If you like to mess with your menu colors but don’t want to lose good color choices you’ve come up with in the past, use an app like kColor to store your favorites. kColor is a free replacement for the now defunct RoColor (old timers will remember it). Chosen colors can be saved in „buckets“ and dragged out of the buckets onto any app that supports color drops. Drop a color into Pe or StyledEdit to have the hex equivalent inserted at that point. Drop a color into SoundPlay or DeskCalc to have those apps turn that color. Or drop a color onto a non-wallpapered desktop to turn the desktop that color instantly.
One thing few people realize is that the Menu preferences panel will accept color drops from tools like kColor, which means you can use kColor’s „buckets“ to keep a library of frequently used BeOS menu colors.
If you use tab completion a lot, you may get tired of hearing the system beep go off all the time, rattling workmates who are trying to get something done in the next cubicle. To put the „bell“ to sleep, create a file in home called .inputrc, containing the line:
set bell-style none
Type:
source .inputrc to read its contents into memory, and get your work done in quiet.
If you have a Castlewood Orb drive attached to your system, it will work just fine in BeOS. However, some users have experienced problems getting Orb disks to eject properly. If this applies to you, boot Windows and use the provided Orb software to set the drive to „Removable.“ The drive will now be software-ejectable from either operating system.
Be’s Leo L. Schwab (ewhac@be.com) offers additional information:
Some SCSI Castlewood ORB drives (2.2G removable media) have exhibited problems when the media is changed. The problem typically manifests as an inability to access the drive after a media change event (removing or inserting a disk), which can lock up DriveSetup.
Castlewood have released a new version of the drive firmware, v2.0. Visit the Castlewood support area and follow the links to the SCSI firmware update. Note that this update is only for SCSI ORB drives (not IDE or USB), and you will need to create a bootable DOS floppy to install the firmware update.
Once updated, the drive and BeOS will deal with media change events just fine. (Note that you may need to run DriveSetup and rescan the SCSI bus to get the drive to show up in the first place.)
SoundRecorder will record and work with very large audio files. It is, however, very difficult to mark specific passages because there is no zoom function. Here’s a workaround:
- Resize the window from the bottom right corner
- Hold down the Shift key and move the title bar to the far right
- Let go of Shift and move the whole window as far to the left as possible
- Repeat as necessary
I managed to increase resolution by several hundred percent. I assume the same method will work for other applications which need space!
Providing hey is installed you can simply use the following line in a terminal to set SoundRecorder (or any other application) to maximum width.
hey SoundRecorder set Frame of Window [0] to BRect[4,200,5004,350]
where the figures in brackets refer to the windows co-ordinates:
4 pixels from the left of the screen (beginning of the visible area)
200 pixels from the top of the screen
5000 pixels wide
150 pixels high
5000 seems to be the maximum possible width. You can set higher values but the width will not exceed 5000 pixels.
To have your own city or town show up in the Time preferences panel, for selecting your time zone, simply create a symbolic link in the correct /etc/timezones/ subdirectory which points to a city in the same timezone as you.
For instance, I live in Temecula, CA, which is just north of San Diego, and in the same time zone as Los Angeles. Here’s what I did:
$ cd /etc/timezones/North_and_Central_America/ $ ln -s Los_Angeles Temecula
Now when I go to the Time preferences applet, Temecula shows up in the scroll box!
I have a standard Bt848 TV card on my BeOS system. I was frustrated as a new user because I couldn’t get the TV app to display full-screen without it being really jerky and fragmented. I ran my desktop at 1280×1024. So I would watch TV in 640×480 window on the regular desktop. Of course, that’s not good enough.
The solution to this problem is to create a Workspace at 640×480, and drag the TV window into it when you start it up. Bang, full-screen TV on your BeOS machine! No shakes, jitters, or dropped frames.
Tyler Riti (fizzyboy@mail.utexas.edu) offers this cool script to automate the process. It requires that hey be installed in your path.
On my system, I have Workspace 12 set to 640×480 so you may want to edit that line for your system or just comment it out. Save this into a text file, chmod it to be executable (or use SetPerms), and place it on your Desktop so you can double-click it any time you want.
TV & sleep 1 hey TV set Workspaces of Window "Bt848 Input 1" to 2048 hey TV set Frame of Window "Bt848 Input 1" to 'BRect(0,0,639,479)'
If you’re a serious Terminal user, and prefer another shell over bash (which is the default shell included with BeOS), you can download tcsh or zsh . Once you’ve downloaded either binary, drop it into /boot/home/config/bin.
To change the shell used by Terminal, open /boot/home/config/boot/ UserSetupEnvironment and scroll to the bottom. Add the line:
export SHELL=/home/config/bin/tcsh
or
export SHELL=/home/config/bin/zsh
You’ll need to reboot for your changes take effect.
The following script will parse all the email messages in your inbox, generating
a People file with name and email-address for each person who sent you a
message. Existing People files with the same name will not be clobbered.
[Editor’s note: If you use Mail-It and want to be more selective about this process, just click the sender’s email address in the header pane to add that person to your People database quickly.]
cd ~/mail/in
find . -type f | {
read file
while [ "$file" != "" ]
do
NAME=$(catattr MAIL:name "$file")
NAME=$(echo $NAME|awk '{print $3}' FS=" : ")
if [ "$NAME" != "" ]
then
EMAIL=$(catattr MAIL:from "$file")
EMAIL=$(echo $EMAIL|awk '{print $2}' FS="<")
EMAIL=$(echo $EMAIL|awk '{print $1}' FS=">")
if [ "$EMAIL" != "" ]
then
FILE=/boot/home/people/$NAME
if [ ! -f "$FILE" ]
then
touch "$FILE"
addattr -t string BEOS:TYPE application/x-person "$FILE"
addattr -t string META:name "$NAME" "$FILE"
addattr -t string META:email $EMAIL "$FILE"
echo $NAME : $EMAIL
fi
fi
fi
read file
done
}
Update: This tip is superceded by the appearance of Sander Stoks‘ excellent MenuKey add-on. The old tip follows.
The Be menu is navigable using the arrow keys — but unfortunately, there’s no built-in way to activate the Be menu without using your mouse. This tip gets around that limitation.
First, install SpicyKeys 1.20 or higher on to your system. Now, say you want the Be menu to be activated whenever you press left-alt+escape. Add the following two entries into the SpicyKeys GUI:
left-alt-escape : *MoveMouseTo 100% 0
left-alt-escape : *MouseButton 1
This tells SpicyKeys that whenever you tap left-alt+escape, it should move the mouse to the upper right corner of the screen, then click the left mouse button.
Make sure that when you click „save“, the two entries are listed in the table in the order shown above (otherwise the menu won’t activate, since the click will happen before the mouse move).
Update: With the advent of SoundPlay 4.0, you can do much more sophisticated MP3 streaming than the M3U technique outlined here. Read Streaming audio from SoundPlay for more information.
This tip is excerpted from Scot Hacker’s MP3: The Definitive Guide, coming from O’Reilly and Associates March 3, 2000. While it is written for all platforms, it may be especially handy for BeOS users, since up-to-date ports of the SHOUTcast and icecast servers are probably held up waiting for the arrival of BONE.
There are two kinds of streaming MP3 servers: True streaming and „on demand,“ or „pseudo-streamers.“ Genuine MP3 streaming, where your server acts like a radio broadcast station (users hear what you’re playing at any given moment) can require quite a bit of setup and configuration, plus special software. MP3-on-demand, on the other hand, is very simple to set up and can be run from any standard web server. With this method, users will click a link to a playlist file (which may reference from one to any number of MP3 files) and the link will be passed to their preferred MP3 player. The playlist will be launched in the preferred MP3 player, which will manage the download of the referenced MP3 files, playing them as soon as it has enough bits to work with. The files in the playlist will appear in their player’s list window (filenames only), so they can skip around between songs at will. In other words, pseudo-streaming is asynchronous, rather than synchronous.
To set up MP3-on-Demand, you must first have a running web server — any platform and any server software will do. Now, place some legal MP3 files on your site and create a text file listing the full URLs to these files. For example, your text file might look like this:
Save this file into the site with an .m3u extension, e.g. Blues_Playlist.m3u. M3U stands for „MPEG URL.“ Finally, check your server’s MIME configuration database (consult your server’s documentation if you’re not sure what this means) to see that the following MIME types are present:
audio/x-mpeg .mp3 audio/x-mpegurl .m3u
[BeOS users: Since most BeOS web servers use the system’s filetypes database rather than a server-specific MIME database, you’ll want to set this up in the FileTypes preferences panel.]
You may need to restart the server to have it recognize the new MIME type. Now, place a link on your site to the M3U file. Users accessing the file should see it passed automatically to their favorite MP3 player, which will display all the files in the list, start playing the first one automatically, and let them switch among files with a single click.
Of course, if you do this, you will need to make sure you have plenty of bandwidth. Whereas real MP3 streaming (covered in detail in MP3: The Definitive Guide) is capable of downsampling files to be bandwidth friendly, this method does not. The bitrate and frequency at which they’re encoded is the bitrate and frequency at which they’ll be served.
[BeOS users: You may also want to check out Simon Huet’s MP3ToStream add-on for Robin Hood. This will avoid the necessity to set up M3U files, but doesn’t offer playlist capabilities.]