Nyan Cat Alarm

This is quite possibly the silliest project I've done. Besides nchoosethree.com. Anyway.

The project was simple: to set up an alarm that would wake me up to the tune of nyan.cat every morning. Since I had just set up my lovely iMac G4 earlier that day, complete with my JBL Creature II speakers, I had something that could autonomously play loud and annoying music every morning, at the expense of my roommate's sleep. I could have done this two ways: (A) command line with cron and mplayer, or (B) with builtin Mac OS X apps. I chose the latter because I was lazy. So the troll begins:

1. Get an MP3 of the Nyan Cat song of nontrivial length. I ripped mine from here.
2. Create an Automator workflow as follows:
1. Set system volume to some annoying but tolerable loudness.
2. Tell iTunes to get the selected song (Nyan Cat, in this case).
3. Tell iTunes to play the selected song.
   Then save the workflow as an Application.
3. Create iCal events at the time when you wake up. Set an alarm to 0 minutes before and open up the Automator application. You may want to test this before going to sleep.

There you go! Troll in a box in five minutes! Unfortunately for me, I forgot that my Mac's clock was ahead by three hours, so creating wake-up events at 8:00am meant waking up to mute the speakers at 5:00am. Whoops!