Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No… it’s Supersprow! (Imagine there’s exciting music here!)
Earlier this year, the Piccolo Systems website became the victim of hacking/hijacking, with the site as we knew it vanishing, apparently to be replaced by one providing a home to malware. Ben Avison is reported to have said he was aware of the issue, but working out how best to bring the site back online was taking time – and this all happened at a bad time, because of a house move.
Any sign of the malicious software has now been removed – though some browsers may still warn visitors that the site is a “reported attack page” – and the site declares itself as down for maintenance.
The upshot of this problem is that it has been impossible to purchase any of Piccolo Systems’ products since the attack – until now, thanks to Elesar Ltd. Rob Sprowson’s company has taken on sales of the software as an interim measure while the Piccolo Systems website is down.
CloneDisc is a tool that allows an entire disc to be copied, and can be used as a backup tool for making exact copies of discs, initialising a disc from an image file, creating those disc image files in the first place, and even as a means to securely erase all the data on a disc.
SystemDisc is designed to manage the system software on modern RISC OS systems, and can be used to initialise new SD cards from which RISC OS can be booted, including the specially overlaid FileCore+FAT disc layouts used (for example) for the bootable SD card used in the Raspberry Pi.
Both pieces of software are priced at £12.50 plus VAT of £2.50, and are delivered by email. Customers outside the UK but within the EU and who are VAT registered can benefit from the reverse charge mechanism by supplying a valid VAT number, meaning they don’t have to pay the VAT at the time of purchase, and there is no VAT to pay for customers outside of the EU.
For existing customers of the two applications, the ‘Resources’ tab on each of the pages above leads to a handy PDF download, featuring the instructions that were previously only shown on Piccolo’s site.