Access an ESP32 camera module from the desktop

If you have a Raspberry Pi and wish to attach a camera to it there are a number of options available to you – including from the Raspberry Pi Foundation themselves – but if you wish to use one with RISC OS, your options are considerably more limited. So limited, in fact, that until very recently I don’t think there was a working option. As of mid-May, however, that changed thanks to Rick Murray.

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QrCode rewritten, becomes version 2.00

Kevin Wells has released a new version of his application for turning small amounts of textual information into two dimensional bar codes, aka ‘Quick Response’ codes. These can provide a quick way for people to transfer information into devices that can read them – for example smart phones using a bar code scanner application – such as URLs, contact details, WiFi keys, and so on.

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TextEase Studio now served with a thump

That’ll be the sound of the user manual landing on your doormat Last year, Elesar Ltd managed to bring back TextEase Studio for RISC OS, a publishing suite that was first developed and published by SoftEase. The updated suite came with what was, at that point, an updated 72-page but still draft manual, supplied in electronic format. Being draft, that manual was obviously still a work in progress – and that work has now progressed to the point where the manual is no longer in draft. The software is now…

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Serve up some SSI soup

Web pages can be very simple, containing a little mark-up that helps inform the software receiving and rendering the page a little bit about its content and how it should be presented, ideally with the help of cascading style sheets (CSS) to provide styling information. However, sometimes that simplicity isn’t enough, and a web page might need to refer to external resources. There are a number of ways this can be done, and one is by using Server Side Includes (SSI). When a page is being passed from the server…

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PiTools updated to version 1.13

Released barely a week ago as a general spin off the software supplied with the 4té computer, intended for use by other people running RISC OS on the Raspberry Pi, an update to PiTools has been pushed out by R-Comp Interactive. The product, which began life as 4téTools on its namesake computer – itself based around the Raspberry Pi 4 – provides additional tools and configuration facilities to the computer in addition to those included in RISC OS itself.

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Escape from Exeria – a new-old game

Back in the mists of time, the first game released by Soft Rock Software was Escape from Exeria, a game in which the player navigates mazes to collect things while avoiding the bad guys – but unlike the most famous example of its kind, with an added puzzle element. Updated and re-released in the mid-1990s, the company has taken another look at it recently and given it a new lease of life.

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