Show report: Southwest 2020

I don’t think anyone can possibly disagree with me when I say that 2020, so far, has been an unusual year. Most of the world is in some form of lockdown due to the SARS-CoV-2 (novel coronavirus) pandemic, with movements beyond our homes and interactions with people beyond our own households at a minimum – which means (in a RISC OS context) shows and user group meetings aren’t taking place.

Show report: Wakefield 2019

Six months on from the show itself… that’s almost as long as the Long Gap between the Wakefield and London shows! Ahem. The place to be for discerning RISC OS users (and retro Acorn enthusiasts) on Saturday, 27th April, was Wakefield – more specifically, the Cedar Court Hotel in Calder Grove – because that was where the annual Wakefield Acorn and RISC OS Computer Show took place.

Show report: Wakefield 2018

That’s last year’s record for a long-delayed show report broken! This year’s Wakefield Show took place on 21st April, at the Cedar Court Hotel, organised by the local user group – the Wakefield RISC OS Computer Club (WROCC). Like last year, I must apologise for another long-delayed RISCOSitory show report. As ever, this is mainly because of how busy I am outside the world of RISC OS, but also because I wanted to edit down my video recordings of the theatre talks to a more manageable length – and video…

ROUGOL meeting, 18th September – Jason Tribbeck on his return to RISC OS

Return of the Mack Tribbeck!1 Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, a name you will have almost certainly seen in the Acorn and RISC OS world was Jason Tribbeck. In the early 1990s, Jason was a developer for Vertical Twist/VTi, a company that produced a number of upgrades and add-ons for Acorn computers, including a SCSI interface, and a sound sampler that connected to the parallel printer port. Argonet was formed in the mid-1990s, and Jason developed some of the software supplied to its users for internet connectivity, including…

Exclusive: A new interface for a new era – introducing RISC OS Rainbow

The new Display icon

Paint the whole RISC OS world with a rainbow! There can’t be many RISC OS users who haven’t encountered a modern touchscreen device, such as a smartphone or a tablet computer – indeed, R-Comp have been selling a tablet now for a couple of years, and have made quite a big thing about it, so it’s difficult to imagine how any RISC OS user could have missed the technology. Smartphones and tablets are often very powerful computers in their own right, but – surely everyone knows – they’re designed to…

RTMPDump comes to RISC OS

Got the hump that streaming gives RISC OS the bump? Get RTMPDump! RTMPDump is a command line tool for fetching RTMP streams and saving them to a local drive, which nicely complements FFmpeg and FFplay – so it is perhaps no surprise that version 2.3 of the software has been ported to RISC OS (as release 1.00) by none other than Christopher Martin, who has been responsible for bringing us new versions of those two applications. RTMP stands for Real Time Messaging Protocol, and was originally developed by Macromedia (now…

The South West Show is dead – long live The South West Show

This year’s RISC OS South West Show almost didn’t happen. Paul Middleton of RISCOS Ltd, the show’s organiser for the last few years, revealed recently that he normally waits for the Webbington Hotel, the show’s usual venue, to reduce the prices of the rooms in which the show can be held – and it seems even more recently (early January, according to Archive 23:4, p4), Paul said that he wouldn’t be organising another show. Richard Brown of Orpheus Internet soon stepped up, with Andrew Rawnsley and R-Comp joining him to…