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…

piLEARN: Reuniting education and RISC OS

Martin Hansen of The MathMagical Software Company has unveiled a new website, called piLEARN. The main thinking behind the site is for it to be a starting point for those people who wish to try out RISC OS on the ARM based Raspberry Pi computer, due to be launched in the next few weeks. He also hopes to have additional material and resources available from the site, with education being an obvious focus since the Raspberry Pi has been intended from the the outset to as a device on which…

RISC OS London Show 2011 – Preview

The RISC OS London Show 2011 is finally upon us. In the morning, I will be making my way down to the hall at the St Giles Hotel, Feltham, where I’ve already set up my stand, ready for when the doors are open to the public at 11am. The line up for this year’s show includes plenty of regular faces as well as a few less regular (and perhaps first time) exhibitors, and some special treats – so let’s get straight down to business and look at who and what…

Snippets – 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…

Snippets – 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…

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…

South West Show 2011. That was today, that was.

As a Bristol resident the annual RISC OS South West show, held at the Webbington Hotel near Loxton, is my local event – but one I almost always miss because it usually takes place in February and clashes with a regular holiday. This year, however, the show was held slightly later, so I was able to go along as a visitor. Having missed it for some years now I’ve no real notion of what the show is typically like in terms of  the number of visitors, so I couldn’t say…