Wakefield 2012 show report

Yet another better late than never report! The last fortnight or so has been a busy one for me, and a major contributor to that has been the annual Wakefield Show, organised as usual by the Wakefield RISC OS Computer Club (WROCC), and held at the Cedar Court Hotel. The show took place on Saturday 28th April, 2012, and it made me busy in the week running up to it because I decided I’d have something new(ish) on show (more on that later), and in the week following it because…

Snippets – 24th February 2012

Basalt and the Toolbox Steve Drain, prompted by a discussion in the RISC OS Open Ltd forum about AppBasic, has written a document about the using the Toolbox with Basalt which, he explains, has never been very well described. Basalt (“BASic ALTernative keywords”) is a module that extends BASIC by providing “alternative keywords by extending the use of actual keywords and adding new keywords, both of which are used completely as native BASIC keywords.” The document is available online, at the link given above, and it is also included in…

Snippets – 14th January 2012

Following the release of version 1.32 of DrawPrint, Sine Nomine Software have announced version 1.34, which fixes a number of bugs, crediting Harriet Bazley for finding most of them, and offering apologies to users who have downloaded version 1.32 or 1.33 in the last few days, who will now need to download version 1.34 instead. “Even if you don’t expect to use the new page export features,” explains Hilary Phillips, “you should still download the new version as it fixes a couple of bugs which have been around for a…

You’re once, twice, three times a shutdown

Shutdown from Kevin Wells

Kevin Wells has released a new application called Shutdown which, as its name suggests, is designed to do one simple thing: Shut the computer down. When launched, the application presents its icon – a red power button – on the left hand side of the icon bar, with the text “Turn me off” underneath it. A single click on that icon will invoke the standard RISC OS shutdown procedure, with the usual warnings; apps with unsaved data will prompt you to save (or cancel), and so on. As such, the…

Midlands MUG Show 2011 report

The Midlands Midsummer MUG show 2011 took place on Saturday 9th July, 2011, and was perhaps one of the quietest RISC OS shows I’ve attended in as long as I can remember, if not the quietest. However, in spite of the very small attendance by users, I did find myself reasonably busy for most of the day, having some fairly long chats with various people – mostly visitors, and some exhibitors, though often not about things RISC OS! (For example, Martin Wuerthner and I discussed the joys of travelling down…

Snippets – 21st June 2011

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.”

Wakefield 2011: The morning after

Yesterday’s RISC OS show in Wakefield, held in the show’s original venue of the Cedar Court Hotel, Calder Grove, is the 16th show organised by WROCC and one month short of being held on the fifteenth anniversary of the very first, held in the middle of May, 1996. It is also the 10th anniversary (again, offset by about a month) of my first appearance at the show – at any show – as an exhibitor. I had a reasonably busy day, demonstrating various aspects of WebChange to people, but did…

Quick fix for IyonixPC year increase bug

IMPORTANT UPDATE: RISC OS 5.16 is now available from RISC OS Open Ltd. This an official release and, as well as a number of other updates and improvements to RISC OS 5.xx, if programmed into the Iyonix ROM will solve the clock problem described below. This means the program presented below to act as a temporary solution to the problem is now no longer necessary. If you are using it, please remember to remove it from your boot sequence prior to rebooting your updated computer. However, please note that if…