Pi in the sky – or, at least, near Heathrow Airport For those interested in the Raspberry Pi, the RISC OS London Show (29th October, 2011, St Giles Hotel, Feltham) will be well worth a visit, since the tiny, low cost computer is set to make an appearance. It’s not known at this stage if it will be running RISC OS by the time of the show, but it seems likely that it will be on the RISC OS Open Ltd stand, judging by comments in their forum. Speaking of…
Read MoreSnippets – 10th September 2011
QuadDioph is a new piece of software from Martin Carradus. It’s an application that solves or finds “solution of certain Quadratic Diophantine Equations, of the form x^2 + B.x.y + A.y^2 = z^p, (e.g. x^2 + y^2 = z^2, two squares adding to a square, or x^2 + y^2 = z^3, two squares adding to a cube).” The application is free to download from Martin’s website. Martin Wuerthner has announced that an ARMv7 compatible version of InterGif. Version 6.18 can be used on the BeagleBoard, ARMini, etc. InterGif is an…
Read MorePipeDream 4.50/23 now free to download
Gerald Fitton of Abacus Training has announced via the Archive-on-Line mailing list that he has now received permission from Colton Software “to make a version of PipeDream 4.50/23 available as Freeware.” In his message to the list, Gerald explains his long standing history with Colton Software and PipeDream, which started in (or around) 1988, soon after the Acorn Archimedes first appeared. Gerald and his wife, Jill, were “invited by Colton Software to create a support service for their newly developed, integrated word-processor spread-sheet Program called PipeDream” – which they did…
Read MoreSnippets – 29th August 2011
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.
Read MoreAll quiet on the RISCOSitory front
It can’t have escaped people’s notice that almost three weeks have passed with nothing new appearing on RISCOSitory – despite a number of posts appearing on other sites, such as The Icon Bar and The RISC OS Blog. The simple reason for this is that I’ve been doing some redecorating and reorganising at home, leaving myself with no desk for a while, and even no internet connection at times. The current situation is that I now have a new desk, so I now have a place to work at home,…
Read MoreSnippets – 6th August 2011
Dorian Computing have made available from their website one updated and one new piece of software. Originally written by Philip Macfarlane in 1991 and “released into the public domain,” DragCom is an application designed to provide a desktop front-end for star commands, making it easier to specify arguments (often files) by allowing them to be dragged onto the main window. This not only reduces the potential for errors when typing the path and filename, but it also removes the need to repeatedly type it if a series of commands needs…
Read MoreMaking a jclean jcut
Posting to the ARMini support mailing list, user Ross McGuiness asked a little over a week ago about the application JCut, and whether there was any chance of it being made ARMini (and Beagleboard) compatible. The software is part of a small suite of programs written some years ago by J. David Barrow for manipulating JPEG files without re-sampling them, and thus without causing any reduction in the image quality that normal editing can cause. The software does this by way of the Independant JPEG Group utility ‘jpegtran’, providing a…
Read MoreA slice of Raspberry Pi
Back in May, on the RISC OS Open forum, Rik Griffin identified a possible new target for a RISC OS port, from The Raspberry Pi Foundation, “a UK registered charity (Registration Number 1129409) which exists to promote the study of computer science and related topics, especially at school level, and to put the fun back into learning computing.” The foundation is developing a very small computer, about the size of a USB stick, with an intended price tag of £10 to £15. David Braben – a name anyone familiar with…
Read MoreYou’re once, twice, three times a shutdown
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…
Read MoreBlog it to me, baby
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.”
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