Book proposal: A potted history of Acorn Computers

From little Acorns grow great oaks dead tree publications. David Bradforth has set up a crowd-funding campaign to publish a new book, to be called A Potted History of Acorn Computers. The proposed book will be a 132 page, perfect-bound, full-colour, A4 publication and, according to the Indiegogo page David has set up, his plan is for “a loose deadline of October for the books to ship to the purchasers; this will be the latest date for the final production giving approximately ten weeks [from the date the Indiegogo campaign…

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Snippets – 24th March 2012

It’s been a busy month again here, which means there have been no posts to RISCOSitory for a while – so here’s a quick round-up of recent goings on in the world of RISC OS. RISC OS 5.18 RISC OS 5 has seen its latest ‘stable’ release in the form of RISC OS 5.18, which features some 340 improvements since the last such release (version 5.16). The full list of improvements can be found on the RISC OS Open website, but this list isn’t written in ‘typical user-speak’. In response…

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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…

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Snippets – 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.

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Blog 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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Snippets – 16th July 2011

Chris Gransden has announced the availability of version 3.02.1.24 of PDF, allowing users to view files in the ever prevalent Portable Document File format from Adobe. Changes in this version include better interaction with Paint and better facilities when saving images. PDF can, of course, be used to view Drag ‘n Drop, a PDF based magazine aimed at Acorn 8-bit and RISC OS 32-bit communities – and volume 2 issue 4 is now available to purchase online for £3. Features in this issue include part 9 of Dave Stratford’s series…

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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.”

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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…

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Bristol RISC OS Users announce an initial informal meeting

Following on from discussions that began about a year ago and which led initially to the creation of a mailing list to bring together RISC OS users in and around the Bristol area, an initial meeting has been announced for those users – so if you are a RISC OS user in that area, the date to note in your diaries is Wednesday 26th January, 7:15pm for 7:30pm, and the venue the Air Balloon pub in Filton, Bristol – which is very easy to find. The following is the announcement…

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