iTunes Alarm Clock

You Mac has some pretty fancy features built into its hardware, including the ability to turn itself on when it’s sleeping or powered off. This capability leverages nicely into an iTunes alarm clock.

In the screencast we’ll use the System Preferences to turn the Mac on at a specified time. Then we’ll set an appointment in iCal that runs an AppleScript a few minutes later. The script will kick off a Playlist in iTunes loaded with songs we’d like to wake up to.

Murphy made a few different scripts for the job. You can pick one or combine pieces from all of them to make your own. Here’s what they do:

• Wakeup1.scpt Script simply plays a Playlist
• Wakeup2.scpt Script plays each track in a Playlist for a specified number of seconds. That should annoy you out of bed.
• Volume.scpt Script gradually increases the iTunes volume until you click stop in iTunes.

You can download the scripts and edit them for your own needs. Feel free to post improvements in the comments.

We’re halfway through iTunes week. We’ll look at more AppleScripts the rest of the week courtesy of Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes. Don’t forget to check back! Or better yet, subscribe to Murphy’s feed.

Google Calendar on iCal

If you haven’t noticed, Murphy uses some Google stuff. He likes the Calendar because he can access it from any computer with Internet access.

But sometimes Internet access is hard to come by. You know you won’t have access for a couple days? Use iCal to capture a Google Calendar to your disk.

You can also use Google Calendar to display published calendars for public events. Murphy is going to show you how to incorporate such a calendar into an iCal based calendar.

If you’re interested in syncing iCal information to Google, there are projects underway. Follow this link to SourceForge and this one to jin’sync.

There’s also an interesting warning about what you put on a shared Google calendar. In the screencast we use a private URL to help hide our calendar information from prying eyes. But security is still something to consider when you’re telling people where you’re going to be and when.