An obvious reference like that is impossible to resist – sorry!
The next meeting of the RISC OS User Group of London (ROUGOL) will take place on Monday, 20th March, and the guest speaker will be telling us how his submarine, Nautilus, is controlled via RISC OS.
Wait, what?
No, okay, then. The guest speaker will be Nemo20000, rather than Jules Verne’s fictional captain Nemo. ‘Our’ Nemo doesn’t have a submarine, but he does have some interesting RISC OS things to talk about.
Some RISC OS users will be familiar with Nemo as one of the people behind Cerilica Limited, who brought us PostScript handling RiScript and vector graphics package Vantage in the 1990s, and who had hoped to keep RISC OS moving forward themselves after the closure of Acorn with a new hardware platform to be called Nucleus.
Nemo has been using RISC OS continuously since those days, even when he hasn’t been a visible member of the community. His primary ‘machine’ for using the OS is VirtualRiscPC, and in all that time he has produced many patches, modules, and tools to improve it and make it a better system. Some of what he has developed can be found on his website, but that barely scratches the surface of what he’s done.
Back in the RISC OS Select days, a very handy facility provided in the OS was the Image File Renderer (IFR) – a system that provided a seamless way for any application that can handle graphics to load any type of image without necessarily understanding that type; provided the IFR understood it, the application could handle it. Nemo is currently working on an enhanced re-implementation of this – and while it isn’t yet at a stage where it can be released, there are enough components and related tools ready that he will be demonstrating it at the meeting.
ROUGOL’s meetings are usually hybrid, with some people attending in person, and some attending online via Zoom. However, this month, because the usual host venue is undergoing refurbishment, the meeting is online only.
To join, you’ll need the Zoom software installed on a suitable computer or other device, a comfortable chair, easy access to drinks and snacks (ideally), and the meeting credentials. You’ll have to sort out most of that for yourselves, but the credentials can be obtained by contacting ROUGOL in plenty of time for the meeting.
Please note that if you’ve attended any other recent ROUGOL meetings using Zoom, those credentials remain the same – so you should already have them.
The meeting will officially begin at 7:45pm, but the Zoom session should be open from 7:30pm to allow people to join before the main talk begins.
