My avid reader will know that I am a big fan of running RISC OS on Raspberry Pi.
I have already written a
post answering whether you can use RISCOS as your main computer. The answer was yes (sort of). If you were not convinced then this is a post about stuff you can get your RISC OS Raspberry Pi computer to do right away.
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| Never forget to go to work again! |
Shown above is the alarms section of the clock application and it is a surprisingly good alarm system. You can set multiple alarms, including specific dates of the year on various recurring patterns. There are two things I like about this. First, by having it in the 'run at startup' folder you get an analogue clock with seconds hand in your icon bar - as close to a 'live tile' as you will get in RISC OS Pi. Secondly, you can have multiple alarms (I am not sure what the maximum is) and alarms can seemingly be set years (months, weeks or days) into the future. There are options for 'working week', 'repeating alarms'. There is a 'Task Alarm' which allows you to boot up another RISC OS Pi app at the particular time of the day - for example, to load the radio player just in time for the shipping forecast. Simply drag the appropriate app into the alarm dialogue box. This includes your own BASIC programs as well (rather exciting, no?) Repeating alarms can be programmed to run on particular intervals, or on the first Sunday of each Month.
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| Calculator |
As you might expect, RISC OS has a calculator app, and it is as good as any you will find on your 'other' desktop machine or phone. Shown here is the programmer's calculator should you need to perform a left shift on a nibble, or whatever.
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| Happy New Year! What? Not another one! |
As desktop calendars go, it is not as good as Window's 10 calendars with
Outlook integration, but if you need to know the date of the next Friday before payday, then this will do plenty. It is also highly customizable, and I think the result looks good. Some operating systems don't even have a desktop calendar - I'm looking at you, ChromeOS!
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| NetRadio - highly recommended. |
My longtime reader will know that one day I hope to have a second reader on this blog. They will also know that I like to listen to a wide range of music as I sit back and relax with some knitting. The NetRadio app turns your RaspberryPi into an internet radio (oh, and before you ask, I don't record the top forty onto
compact cassettes anymore, honest).
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| It's notepad |
One of the main roles for my Raspberry Pi is to simply keep notes, records, and calculations. Between the simple but powerful StrongEd text editor (shown above) and PipeDream, RISC OS has this basic computing job covered. Pop over to the task window (F12) and you can navigate your text file library using the
*BUILD <filename> and
*TYPE <filename> commands. This, obviously, makes you feel more like a hacker even though you are really just writing your thank you letter to Santa. StrongEd is a little more than Notepad for RISC OS, featuring spell checker, split screen and various other features for the power user to enjoy.
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| Sometimes you need to know the distance to the shops in astronomical units. |
Convert is my go-to app for converting various units. There are loads of units available, I'm just showing a small selection of the 'less common' ones.
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| Brrrr |
Weather UK is an app for showing simple weather data for various cities in the UK.The data comes from the BBC weather feeds and clicking on the text will bring up a forecast in your browser.
And that's not it! One really awesome feature (for me at least) is that RISC OS will run most of your favourite BBC BASIC applications. I have already
written a post all about this and I am currently in the process of converting various files from
my BBC master 128 onto the Raspberry Pi. No doubt I shall be back really soon to write about this.
If you enjoyed reading this post, then do please share it with your friend. It would be great to have
two readers! If you don't have a friend, then no worries, you might like to
read about data logging on Raspberry Pi, or
something random but similar.
Until next time...
