Cool Kitty Tricks
I had a Safari crash, which leads me to believe that Emacs isn’t really my problem. I still haven’t rebooted - that would probably be a good idea after installing a new OS, but Kitty never asked me to reboot. Anyway, I’ve found some neat tricks while playing with Kitty - some are my own discovery, but most are from MacOSXHints.
The whole command-shift-left/right arrow thing for Safari is new to me, but that’s the quick way to switch tabs. Command-tabbing in Panther has changed a bit, too - now there’s a big program switching popup.
To make your own keyboard shortcuts, open the Keyboard and Mouse panel in System Preferences and choose the Keyboard Shortcuts tab. I added a shortcut to all apps (choose All Applications at the bottom of the shortcut list and hit the plus button). I typed Show All to add that menu item and gave it the shortcut control-alt-command-H. I’m also adding a Hide Chat Participants shortcut to iChat.
When I first set up iTunes to play Filk Radio, I went through a whole song and dance to get the correct Live365 streaming URL into iTunes. I wanted to add some others today and discovered a much simpler method:
- Find your station at Live365.
- You should arrive at the station page, which will have a URL like http://www.live365.com/stations/filk_com or http://www.live365.com/stations/295422. Each station has both a name and a number, and it doesn’t seem to matter which you use.
- Edit the URL in your location bar - replace stations with play.
- If you want to listen to the station in Safari, just hit return and the stream will play as embedded Quicktime (though I thought embedding was illegal now).
- If you want to listen to the stream in iTunes, which I find more convenient, then don’t hit return. Just copy the new URL http://www.live365.com/play/295422 from the location bar (command-C), go to iTunes and choose Open Stream from the Advanced menu (or just hit command-U), and paste in your URL (command-V). The stream will start playing.
- Any time you play a stream in iTunes, it ends up in your Library. (In fact, I have three or four versions of Filk Radio resulting from these experiments.) To put it in a more convenient playlist, just drag it from the Library playlist (it will be the one playing) into your playlist of choice. For some reason you can’t drag a stream into the official Radio playlist, but you can make a new playlist for Live365 stations.
- Now anytime you click on that tune in iTunes your Live365 feed will start playing. The free version includes commercials. I don’t know how the paid version works - probably by adding your username and password to the URL. That project is left to the reader.