Hey, you know that G4 mac mini that you sold when yo got your new intel mac mini? Well, you’re about to wish you didn’t sell it, dude.

Seriously though, there are a lot of great ways to use your old macs capable of running tiger or leopard. Probably some uses for the older OS’s too, but I don’t care about those because this is my blog and I’ll thank you not to criticize my lifestyle. You can take this to all sorts of levels, but I’ll start with the most basic and then tell you how much further down the rabbit hole goes.

To start, we’re just going to kick off a playlist on the old computer at home while you’re at work. I hope you have speakers hooked up to that thing. The 2” speaker doesn’t exactly have any balls.

First we’re going to make an Automator application. This makes the whole thing a little more convoluted, but it also enables people who do not know any applescript to do this kind of cool stuff. Open Automator and look in the “iTunes” section on the far left. Inside that, you’ll find an action called “get specified iTunes items” that you’ll need to drag into the main arrangement window (I actually don’t know what it’s called so I’ll show you a screenshot in a second). Select the playlist you want to automatically play when you send the command from work. Now, drag the “Play iTunes Playlist” action into the main arrangement window. When you’re done it should look like this: (click to enlarge)

Now, we need to save it as an application called “Play Circa Survive” (changing Circa Survive to whatever the name of your playlist is) and put it in the Applications folder. Now, go to /Applications/Applescript/ and open “Script Editor.app”. Type this with your application name in Script Editor:

tell application “Play Circa Survive” to activate

Now click “compile” and save it as a script somewhere with the same name as your automator application to stay organized. I set up a folder within the documents folder named “mail scripts”

Ok, Open Apple’s Mail.app on your old computer and set up an account specifically for your old machine (i.e. “automationcomputer@gmail.com”) QUICK. Come on, dude, keep up. The end goal here is going to be sending an email from your work address to the special email address on the old computer at home and having the old computer run scripts or applications based on the subject line. Now go to Mail preferences and select the rules tab. Click the “add rule” button in the top right. Name your rule after your automator application and set up this logic: (click to enlarge)

Notice how I set the subject to the name of the script, application and rule name? Consistency is key!
Now choose your applescript from the choose dialog and click OK.

Final step: Send an email from your work address to your old computer address with the subject line reflecting the name of the rule applescript etc… you get the idea. Did it work? Yea? AWESOME. Now you see the kind of uhh…..fun you could have with this type of thing.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way (and if it didn’t work please comment or e-mail me , I know I’m sorta ADD in my writing and can be hard to follow), I’ll explain one example how it could be useful…. in a painfully detailed and embellished way.

Ok, so you’re out with this girl. She’s super hot, doesn’t care that I….. I mean you smell like something that’s been passed through the system of a 90 year old woman and wants to come back to your place…
You thought this might happen, so before leaving the house that night you made a playlist of songs you for some reason believe will help you get lucky called “get me *****” and put together the mail rule for it. You even added a volume action into the automator app so that it would be background music and not “holy shit my ears are bleeding” music.
So here you are getting ready to leave the bar and you send an e-mail from your iphone or blackberry or whatever the eff you have in your pocket to myapartment@blah.com with the subject “get me *****”. When you get back to your apartment and walk in with the young lady and the “get me *****” mood music is playing she might just forget about the fact that your apartment has star wars wallpaper or that your mom is yelling downstairs into your basement apartment that she can’t get the skidmarks out of your winnie the pooh feetie pajamas. Who knows? maybe she WILL sleep with you. In which case, you’re welcome.

Now install remote desktop, accumulate some more old macs, buy some x10 modules and for the love of god change your wallpaper. You have some home automation to do.