thanks Lupinglade. two questions:
1) from the name, it appears this method sets the value for a user setting. that might work for me, but what i have right now is actually a flag. is there a corresponding method for flags?
2) re: authentication, is it possible to pass the relevant username and password in the query string for this request? i'm working with a simple device that doesn't have support for multiple HTTP requests so i've got to cram everything into one URL.