Author Archives: B

Sick Lombard

The Lombard is in intensive care under the excellent care of Gary and the good folks at Daystar computing (makers of the xlr8 Mac CPU upgrades). Say a prayer for it! Or send $2985 to the Benjamin Westafer Benevolent Society. Yikes. I’m hoping to have it back next week. I didn’t realize it was now eight years old. I do want an excuse to get a new one, but I’m very attached to the Lombard. It’s been a workhorse and hopefully it will have a new lease on life when it returns.

Simple Clock

OK, so I have trouble getting up in the morning. I’m constantly late and unfocused; well, that’s what I’m told. Anyway, I wrote a clock for myself in AppleScript with some borrowed code and some of my own and here it is. The magic of the script takes place in a crontab. The crontab is really simple to make, but it means a trip to the Terminal. I know, I know, I’m supposed to use launchd, and I will get around to that, but the crontab is faster for me. Here’s the script:

tell application "Finder"
set volume 10
end tell
set volInt to 60
tell application "iTunes"
set sound volume to volInt
set song repeat of user playlist "wfae" to one
play track 1 of user playlist "wfae"
end tell
set whichButton to ""
repeat until whichButton = "No, I'm up!"
display dialog "Snooze?" buttons {"No, I'm up!",
"SNOOZE"} default button "SNOOZE"
set whichButton to (button returned of result)
set sleep to "sleep"
if whichButton = "SNOOZE" then
tell application "iTunes"
pause
end tell
do shell script "/bin/tcsh -c '/bin/sleep 300'"
tell application "iTunes"
if volInt < 100 then
set volInt to volInt + 10
set sound volume to volInt
end if
play
end tell
end if
end repeat
tell application "iTunes"
set song repeat of user playlist "wfae" to all
set volInt to 60
set sound volume to volInt
play track 2 of user playlist "wfae"
end tell

Save this as an Application and put it somewhere. Mine's in my home directory.
Open the Terminal and type:

crontab -e

Type the following (crontab -e spits you into vim)

15    8    *    *    *    open    iTunesWakeUp.app

The spaces inbetween the items are tabs. One mustn't forget the tabs, oh best beloved.

type :qw

and you'll get a nice message from the Terminal:

crontab: installing new crontab

You can check it by typing crontab -l

Now, go to sleep and wake up to iTunes.

A few gotchas:
I've pointed my alarm at track one of the playlist "wfae". This can be whichever of your playlists you choose. BTW, track one on my alarm is the sound of an alarm bell.
Track two is the live stream from WFAE, the NPR news station in Charlotte, NC.

The hits just keep on coming…

I’ve had to shut down my online store :-(. It seems I was in violation of NSAOnline’s user agreement. I understand where they are coming from though we do disagree. If I pay $15.00 a month, I can have my NSAOnline-hosted ‘site’ where, to quote the nice lady at NSAOnline, “all business goes directly to me”. My $15.00 a month would also afford me a banner ad on my site which would lead directly to their servers. ‘Hmmm,’ I thought. When a user clicks on the banners on my site, I get a percentage of any generated sales. In other words, iTunes and LinkShare are paying me to host their banners! By creating my own store, I was able to have all business go directly to me without having to pay NSAOnline for the privilege (except for the fee I paid to become a ‘distributor’). I mentioned this the above to the nice lady and was met with silence. While I feel good about JuicePlus+® the product, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to feel good about multi-level marketing.
And this is why I’m poor. I just don’t ‘get it’. I don’t host JuicePlus+® parties, I don’t foist tapes and videos on people. I simply offered folks a way to save a few bucks by getting JuicePlus from me.
*End of whine*