My Roundabout Way of Waking Up to the Junkies
“Wake up with the Junkies, good-good-mornin’” raps Seez Mics of the Educated Consumers, heralding in another Junkies radio show. The Junkies helped keep me sane at my job last year — I listened every morning from the moment I got up until the Junks signed-out at 10AM. They air live from 6-10AM weekdays on Washington DC’s WJFK. Having moved to Atlanta two weeks ago, I’ve tried to listen to them on the stream in the mornings while podcasting what I missed later in the day. It’s nice, but I miss waking up to them on my alarm clock.
Last night I decided to do something about this. I tried finding a Firefox extension that opened up a webpage at a certain time, hoping to set the WJFK streaming page to open automatically at 8:00 or so. No dice. I searched the ol’ download.com to try to find alarm clock software but they all sucked. Then I was hoping that the Windows Scheduler would allow me to do this, but I could only get it to open up the browser - not a specific webpage. I searched around the Internet again to see if there was any Firefox extension that I could try to shoe-horn into this scheme. I did! It’s called Home Page Scheduler and it allows you to set your homepage to change based on the time of day (and take notice of the gatech.edu address they’re adding in the screen shot — HOLLA!) But of course there was a problem: the xpi file for HP Scheduler wouldn’t install because it was only made for earlier versions of Firefox.
There are ways around these things, of course, and I’ve done them before. It’s actually a simple process which you can read about at LifeDev. It essentially involves renaming the xpi file to a zip file, unzipping it, editing one of the files to change the version compatibility numbers, zipping it all back up, renaming it back, and then installing it. (Essentially.) So I did that and set my homepage as the WJFK stream between 8:00 and 8:12 on weekdays. I then set Windows Scheduler to open Firefox at 8:10. As long as I leave my computer on and my speakers turned up it will automatically open Firefox at my designated time, use the specific homepage I set to start up the audio, and will revert the homepage to my default Google by the time I actually roll out of bed.
I’m not sure if I’m clever or a dumbass for doing this the hard way, but irregardless I got my results. In the words of the Junks: “It’s pretty mullllnnnnayyy (money)!”
