Disclaimer: The following instructions are intended for legitimate use. As a musician myself, I do not condone music piracy. Support your favorite bands by purchasing their music. Oh, and the songs you can download using this method are not high quality encodings.

Fire up Safari and navigate to your favorite band’s MySpace page.

Open up the Activity window from the Window menu (Shortcut: Command-Option-A). Back in the main browser window, click on the song you want. In the Activity window, a new item should begin loading that has an address beginning with http://cache##-music##.myspacecdn.com (where ## are numbers). If you look under the Status column, it’s usually one of the largest files. Click on this item, and copy the address using Command-C.

Now open up the Downloads window from the Window menu (Shortcut: Command-Option-L). Paste the link you copied using Command-V. The song will begin to download.

Keep all three windows open (main browser, activity, downloads) while the song downloads. Once complete, open the file in iTunes, add artist info, and you’re good to go for the next two months until the new album comes out!

Due to it being the end of Spring Quarter here at UC Santa Cruz, I have not been able to devote time to search and hopefully find the answer. However, my last final is on Wednesday morning, and the first task on my list of summer projects is to get the instructions updated for Leopard. I hope to find a solution on Wednesday and get the new guide up by Thursday. I’ll be twittering the entire install process, so follow me if you want in on the fun.

Aside from a Tandy 1000 dating from 1986, the Compaq was the first computer I ever owned and also the first exposure I had to a non-Mac OS world that dominated my school at the time. Within a year, I had begun to add various upgrades, first and foremost being an 80GB Maxtor drive to compliment the existing 30GB. My transformation into a geek followed shortly afterward when I bought PartitionMagic v.7 so I could create a dual-boot system running Windows ME and Mandrake 8.2 ( I was forced to live with Mistake Edition for about a year and a half before upgrading to XP). During the following years, I added a few more upgrades before I built a new PC from the ground up in 2004, only to sell it about six months later to finance my first Mac, a 900MHz G3 iBook running Jaguar. The Compaq was relegated to a Linux box at that point, and stayed that way until this past fall when I decided to install XP so I could have a backup system if anything were to happen to my MacBook Pro.

Apparently the timing was right. In the end of October, the keyboard and trackpad stopped responding on my MBP. After about an hour on the phone with three people at AppleCare, Apple decided they would send me a new MBP. So I sent the old one back, received the new one, and all was well. For two and a half months. At the beginning of February, the same issue surfaced in the new one. The same day I planned on heading up to the Apple Store in San Jose, the Compaq died. After five minutes on the phone, my dad agreed to finance the rebuild, and I was off to San Jose with my shopping list for a stop at Fry’s.

Going Shopping

My original list was comprised of four main components.

• Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L
• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.4GHz)
• RAM: G.Skill 2 x 1GB DDR2 800 SDRAM
• Storage: 2 x Segate Barracuda 250GB SATA drives

Arriving at Fry’s, I discovered that I wasn’t going to be able to fit all of these into the budget my dad agreed on, so I started searching over their selection. With my iPhone pointed to Newegg so I could check on reviews, I made my final selection.

• Motherboard: ASUS P5GC-MX/1333
• Processor: Intel Pentium Duo E2140 (1.6GHz)
• Memory: Kingston 2 x 1GB DDR2 800 SDRAM

I decided to go without buying new drives for the time being, instead salvaging the original 30GB drive (the 80GB died about six months ago). Seeing as this box is going to be a backup/secondary machine, I don’t need all the extra storage at the moment.

Building

Upon arriving back in Santa Cruz, I immediately began the process of removing and cleaning the old components. Installing the new hardware was a breeze, but I ran into a problem when I tried powering up the system. Perhaps it’s due to the computer originally being an AMD machine, but the harness containing the wires for the power button and status LED’s on the front panel was wired differently than the front panel header on the motherboard. This required an additional 30 minutes of figuring out what wires went where, whether they carried positive or negative currents, then rewiring the header harness. All said and done, I had a clean and working box in about two hours.

Software

Because I don’t run Windows on my Mac yet I find a need for it at times, I decided to go with Windows XP for the OS. I was debating whether or not to run Vista, but decided it wasn’t worth it. After another hour, XP Pro was freshly installed.

Drivers and Configuration

Like every other motherboard you can buy in a store, ASUS provided a CD containing all the drivers I needed to get everything working. Except for the built-in gigabit LAN. This wasn’t a big problem for me, as I had also installed a D-Link WDA-1320 wireless PCI card. Even with the wireless card, I spent an hour trying to debug the built-in LAN port, but eventually gave up after trying four different driver versions from ASUS’s downloads site.

After some software updates, restarts, and installation of other software (Kaspersky Anti-virus, Microsoft Office, etc.), the build was officially complete. I then began to tweak the BIOS settings, seeing just how far I could push this hardware. After some trial-and-error, I got the processor to run comfortably at 2.4GHz without sacrificing much in terms of temperature.

Final Thoughts

I’ve been using the machine a couple times a week for the past two months. Overall, I am quite satisfied with how the build turned out. I’ve encountered a few issues with the built-in graphics chipset, Intel’s GMA-950, which probably isn’t the best engine to drive my 24″ Dell display. Graphics and video can be choppy, and pixels are occasionally left on screen after I close or move a window. If I had a graphics card that offered DVI output, I don’t think there would be any issues.

Download: MGS Codec Ringtone

Say you’re like me, and you have multiple accounts in iChat - an AIM screen name, Bonjour, and a couple Jabber/Google Talk accounts.

Note the order they appear in the Accounts pane of the Preferences window. This order directly corresponds to the shortcut that will display each contact list. According to the picture above, Command+1 should display my AIM buddy list, Command+2 for Jabber, and Command+3 for Bonjour contacts. A quick look at the Window menu confirms this.

To change the order of the shortcut keys, just drag the account names around. Command+1 is the first (top) account in the list, Command+2 the second, and so on. As you could probably guess, iChat supports up to nine shortcuts in this manner. Oh yeah, the first account in the list will be the one that shows when you click on the iChat icon in the dock.

I arrived at my sister’s place here in Flint at about 8 PM last night, and within an hour I had already started my long and arduous process with the ultimate goal of having a fresh computer with that “brand-new” feeling, speed, and responsiveness. The first task was to install Norton Ghost, my personal favorite drive imaging application for any platform; while I find there are many useful Mac applications for imaging, I have yet to find one I like as well as Ghost. With Ghost installed, I performed the one-click magical action that is Clone.

About an hour and a half later, I had a complete image of the system backed up on an external drive. I just popped in the Unattended Windows XP SP2 install disc I created last summer, set it, and [forget] it. Half an hour later I had a fresh install Windows XP Pro. The easiest work was done.

At around two in the morning, I had to reinstall Windows again due to a system crash which, to my geeky pleasure, produced the glorified BSOD and elicited a laugh from myself. I decided to call it a night at a little after 3, once the system was back in a operable state.

From the time I woke up (10:30) to just about an hour ago, I have been slowly-but-surely restoring some of the backed-up files to the “new” computer. It took about 6 hours to restore the My Documents folder, Outlook and Outlook Express email settings, and some other files, mostly due to the fact that my sister is blessed(?) with the photography gene and has roughly 20-some gibibytes of pictures on her computer. But the worst part was waiting for the files to copy out of the Ghost image. I don’t quite understand why restoring those files from the image takes three times as long as it did to create the image in the first place.

With the Dell ready to rock-and-roll, I turned my attention to their other computer: a 1999 Gateway, running Windows 98SE. The goal was to copy another five gibibytes or so of older photos onto the external drive, and then onto the Dell. After waiting eight minutes and 14 seconds for it to boot up, I slowly (four restarts later) discovered that Maxtor doesn’t have Win98SE drivers for the drive model we have. My solution was to download drivers for my SanDisk flash drive, which also made me have to download WinZip. After restarting yet again, I finally had a means to transport the pictures to the Dell.

Four hours later, I was done transferring the pictures, and hoping that I’ll never have to use Windows 98 again. Using that Gateway was the most painful computing experience I’ve ever had, but it’s over. A full day of work was required to complete this task, and I’m damn glad it’s done.

After downloading and extracting the zip archive, copy the Keynote Action Pack to your iWork folder (most likely /Applications/iWork ‘06). In order for the automatic slide titling and automatic QuickTime export to work, you must enable GUI scripting by opening the Universal Access panel in System Preferences. Place a check in the box at the bottom of the window where it says “Enable access for assistive devices.”

To use the Automator Actions from the Finder, copy both workflows to ~/Library/Workflows/Applications/Finder. With that complete, you’re ready to use the actions. Browse to a folder where you have a bunch of image files, select the images you want in your slideshow, then right-click and choose Automator->Create Keynote Slideshow or Automator->Automagic Slideshow.

If you wish to change some of the settings, such as the template used in Keynote or the slideshow resolution, just open up the actions in Automator. I have tested these actions with iWork ‘06 only, so they may not work with earlier versions of Keynote. Let me know how they work for you.

Download: Keynote Automator Actions

Created with Paul’s flickrSLiDR.

It’s still beta, so there are a lot of features currently unavailable, and thus I refrain from attempting to do a faux review. That said, I can say with confidence that Virb is the MySpace killer that I, along with countless others, have been waiting for. Be sure to check it out when it launches in the near future.

UPDATE: Ah, I almost forgot. I have five, count ‘em, five invites available to give out. UPDATE II: More Virbs! I now have FIFTEEN (15) invites awaiting new owners. Leave a comment and include their email address (not in the body of the comment), and you shall receive one! Once you’ve registered, be sure to add me (virb.com/bradbergeron).

Click here to download.

Included in this ZIP archive is the screensaver file, along with the font used for headlines. You can double-click on the font to install it via Font Book, or if you use a font manager, such as Linotype FontExplorerX, you can install it through that program. As for the screensaver file itself, just copy it into ~/Library/Screen Savers. Open up System Preferences, Desktop & Screen Saver, and choose Digg from the Screen Savers list.

This is a 1.0 release, and I do plan on adding more eye candy to it. This screensaver, with the exception of the “digg guy” logo, is being released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License.