:

   0 6 * * * ruby /Users/dwburns/scripts/McrSender/McrSender.rb
   

   (Again, change the path to your own path).

You can test it the first time by running (something like) the following in Terminal:

/Users/doug/McrSender/McrSender.rb