Martin Hansen of The MathMagical Software Company has unveiled a new website, called piLEARN. The main thinking behind the site is for it to be a starting point for those people who wish to try out RISC OS on the ARM based Raspberry Pi computer, due to be launched in the next few weeks. He also hopes to have additional material and resources available from the site, with education being an obvious focus since the Raspberry Pi has been intended from the the outset to as a device on which kids can learn to program and Martin, as well as being a programmer himself, has taught mathematics for over twenty years – not to mention the obvious historical connection between RISC OS and education. Continue reading »
Nov 232011
Aug 292011
Christopher Martin has announced the availability of version 1.20 of FFmpeg and FFplay. FFmpeg is a versatile, open-source, multi-platform video and audio conversion system and FFplay is a very simple media player built upon FFmpeg and SDL. Christopher has also released a new version, 2.13, of Murnong, an application for fetching and decoding videos from YouTube, this update having been made necessary due to changes implemented on the video sharing website.
Jul 212011
Hot off the virtual press, the RISC OS community now has another source of news and opinion in the form of The RISC OS Blog. The emphasis, states the blogger, will be on “modern RISC OS”. He (or she) intends to write “the occasional snippets of news regarding the RISC OS operating system and all that surrounds it, and just generally [write] about the platform as a whole.”
Jul 162011
Chris Gransden has announced the availability of version 3.02.1.24 of PDF, allowing users to view files in the ever prevalent Portable Document File format from Adobe. Changes in this version include better interaction with Paint and better facilities when saving images.
PDF can, of course, be used to view Drag ‘n Drop, a PDF based magazine aimed at Acorn 8-bit and RISC OS 32-bit communities – and volume 2 issue 4 is now available to purchase online for £3. Features in this issue include part 9 of Dave Stratford’s series on sorting, an article about upgrading to Messenger Pro 6, a selection of photographs from the 2011 Wakefield Show, along with a number of other articles.
Jun 212011
David Higton reported on the RISC OS Open forums that at the Southamton Acorn Users Group meeting on 14th June, to which he took his BeagleBoard for the purposes of this, he “demonstrated copying the files from a bootable SD card to an empty (formatted) SD card and booting from the latter.” Continue reading »
As a Bristol resident the annual RISC OS South West show, held at the Webbington Hotel near Loxton, is my local event – but one I almost always miss because it usually takes place in February and clashes with a regular holiday. This year, however, the show was held slightly later, so I was able to go along as a visitor. Having missed it for some years now I’ve no real notion of what the show is typically like in terms of the number of visitors, so I couldn’t say if there was an increase or not this year – but what I can say is that I was pleasantly surprised with the turn out. I can’t help but suspect that it is higher than previous years, and that the reason for it is a combination of the amazing coup that Paul Middleton managed by getting Sophie Wilson to do a theatre presentation, and R-Comp‘s decision to unveil their ARMini computer at the show. That’s the sort of combination that could have the South West Show challenging the Wakefield Show as the premiere event in the RISC OS calendar.
Following on from discussions that began about a year ago and which led initially to the creation of a mailing list to bring together RISC OS users in and around the Bristol area, an initial meeting has been announced for those users – so if you are a RISC OS user in that area, the date to note in your diaries is Wednesday 26th January, 7:15pm for 7:30pm, and the venue the Air Balloon pub in Filton, Bristol – which is very easy to find. The following is the announcement that has been posted to comp.sys.acorn.announce:
Having failed to monitor the company myself via Companies House, I received an email a couple of days ago from an anonymous source calling himself Acorn Informer pointing out to me that the registered details for Acorn Computers (Cambridge) Ltd had changed. A quick visit to the Companies House website myself, and I had the new details. Continue reading »
A single web page has appeared which, on the face of it, is designed to spark interest by containing little or no information, other than the familiar looking name and logo, an interesting catch-line, and a link to the Acorn Computers page on Wikipedia. That page can be found at acorncomputers.com. The first and most obvious reaction to this is to remember the so-called revival of the Acorn brand name a few short years ago, and think “Oh no, here we go again!” Continue reading »
Jan 302010
Updated 31/1/2010 with a fourth idea and altered to use a vector based acorn.
Updated 1/2/2010 with a new version of idea 4, but with better colours, and a few others.
Following the initial comments made earlier this week about the possibility of starting a new Bristol based RISC OS user group if there is enough interest, Trevor was able to find a copy of the old BARUG (Bristol Area RISC OS User Group) logo:
Bristol Area RISC OS User Group Logo
To my mind, there are a small number of issues with this. First and foremost, it’s a bitmap which means it can’t be easily re-sized (upwards) without a loss of quality. Somebody, somewhere probably does have it in a vector based format – but it matters not, because of the remaining issues. The second is that it uses the word “RISC” instead of “RISC OS” – the former term encompasses a great deal more than just RISC OS (although the flaw with both is their apparent exclusion of, say, 8bit users of old Acorn kit). And the third most obvious issue is the use of the acorns to represent the towers of the Clifton Suspension Bridge; representing the bridge encompasses a well known Bristol landmark in the design – which is great, given that it’s a Bristol based group – but the acorn is somewhat out of date in that it associates the group (and RISC OS) with Acorn Computers Ltd, who are long gone. There may also be trademark issues with the use of the acorn.
