Nov 14, '05 05:57:00AM • Contributed by: Anonymous
You can probably do this trick alone with iCal, but I wanted to find a solution without setting up a multitude of calendar events, and I don't know iCal as well as I should. So I created an Automator application to 'Get specified iTunes items' and then 'Start iTunes Playing' (both in the iTunes library entry). I picked a playlist created with a few songs to be somewhat obnoxious, so that I'd actually wake up, walk over, and turn off the computer. I saved the workflow as an application and stuck it in ~/Applications/.
Then, I went to the Terminal, and elected to edit the crontab (via crontab -e). I added this line:
0 6 * * 1-5 open ~/Applications/alarmclock.app
Just make sure that you've enabled 'Restart automatically after a power failure' on the Options tab of the Energy Saver system preferences panel. Incidentally, about 10 minutes after I finally went to bed, the power went out again. It didn't come back on while I was awake, but I woke up on time.
It took me about 20 minutes to download and test a handful of alarm clocks, and it took me about 10 minutes to come up with this solution. I have been teaching myself Perl, and I know there's gotta be a way to make a more robust alarm clock, but this was as quick as I could do at 12:30am.
