{"id":7855,"date":"2009-09-30T16:23:20","date_gmt":"2009-09-30T23:23:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/?p=7855"},"modified":"2019-12-23T14:29:49","modified_gmt":"2019-12-23T22:29:49","slug":"use-your-twitter-stream-for-mac-os-xs-rss-visualizer-screensaver","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2009\/09\/30\/use-your-twitter-stream-for-mac-os-xs-rss-visualizer-screensaver\/","title":{"rendered":"Use your Twitter stream for Mac OS X&#8217;s RSS Visualizer screensaver"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class='__iawmlf-post-loop-links' style='display:none;' data-iawmlf-post-links='[{&quot;id&quot;:3683,&quot;href&quot;:&quot;http:\\\/\\\/www.google.com\\\/search?client=safari&amp;rls=en&amp;q=os+x+rss+visualizer+twitter&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;oe=UTF-8&quot;,&quot;archived_href&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;redirect_href&quot;:&quot;http:\\\/\\\/www.google.com\\\/webhp?client=safari&quot;,&quot;checks&quot;:[],&quot;broken&quot;:false,&quot;last_checked&quot;:null,&quot;process&quot;:&quot;done&quot;}]'><\/div>\n<p>Just a quick little tip for OS X users. Nothing fancy, and others may have figured this out already, but a quick <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/search?client=safari&amp;rls=en&amp;q=os+x+rss+visualizer+twitter&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;oe=UTF-8\" title=\"Google: os x visualizer twitter\">Google search<\/a> didn&#8217;t come up with answers, just questions&#8230;so here we are.<\/p>\n<p>For the uninitiated, one of the default screensavers in OS X is the RSS Visualizer, which shows a slick &#8216;floating text&#8217; presentation of the text from any RSS feed against a cloudy blue background.<\/p>\n<p>I wanted to put my Twitter timeline in, so that even when my &#8216;puter&#8217;s not doing anything, and I&#8217;m across the room reading on the couch, I can keep an eye out for updates. Seems simple, but on first blush, it didn&#8217;t seem to work, as I just got the background, and no tweets.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s an easy fix, though. Twitter password protects your RSS feed, so that other people can&#8217;t &#8216;hack&#8217; into your feed and see updates from those of your contacts who have protected their feed from public view &#8212; and the screensaver options don&#8217;t give a way to enter your Twitter username\/password combination.<\/p>\n<p>Twitter does, however, respect RSS-embedded passwords. So, in order to get the screensaver to work correctly, change the RSS feed from the default<\/p>\n<pre><code>http:\/\/twitter.com\/statuses\/friends_timeline.rss\n<\/code><\/pre>\n<p>to a customized<\/p>\n<pre><code>https:\/\/USERNAME:PASSWORD@twitter.com\/statuses\/friends_timeline.rss\n<\/code><\/pre>\n<p>format, and you&#8217;re off and running.<\/p>\n<p><object width=\"500\" height=\"315\"><param name=\"movie\" value=\"http:\/\/www.youtube-nocookie.com\/v\/lIMJwzaDIJg&#038;hl=en&#038;fs=1&#038;border=1\"><\/param><param name=\"allowFullScreen\" value=\"true\"><\/param><param name=\"allowscriptaccess\" value=\"always\"><\/param><embed src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube-nocookie.com\/v\/lIMJwzaDIJg&#038;hl=en&#038;fs=1&#038;border=1\" type=\"application\/x-shockwave-flash\" allowscriptaccess=\"always\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" width=\"500\" height=\"315\"><\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n<p>Note that I&#8217;ve changed the protocol from <code>http<\/code> to <code>https<\/code> to avoid transmiting my Twitter username and password in cleartext. With the standard <code>http<\/code> protocol, in theory, if someone was <em>really<\/em> determined, there&#8217;s a chance that they could intercept the TCP stream between your computer and Twitter and see your Twitter login credentials. Using <code>https<\/code> (the &#8216;s&#8217; stands for &#8216;secure&#8217;), the information between your computer and Twitter is encrypted, so that packet sniffers wouldn&#8217;t get anything.<\/p>\n<p>And that&#8217;s it! One Twitter-enabled RSS screensaver.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A simple tip on setting up Mac OS X&#8217;s RSS Visualizer screensaver to display your Twitter update stream.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2039],"tags":[118,113,241],"class_list":["post-7855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-apple","tag-apple","tag-macintosh","tag-twitter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7855"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7855\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}