Supersize Your iPod

Forget pocket sized. William Lindsey Cochran made something BIG for playing music on.

I am not a pack rat, the opinions of my family notwithstanding. I’m just somebody who frequently sees the potential value in things the rest of the world would have thrown away long ago. Take old Mac computers. I was once mesmerized by the online tutorials showing how to turn your old Macintosh SE into a self-contained aquarium. Not that I wanted the hassle of tending fish. But it was just such an elegantly useful repurposing of something that was otherwise destined to be banished to a landfill.In keeping with that same spirit, I’d been thinking for years now about how my old Mac Classic has a lot in common with my first generation iPod. They both have tiny little screens that monochromatically display their information in the original Mac OS default font. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a desktop version of your favorite portable music player? And that’s when inspiration dawned. Armed with a handful of Bluetooth peripherals, the endlessly customizable Yahoo! Widgets, and a FireWire capable iMac G3, I could crossbreed the music playing delight of an iPod with the home appliance sturdiness of an iMac to create a dedicated music jukebox that looked pretty damn cool sitting there pumping out audio. I created…the iMod. And you can, too.

Obviously, the engine that makes this whole train run is an old school iMac G3 computer. I first set up my iMod on one of the original blueberry colored models, but with a 6 GB drive and nothing more than USB 1.0 ports, the limitations of this early iMac soon became apparent. So I picked up an all white model for around a hundred bucks and set it up with OS X. Since these old iMacs don’t have the graphics power of the new Apple computers, I chose to install OS X 10.3 “Panther”. If you’re wondering how to install “Panther” from the installation DVD onto a CD-ROM only iMac, you can either use an external FireWire DVD drive or a second Mac computer equipped with a DVD drive booted into target disk mode. Then I made sure to perform all the updates to bring the iMac up to OS X 10.3.9.

That done, there were a slew of software updates to be performed, too, most notably on QuickTime and iTunes. And since I inhabit a Wi-Fi networked home, I picked up a used old school AirPort card to make downloading and streaming music more convenient. Now that the iMac was ready to go, I installed a copy of Yahoo! Widgets. I’m no coder, but over the years I’ve learned to stand on the shoulders of better trained programmers and have been able to adapt their widgets to do the things I want them to do. For my iMod, I decided that I wanted the iMac screen to replicate the early generation iPod screens as much as possible. So I needed to create a widget of my own that could display the desired track, artist, and album information, provide control over playback, and also represent the track position of the audio. I found a wonderfully executed widget named whiTunes created by Alex Reid. With my smattering of an understanding of XML, I fired up a text editing app and cracked open Alex’s widget to see what I could make of it. The results of my trial and error approach can be seen in the photo below: an iMac desktop that has been customized to look like the screen of an iPod. You can download the iMod widget here. You’ll need to put it in the Widgets folder that installing Yahoo! Widgets created inside your Documents folder.

There are a couple things to keep in mind as you use the iMod. It was designed to run on a 1024 x 768 display and won’t look quite right at other resolutions. Keep in mind, too, that the iMod widget is designed to work with the font Chicago…which you won’t find on a recent OS X computer. Apple stopped including the font with their release of “OS X. But if you own any older Mac software installation discs, you can easily add it to one of your iMac’s Fonts folders. Or you can download a copy here. Otherwise, the iMod widget will display with a default font and you won’t have that simulated iPod look.Once you’ve gotten everything installed, there are several further tweaks that will enhance your iMod. With iTunes running, activate the iMod widget and center the image as desired on your display. The horizontal bar just below the name iMod is exactly 1024 pixels across. It should reach from one side of the display to the other with no gaps at either end. Adjust the vertical position to suit your taste. Then go to the Yahoo! Widgets pull down menu in the menu bar and select Widget Preferences, then iMod. You’ll want to make sure that you don’t select Desktop as the window level for the widget (otherwise the buttons won’t function). You’ll also want to check the Lock Window Positions box so that your properly centered widget doesn’t stray from its location during use. Since my iMac is dedicated solely to iMod and iTunes use, I’ve made sure that both applications have been selected in the System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items panel.

I’ve also made use of a minor hack that causes the menu bar to hide when iTunes is active. It’s the simple addition of two lines to the iTunes Info.plist file, but it causes the menu bar to recede off screen when not wanted in much the same way that Dock Hiding makes the Dock disappear. If you know your way around a text editor, then simply find the Info.plist file inside of the iTunes application (by Control clicking on the icon and selecting Show Package Contents). TextEdit will allow you to make the necessary changes. Once you’ve opened file, add the following to the string of code:

<key>LSUIPresentationMode</key><integer>4</integer>

I suggest inserting it immediately above the line near the bottom of the file that reads:

<key>NSAppleScriptEnabled</key>

…not because that’s where it needs to go, but because if you’ve never done this sort of hack before, you won’t be putting it in an ineffective location by accident. Save the file and close the folder. As always, if you want to perform this sort of modification, you would do best to work on a copy of the file so that if anything goes wrong, you can replace the modified version with the original.

There are a couple additional enhancements worth noting. Because listening to internet radio is a priority for me, I took extra pains to make sure that the track data from an internet stream parses in the same way that the mp3 or CD data does- specifically that the track title always appears on the top line with the artist name below that. Also, since my iMac lives next to my bookshelf, I wanted to have a way to control it from elsewhere in the room. So I equipped it with a D-Link DBT-120 Wireless Bluetooth 2.0 USB Adapter. With OS X 10.3, any USB equipped Mac will be able to recognize the dongle and make connection with any nearby Bluetooth devices. Such as the Apple Wireless Mouse and Keyboard I happened to have on hand. Since I only need the keyboard for occasional tasks, it usually remains turned off to conserve the batteries. But the mouse has its own space on the coffee table next to the other entertainment oriented remotes. Music from the iMod is only a click away.

Got iMod? If you’ve downloaded the iMod widget and installed it on your Mac, we’d love to hear from you. How did you get on? Send all your stories, photos etc to us here, and we will publish the best ones on the site.. Happy modding.

Posted in Internet & Music

Tags: imod, ipod, mac, mods, widgets

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