SW RISC OS Show on 1st March

It’s now just two weeks until the SW RISC OS show at the Webbington Hotel near Weston-super-mare, just south of Bristol. The show runs from 10.30am to 4pm on Saturday 1st March. As well as a wide selection of RISC OS exhibitors, there will also be space set aside for a “bring-your-own-computer” Raspberry-Pi-style “jam”, where you’ll be able to show what you’ve been up to, and test things out on fellow enthusiasts.

RISC OS exhibitors include R-Comp, Orpheus Internet, RISC OS Open, CJE Micros, MW Software, Organiser, Drag’n’drop magazine, Archive magazine, Steve Fryatt, Fortran Friends, and of course the Charity Stand. We’re still awaiting final confirmation from a couple more, too.

We’ve managed to ensure that entrance fees can stay unchanged from last year, making the show the cheapest of the “nice hotel venue” RISC OS to enter. We’re aware that the weather has not been kind to folks in the SW recently, and hopefully it won’t put too much of a dampener (pardon the pun) on things for the show.

We look forward to seeing people at the event, and if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with either myself or Richard Brown at the usual R-Comp or Orpheus Internet contact details.

Further information, including directions etc, can be found on the show website – http://www.riscos-swshow.co.uk/

See you there!

In lieu of a vertical banner, I have created a textual promo on my blog.

Only 18 miles from where I’m living at the mo’… but only if my swimming improves. I’ve some bits & bobs I could give away too (sucks teeth).

Just a quick “bump” to remind folks that it is now only two days until the RISC OS Southwest show.

In lieu of a vertical banner

There’s been a vertical banner on RISCOSitory for ages. I knocked that one up (ooer, missus) because there wasn’t an ‘official’ one – but I see there now is.

Hmm. I prefer my version, and your textual one, to the proper one. Who had the bright idea to put the R-Comp and Orpheus logos at the green end, when they’re bit maps rendered against a lighter colour, possibly white?

RISC OS Open will be there – we’re looking forward to it! :)

ROUGOL will be there too. Also looking forward to it! :-)

Various MUG members will be there as well.

Looking forward to it and spreading the word about the July MUG show as well :-)

I plan to sleep late (!), but hope you guys have a good day.
Please post lots of photos and stuff because this page needs lots of love. It hasn’t seen action since 2011!

Thanks to everyone who organised the show, to those who exhibited and to everyone who came along to have a look. It was a looong day for Ben and I but well worth it. Maybe we’ll see some of you at Wakefield next month? :)

Maybe we’ll see some of you at Wakefield next month? :)

Grrr!
I’ve just spent most of yesterday and this morning reviewing a tender response¹ that was this weekend out and the last weekend in April is the CAMRA AGM at Scarborough.

¹ It has two commas in the price – and before Rick chimes in: we don’t use that foreign malarkey for decimal separator, proper . for decimal and , for thousand and million bits round here.

It has two commas in the price

Now, we could do with those kinds of sums in the RISC OS world, so Ben and I could come and work full time for ROOL instead of doing voluntary stuff in our (very little) spare time. And the same applies to many others in the community, of course. A seven-figure sum could transform RISC OS and keep things going very nicely for another decade!

A seven-figure sum could transform RISC OS and keep things going very nicely for another decade!

Do useful work as a volunteer = little thanks and no income.
Do work for NHS, = no thanks¹ with unpaid out-of-hours xtras
Do work for banks = bonus payment for screwing up

Personally I couldn’t live with myself if I did option 3

¹ Plus comments from Tories that are best described politely as extremely far removed from accurate.
Particularly annoying when you know they have undeclared interests

Please post lots of photos and stuff

It’s not on ROOL’s page, but now that I’m back up north(ish) I’ve put my photos from the event up at http://www.stevefryatt.org.uk/gallery/index.php?/category/southwest2014 — I think it should work in NetSurf.

Thanks to Andrew and Richard for all their hard work making it happen (especially as I’ve a good idea of the amount of work involved).

Maybe we’ll see some of you at Wakefield next month? :)

I hope so. :-)

I’ve put my photos from the event up at

An observation from the photos….what should we be doing to attract a younger generation¹ of hacker-types to RISC OS?

¹ Even I can no longer fool myself, the non-coloured hairs are starting to win this battle, and I can’t even try the excuse that I’m Leland Palmer (that, too, will probably date me ;) ).

Even I can no longer fool myself, the non-coloured hairs are starting to win this battle,

White is warmer than pink.

On topic – maintaining a youth interest is a mysterious process. The same difficulties exist in other organisations/groups. CAMRA has been fighting the same problem for years, most of the success revolves around “fun”

White is warmer than pink.

You know, one day I might turn up at work with animé-blue hair. Just for lulz.

I wrote more, but deleted it. I know what I want to say, just don’t know how to say it.

So instead I shall ask this:

Given the age of the people in the photos, I’m sure we all have fond memories of the Beeb. You know, there’s a quiet little mailing list and just the other day a machine failed to start up. Turns out one of the address decoding chips had given up the ghost. The fault was diagnosed from the behaviour, the chip replaced, the machine burr-beeps once again.
Now let me wonder what is the exact process of events from power-up to executing the first instruction of RISC OS code on the Pi? A lot of it is guesswork and the results of hackery, it appears that the GPU runs yet another processing core than the ones recently documented, and upon this runs some sort of firmware. In this respect, the ARM is a sort of imōto¹ processor, not quite a co-pro but not quite the pro-pro either. You can’t answer this. Those who think they can don’t really know the exact details, and those who know the exact details can’t say, NDA and all that.

When you compare hardware of old with hardware now, it reminds me of a line from that Joni Mitchell song – something’s lost but something’s gained – we have gained the power to do incredible things. So many people don’t give a moment of thought to the power in their pocket every time they get a notification of a new email, they don’t think of all that came before it. And I would have been the worst student ever if I had this iPad when I was a teenager. I’m lying in bed writing this before watching a recording of a TV program. Yeah, I just had to make do with a Walkman and some worn out tapes. ;-)
But, yet, we have lost something. We have lost the accessibility to be capable of understanding what makes it tick. If people think that computers are some sort of magical contraption that works on some strange sort of wizardry, surely that applies even more today when the entire machine is this silly looking square thing smaller than a coin. Few have any data sheets worth talking about, it is surely all so very impenetrable.
What would entice somebody to want to become a programmer today?² I mean a real programmer, not an SEO type, content cloner, or somebody who wants to throw together a knock-off app just to stick in adverts.

So my question is this: Why are you interested. What makes all of this fun for you? And if you can answer that, do you know how you might begin to share this, especially with a generation that never had to load software from a tape or wait for a program to download, or even had a look inside a computer?³

How do we define “fun”?

Well… That was more than I planned to write the secondthird time around. I’m still not sure I’ve said it right.

¹ It’s a Japanese word that means “little sister”.

² I will kill anybody that mentions “year of code”. http://www.heyrick.co.uk/blog/index.php?diary=20140214

³ What first attracted me to the BBC Micro was when I realised a few simple PRINT statements would take care of my maths homework for me. What absolutely sealed the deal was when I snuck into the classroom during evening prep and undid four simple screws and the cover lifted right off. Oh hell yes ! Now that’s more like it. I didn’t get detention when caught, I got a fiftieth-generation photocopy of the schematic which needed quite a bit of touching up. But it was like dropping a person in a city full of interesting things and then giving them a street plan. Perhaps this is the basis for my preference for assembler, even if I’m not as good as I wish I was? Because having taken the Beeb apart in my mind (the school wouldn’t have been happy with anything more!), I could visualise the address bus, the data bus, the control and clocking pulses, all the little bits and how they relate to each other. You just cannot experience that with a little blob of plastic (and the bit you can see isn’t even the fun part, that’s hiding underneath!).

So my question is this: Why are you interested. What makes all of this fun for you?

What makes me want to work where I do and do what I do? Challenge? possibly. Curiosity about new things? possibly. A sequence of incidents starting with taking my bedroom wall clock apart and putting it back together, through building a TV games computer and learning to use the Polytechnic EPROM programmer and write notes for the students (I was in school). Having numerous people tell me something was impossible when logic said otherwise and then testing proved me right. All these, some or none.

And if you can answer that, do you know how you might begin to share this, especially with a generation that never had to load software from a tape or wait for a program to download, or even had a look inside a computer?

I don’t understand me, other people are more difficult. However, I believe I can say that you’re looking for a good teacher. When I say good I mean good. Good teachers understand “hooks”

How do we define “fun”?

You don’t, you study other people and find their hook. You find what they find fun.
Does any of this make sense to anyone else?

It’s difficult to do justice to your post in the few words I am going to contribute, but here goes.
You are saying in effect that it’s more fun to understand how something works than merely using it. You’re right! I have been saying this for some time, but it runs against conventional wisdom that says that you only have to know how to operate a computer or device.
A few more points.
1. The better you understand how a machine works the better you will use it (as opposed to the current popular view).
2. It is more rewarding or satisfying to, for example, understand how a television works than to passively watch any number of TV programs. Ditto for a computer.
3. Many RISC OS folk may have forgotten how Acorn started with the BBC Micro and later the Archimedes etc.. The objective was to understand how the machine worked as much as to use it as a tool. It was not designed with a view to using it passively as a sort of multimedia entertainment centre.
4. As computers have progressed, it has become more and more difficult to understand even a small part of how a computer works. For example, programmers say that RISC OS is the only OS for a desktop computer that a single person might, given time, be able to completely understand.
5. I believe that a lack or total lack of understanding of any machine that one uses leads to alienation from that machine. Thus to talk about computers at a social gathering kills the conversation, people turn off.
6. Taking these points together leads to the shocking conclusion that most (all?) of us will feel some or complete alienation from modern computers, sometimes summed up by the user wishing to smash the machine up when it goes wrong.

Really, these points need some qualification and some examples or backing up, but I haven’t time for that and so just take the general idea. And, no, my knowledge of how a computer works is pretty feeble. Most folk haven’t the time to study computers in depth, hence the problem.

You are saying in effect that it’s more fun to understand how something works than merely using it.

Ding! Potential hook for subject Pampling identified on line 10,000
Checking for other hooks before testing next subject.

No Photos?

No Photos?

https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/1/topics/2415#posts-30713

?

No Photos?

How about 1000 photos ?

Having now been able to write up a show report, I’ve linked to Steve Fryatt’s photographs, and embedded that video.

Since nobody else has commented yet, take a more careful look at about the 53 second point.

Nice one, Vince. An entertaining report as ever. And as for the London Show timelapse – I’m afraid we didn’t get to do anything silly in that one. The great thing about the London Show was we were too busy to leave our stand for the whole thing. Which was also the worst thing about the show! ;)