How I found a Wii for $249 a week before Christmas without waiting in line.

Posted by ryan at 09:29 PM in games . | 1 Comments

Now that I don't have to look for a Wii anymore, I thought I'd share how I found a Wii in less than a week for $249. If you want to give this a try, here is what you will need: A linux box (with network connectivity) and some knowledge of basic linux command line tools - grep, curl, crontab.

My method was simple: check the wiitracker.com RSS feed once a minute to see if any Wiis were in stock, and if so send a message to my cell phone giving me the details. Many US cell phone carriers have an email to text message feature. I used this feature on my phone to ensure I would find out about in stock Wiis as soon as possible. For instance, if you have a AT&T/Cingular phone you can email xxxXXXxxxx@mobile.mycingular.com to send a text message to your phone.

To check the RSS feed every minute I wrote a very simple shell script utilizing curl and grep, and ran the script every minute with the help of cron. If I found a match to "in-stock" I would send the match to my phone. This would result in a message with the store name and price.

The script in its most basic form:

#!/bin/bash # checks wii tracker for in-stock status

curl http://wiitracker.com/rss.xml | grep "in-stock"

if [[ $? = 0 ]]
then curl http://wiitracker.com/rss.xml | grep "in-stock" | mail xxxXXXxxxx@mobile.mycingular.com
fi

Copy and paste this into a file on your linux box and make sure you have permission to execute it:

chmod 755 /path/to/script

To run the script every minute we will use cron. I set up the job using crontab:

crontab -e

This will fire up your default text editor (vi/emacs/whatever). Add the following line, save and exit.

* * * * * /path/to/script

Now you should be good to go!

Before all you geeks tell me the million ways I could have improved this script.. thanks, but I already got my Wii. There are some glaring problems with this script though. For starters, it will send you an email every single minute there is a wii in stock somewhere. While that might sound great, it gets annoying when the email is about a $700 Wii bundle from Toys R' Us. I eventually modified this script to watch for the common bundle deals from Toys R' Us and eToys.com and ignore them.

The good news (for me anyway, and maybe for you) is that the first time a $249 Wii came in-stock, in my case from Amazon, I got it without a problem.