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!

Download: Codec.m4r

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.

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.zip

Before I begin, let me say that I have been a Mac user for only two years. I made the switch, and I’ve learned enough about OS X in that time to let me do this. So, without any more small-talk, let’s get into it!

Before You Begin

You will need a 1GB or larger flash drive. It is impossible to install OS X on anything smaller. After testing this procedure multiple times, the largest free space I had after booting up was 11.6MB.

You will also need the original Mac OS X Install Disc(s) that came with your computer.

Preparing the Flash Drive

Start out by completely formatting your flash drive. Open up Disk Utility, select your device from the source list (mine’s a SanDisk Cruzer), and click on the Erase tab. Be sure the filesystem is Mac OS Extended (Journaled), and uncheck the option to install Mac OS 9 drivers. Space is crucial, and there will be no point in having OS 9 recognize our device if we’re trying to get it to boot into OS X. Enter a name for your drive, and click on Erase.

If you click on the new drive name, you will see that Owners are not enabled.

We have to get that changed. Open up Terminal.app, and enter the following command:

sudo /usr/sbin/vsdbutil -a /Volumes/iTote

Be sure to change the name of the volume (iTote) to correspond to the name you gave your flash drive when you formatted it.

Owners should now be enabled.

Installing the Base System

In order to extract the critical system files and install them on the flash drive, we have to use Pacifist. Insert your Mac OS X Install Disc, and open Pacifist. When Pacifist recognizes the disc, click on Open Apple Install Packages.

Select your install media and click OK.

If you are prompted to insert another disc, click Skip. The files we are looking for are on the first disc.

After the package list loads, expand EssentialSystemSoftware, then EssentialSystemSoftwareGroup. The two packages that are needed in order for OS X to boot are BaseSystem and Essentials. Select them, then click on the File menu.

Select Install Files to Other Disk…

And choose your flash drive. Click Install to begin extracting and installing. This will take a while.

Remove Unnecessary Files

If you are using a drive smaller than 2GB, you will have to remove a few files before you can continue. Open up your flash drive, and navigate to /System/Library/Fonts. Scroll to the bottom, and you will find a group of Japanese and/or Chinese fonts. Removing these will free up over 100MB. DELETED! Be sure to empty your Trash.

Copy Missing Files

Because we extracted the system with Pacifist, there are a few files that are missing off our flash drive. Open up your main hard drive which has your running copy of OS X installed. Navigate to /System/Library/CoreServices. Copy SetupAssistant over to /System/Library/CoreServices on your flash drive. It might be easier to have two separate finder windows, as you will have to authenticate yourself when you copy the file.

Now we need to copy the package receipts for BaseSystem.pkg and Essentials.pkg onto our flash drive. Open your main hard drive again, and go to /Library/Receipts. Copy both BaseSystem.pkg and Essentials.pkg over to /Library/Receipts on your flash drive.

Make the Flash Drive Bootable

Now that all the required files are present, it’s time to make the system recognize the device as bootable. Open up Terminal.app once more, and enter the following command:

sudo bless –verbose –folder “/Volumes/iTote/System/Library/CoreServices” –bootinfo

This command “blesses” the CoreServices folder, which makes the system recognize it as an installed operating system. Again, be sure to substitute the name of your flash drive for the volume name in the above command.

Fixing File Permissions

When the files were copied from the installer CD, they didn’t have the correct permissions to allow the system to read and write to them. Open up Disk Utility, and select your flash drive. Click on Repair Disk Permissions, and go get yourself a coffee while it runs.

Booting From the Flash Drive

If you have an Intel Mac, you should be able to set the flash drive as the Startup Disk in System Preferences. For PowerPC Mac’s, things are a bit more complicated. I’m not going to re-invent the wheel, so I’ll forward you on to this article.

In Closing

Before you start complaining that this technique does not work with Intel Mac’s, be aware that I have not tested this on an Intel Mac because, well, I don’t have one. If anyone has an Intel Mac, please let me know if you can get this working, and what differences there are in the procedure.