TiVo freakin’ rules.

O’Reilly Publishing, the group who has in the past published such fantastic works as Web Design In a Nutshell, and The HTML Pocket Reference (both by the effervescent Jennifer Neiderst Robbins), has unannounced the release of a new book called simply “TiVo Hacks”. TiVo, already being the coolest thing in the world, is about to get even cooler.

People have been hacking and modding TiVo and other DVR units since long before they were even available to us schmoes. The difference now is that there is such a hype around the unit, and so many people now own it, that books like this can be written and released to help non-programmer types do some pretty cool stuff with their favorite toy.

Raffi Krikorian (who incidentally has a brilliant blog at bitwaste.com) authored this book and preorders are available at Amazon.com.

Here’s a quick list Raffi compiled that showcase his “Top 5 TiVo Hacks” to be found in the book:

1. add hours to your TiVo : face it, 80 hours is never going to be enough for die hard television fans out there. with the help of weaknees, i’m documenting the step by step process of getting more hours into your PVR (if you do have not-so-strong-leg-joints, then you can turn right to weaknees as they have some awesome kits already put together for people).
2. 30-second skip : ReplayTV owners have it, why not us?
3. listen to your e-mail : don’t want to get up from your couch and find your laptop? using the home media option and some perl, we can get your TiVo to literally read out the first few lines of all your e-mail for your listening to pleasure.
4. be a guest on jay leno : not exactly, but your TiVo can claim you are. with the simple use of some scripts to run on your TiVo, you can change the descriptions of the television programs to guest star you.
5. get weather maps : the ultimate lazy man’s hack. are you too engrossed to get up and even look out the window? how about hitting a sequence on your remote control to ask your TiVo to query weather.com to get the radar image and put it up on the screen? that way you’ll know if you should even bother getting up.