Wakefield Show 2024 - 27th April

The Wakefield Show is now only a week away, on Saturday 27th April, and is again being held at the Cedar Court Hotel in Bradford.

The show is open between 10:30 am and 4:30 pm and the entry fee is 5 GBP (accompanied under 12’s go free).

There is a full list of exhibitors on the show website www.wakefieldshow.org.uk . All the usual companies/organisation will be in attendance, and you should see a few new products from many of them on the day. For example on the Drag ’N Drop stand you will be able to see the graphics tablets that work on RISC OS, and also no doubt you will be able to see the latest work on their new WiFi stacks from both RISC OS Developments and RISC OS Open. A new game is scheduled for release from AMCOG Games as well.

There will be the usual Charity Stall with lots of bargains for you to grab, raising money for Wakefield Hospice, which the club has supported for many years. The club has now raised over 28,000 GBP for charities, so please do support this worthwhile cause.

As in previous years there will be a show theatre and this year there are no less than six presentations during the day. The full programme is listed on the show website with the time slots for each talk.

The Wakefield RISC OS Computer Club, who organise the show, are also very pleased to announce that there will be another popular Prize Draw, with a chance to win one of the SIX prizes on offer. Entry cost is 1 GBP per ticket (max. 2 tickets per person), so don’t miss out!

OMAP5 platform moved from amber to green. We have now 5 platforms in green, Pi and Titanium in amber. Will we see a RISC OS 5.30 in time for the show?

The Pi (says 3 items, only 2 listed – and unassigned) is “desirable” and looks to be related to gamma support on the Pi 4. I don’t think that should be a showstopper.

The Ti to a NAS at high speed can drop packets which isn’t great but it’ll work due to protocol retries; and the other thing is that the interface can detect faulty cabling so it might be nice to report on that. Neither of these should be showstoppers.

To put that into context, yesterday when I turned on my XP box to copy some TV recordings to harddisc, it popped up a warning to say that it had detected a clash with another device on the network (this Pi, via WiFi ¹) and it had shut its network interface down (until the problem was resolved). RISC OS could do similar, but doesn’t ². So some features are desirable to have, but not essential leading to blocking a ROM release.

So… fingers crossed, but it’s less than a week so the timing is Real Tight.

¹ I thought I’d reserved .30 in the DHCP allocations, I’ll need to check.

² When my SD card went awry and I cloned one Pi from the other, all hell broke loose as they were both trying to be .10, changing the static IP of one and… magically stuff just worked! (cue snarky comment from Steve ;) )

cue snarky comment from Steve

DHCP “just works”¹ and manually assigned² is subject to human error³
DHCP reservation is breakable if the config is stupid enough⁴

¹ According to project managers application printing “just works”, sadly that only holds true out-of-the-box about 10% of the time.

DHCP “just works” and manually assigned is subject to human error

DHCP fails if your machine boots in ~10 seconds and the router takes several minutes and the DHCP setup is a simple “wait for a few seconds at boot or fail out” process.

The Pi machines running RISC OS are all static IP for that reason. Everything else is DHCP as they’re smart enough to notice the WiFi coming up and sort themselves out accordingly.

This issue is, perhaps, a bigger deal than whether or not a command can report a wonky wire, but that minor convenience is part of what’s blocking the Ti release. <shrug>

;)

So… fingers crossed, but it’s less than a week so the timing is Real Tight.

Well given the title, I think you can uncross your fingers:

https://www.riscosopen.org/news/articles/2024/04/21/five-hundred-and-thirty-reasons-to-visit-bradford

DHCP fails if your machine boots in ~10 seconds and the router takes several minutes

I really haven’t checked, probably because the router and NAS sit in the cab in the garage, connected to a UPS, so boots on the router tend to be induced by yours truly when required.

and the DHCP setup is a simple “wait for a few seconds at boot or fail out” process.

Ah, well that is really a failing of the stack, no better than a printer (never found a decent stack on any of them, some¹ can’t even disable BOOTP without disabling DHCP)

¹ Kyocera for one

The Pi (says 3 items, only 2 listed – and unassigned) is “desirable” and looks to be related to gamma support on the Pi 4. I don’t think that should be a showstopper.

I think it would be the height of madness to release 5.30 for several machines excluding the Pi. If that happens I hope that one of the suppliers will release a version of 5.30 for the Pi. The licence does now allow this.

I seem to remember that gamme issues on the Pi 4 were ignored when 5.28 was released.

Tomorrow’s beta

As predicted, the latest Beta is out; it requires the associated Boot files. If you’re unsure, it’s probably best to wait for the Official 5.30 releases. ;) But hey, what’s the fun in that!

I have taken a snapshot of the 530 Pi rom and updated my Pi to 5.30 for the show.

In case anyone else wants to do this, I have uploaded the firmware here – just copy it over your !Boot and it will update the rom and firmware and add the RO530Hook directory.

If anyone wants to know more about the recent improvements to WinEd – or even the tool used to do the updates to the manual – I’ll have a copy of the newly minted WinEd 3.27 on display on my stand today.

A proper announcement will follow, once I’ve found all the bugs at the show!

Thank you to the show organisers for Saturday, and to RISC OS open for the new version 5.30 on my Panda.

It might not be the newest computer now but I’m used to my setup so I appreciate the continued support, each version feels faster than the last, or I’m getting slower!

Would also like to thank the organizers. I very much enjoyed yesterday’s show and came away with a big stack of goodies. Having returned to the RiscOS space after a while it is great to see the really positive advances the OS has made recently.