I’ve been recently reunited with my old Flower Power iMac or what most people dubbed the Barbie Mac. After a nice stint with my friend Mary who upgraded to a kick-ass MacBook, I tried to loan the iMac I have always called Tank Girl (that’s what its colors remind me of) to another curious/Macskeptical friend. He bailed on it after a week. Actually, he didn’t have the time to take her out of the box. I did offer to send it off to another friend who lives way outside Texas yet no response yet.
Undeterred to give up the ghost, aka Goodwill’s computer store, I convinced Somara to convert Tank Girl into a super-fancy alarm clock. Waking up to music from KMAG, a playlist of MP3s or even a CD has to be an improvement over NPR lately. It’s not their so-called Liberal bias, there’s just not much good news lately and the election isn’t helping my mood or anxiety. Besides, the accusers of bias seem to have selective amnesia over the airtime given to tools emeritus Juan Williams and Cokie Roberts alongside Conservative apologists David Frum, Kevin Philips and half the Cato Institute. Don’t get me started on Grover Norquist, he’ll only do radio so you can’t see his nose growing under his Klansman hood.
Sorry. I was on a roll against a friend’s memory problem and his problem with repeating whatever Rush tells him.
Anyway, I modified Tank Girl with some free Widgets I thought would be useful to have on display in the morning: current traffic snarls around Austin, the current weather in Pflugerville, an immediate To Do List, ESPN’s latest scoops on the NHL and a large display of today’s date in a Flyers jersey. I hope to find others with more practical usages. Meanwhile I threw in something to remind me about upcoming birthdays which oddly taps into Address Book to find the information. A Widget giving alerts on deals at the hotels in Las Vegas to tell friends and another which can usually tell Somara which song the stream is playing, in case I’m in the shower or away. Lastly, I found one counting down how many kilometers the New Horizons probe is from Pluto; over three billion if you want to know.
The more educational experience was figuring out Automator to get Tank Girl to play the current choice in iTunes. Putting the program into Login Items will only launch iTunes. Fortunately, the Workflow (Apple equivalent of a Macro) ordering iTunes to play a particular playlist I want makes the software launch. This leaves Login Items only having to execute a Workflow which makes Dashboard start.
Energy Saver proved its reliability on Tank Girl’s maiden run this morning. The aging iMac powered up and booted at 6 AM as scheduled. It took five minutes from the initial POST chime until iTunes tapped the stream but I was pleased. Somara said it was late. I think her alarm clock is fast. Why were we up though? Remember our four cats? They’re incapable of understanding the weekend concept so sleeping in past 530 AM is harder to achieve in our house than bowling over 200 on the Wii.
Just an aside–Cokie Roberts is a graduate of my alma mater, Stone Ridge–she can’t be all that bad. We are sisters of the black watch plaid kilt and I feel compelled to defend her!