The Antenna

Minitel Magis teardown - again.

Big Town, Strings, Minitel Magis (test and teardown).

Here are some of the things that I spotted which happened in the RISC OS Open source world this week...

Graeme Shrimpton has released a new module, MyChoices, mentioned on the June fireside chat for developers, with the goal of making it much easier for them to load and save their application’s choices (or settings). It deals with the two problems a developer faces – correctly handling where those choices are stored on user machines, and parsing the file that contains them. The first problem is the file location and how to access it both for reading, and for writing – and the two are slightly different. There are a…

Opus 5: Richard III

The next developer chat is tomorrow night (25th July) for everyone interested in a very informal event online aimed at RISC OS developers of all levels.

The KIM-1 monitor surprises me every time I dive into it. The KIM-1 Explained is nearing completion. The KIM-1 explained There is a bug in the TTY CLI, it accepts characters as ‘;’ and ‘:’ as valid hex and translates to A..F. More about this innocent feature here: PRTBYT, GETBYT and PACK See also:A demo […]

Reports coming in of the death of John C. Dvorak, apparently passed away on Monday (July 20th) from complications of heart bypass surgery. Dvorak started in wine and moved to silicon as an early columnist at InfoWorld, one of the pillar references for this particular blog because of its studious regular reporting, and most notably for PC Magazine where he had no less than two columns since at least 1986. In addition to this and other tech journalism credits, he was on the flagship CNET Central cable TV program in the mid 1990's with his "Buy It, Try It, Skip It" reviews, plus other shows hosted on NPR and then-ZDTV. He was also a regular guest on Leo LaPorte's syndicated radio program and podcasts, and joined former MTV veejay Adam Curry (well known to us in Gopherspace for MTV Networks v. Curry, and an early user of TTYtter before Twitter started to suck) in 2007 as co-host of the No Agenda podcast, a role he maintained until his death. Dvorak hailed from a different generation of tech journalists, far more personal and yet far more technical, and even his detractors (given his political views, which we won't talk about here, there are many) would admit he was at least entertaining. He was 80. Rest in peace.

The time has come once again for anyone interested in software development and RISC OS to gather around the fire fan and discuss anything relevant to the topic. Saturday, 25th July is the date of the next scheduled ‘friendly firefanside chat’ for RISC OS developers. If you develop software on or for RISC OS, or you’re working on the operating system itself, or you’re wondering how to get a start in programming on the platform, this meeting is for you. It doesn’t matter if you’ve plenty of experience, or you’re…

Philly Cheese Stack, Toxicity, WZBA Maryland memories.

The lastest version of IPFire features a fundamental change to how the system handles DNS.

The Summer 2026 edition of Drag'n'Drop magazine is now out. This edition is 40 pages of news, reviews, tools and lots of code to type in or just review (I always buy the version with the programs included).

Tyres, The Online Safety Act falls at the first hurdle.

Aus alter Verbundenheit bin ich immer noch stiller Mitleser diverser RISC OS-Mailinglisten. Auf einer derer kam vor wenigen Tagen die Ankündigung, dass die über 10 Jahre dauernden (also ein echtes Projekt aus der RISC OS-Welt – man wartet ewig drauf, und wenn es dann fertig ist, interessiert sich keiner mehr dafür) Bemühungen, die Reste von APDL nach dem Tod von APDL-Gründer und Inhaber David Holden 2014 wieder gesammelt zur Verfügung zu stellen, sich jetzt der …Read More →

The next RISC OS User Group of London (ROUGOL) meeting will take place on 20th July – tonight – and rather than a guest speaker, the meeting will instead be an open one for general discussion of all things RISC OS. Bryan Hogan, who organises the meetings, and hosts their online element, notes that they have had a run of eighteen meetings featuring someone delivering a presentation, and talking about something relevant to the RISC OS and/or legacy 8-bit community. And thanks to the power of the internet, those guest…

Chronopost and the lack of giving a..., SRAM power up contents, New chair, British stuff, A new hope tomorrow, Sanity at last.

Here are some of the things that I spotted which happened in the RISC OS Open source world this week...

It's now possible to test experimental features on the Gnome desktop without worrying that you'll break things.

Hiding out for nearly 15 years, the Ghostlock vulnerability allows a standard logged-in user to gain root privileges.

This article tells part of the story of Maxis Software. Maxis came into 1994 riding high on the wings of SimCity 2000, the hit of the previous holiday season. They followed up that success with… SimHealth: The National Health Care Simulation. This may sound like satire, but it was all too real. To be clear, SimHealth was […]

The first issue of a new French-language digital (PDF) magazine is available to buy for enthusiasts of platforms sitting a little (or even some way) outside of the mainstream – which includes RISC OS. The first issue of Mag42 covers a whopping eighteen platforms, serving as a buyers’ guide with details of their specifications, potential uses, and prices – and one of those eighteen is the Titanium, from Elesar. Containing 60 A5 pages, Mag42 is delivered as a PDF file and costs €5.90, and according to David Feugey the next…

The July 2026 Rougol meeting is on Monday.

At long last.

Linux waking up, Getting rid of old log files.

Summer is flying by. It's already St. Swithin's Day and the July edition of WROCC's mini magazine was sent out to subscribers at the weekend.

An exapnsion for the MTU bus: RAMpager: a 1MB banked RAM expansion for the KIM-1 On this location you can find the open hardware source of a RAM card made for the MTU bus he RAMpager is a MTU banked RAM expansion for the KIM-1: the board supports up to 1MB (that’s three orders of […]

Anna, Freezer, Xmodem both ways.

The Kempac system now is fully documented! See also:A demo of the new facilities in the KIM-1 Simulator 2.2.1A demo of the new facilities in the KIM-1 Simulator 2.2.1 Scroll, copy paste of the console. New versions of KIM-...KIM-1 connectors: beware the Chinese cheap variants!The KIM-1 needs 2 edge connectors. The specifications are: card edge; […]

Thanks to Gerben Voort the source of the PIM-1 has been added to the PIM-1 page See also:A demo of the new facilities in the KIM-1 Simulator 2.2.1A demo of the new facilities in the KIM-1 Simulator 2.2.1 Scroll, copy paste of the console. New versions of KIM-...KIM-1 connectors: beware the Chinese cheap variants!The KIM-1 […]

A 16-year-old vulnerability allows an attacker to escape a virtual machine, gain access to the host, and execute malicious code.

The demise of WZBA, This is insufferable, File transfer from my EPROM programmer.

I'm going to try a new series here, where I report on the updates that have happened in Open Source over the last week, each Saturday. There are often a few things going on, and hopefully I'll be able to spot them, and report what's happening.

The fete, No I won't use your stupid app, The missing member, Arduino IDE looks like Zap!, Combine harvester!

Oberon is Niklaus Wirth's successor to Pascal and Modula-2 — a small, strongly-typed systems language. This project implements a practical DOS dialect of Oberon-07: the core language "plus what real 16-bit systems programming needs." Programmers who are interested in experimenting with a programming language that was meant to succeed Pascal, find it at DosWorld's Trubo Oberon at GitHub.

Michael Brutman created an interesting project, a basic packet driver that enables you to use the DaynaPORT SCSI/Link Ethernet device under DOS. These devices were usually used on early Macintosh computers which had SCSI controllers but not much else for expandability. Today these devices are somewhat hard to find but they are emulated by devices like BlueSCSI and ZuluSCSI. If you would like to use the DaynaPORT for networking on FreeDOS, download it at the project on GitHub.

If you want to find information about a file or directory from within RISC OS, the obvious thing to do in the desktop environment is to click the ‘Menu’ mouse button with the pointer over the object in a filer window, go to the submenu for it and choose ‘Info’. However, the information you get from doing that is quite limited – the ‘About this object’ window will tell you its name, its type, its size, the access rights set for it, and its date stamp. (And for a directory,…

We set up a FreeDOS store on Zazzle in 2011 so folks could buy stickers, tshirts, mugs, ties, and other items with the FreeDOS logo on them. However, maintaining the store is starting to become a hassle, so we're planning to close the Zazzle store a month from now, in August. This is your last chance to buy stickers and tshirts if you want them.

If you ever travel to other countries, particularly to the same ones repeatedly, register an Apple Account for each country with an easy to remember format. For example joe.uk@example.com, joe.es@example.com, joe.jp@example.com. Obviously this example only works if you own “example.com”, but you get the idea. Around the world, there are businesses whose services are available, […]

Not looking forward to tomorrow, The summer sales: New face shield for weed whacking, Influencer vlog light ring, Weather station with WiFi and app.

Farage, Immigration and reality.

Developer Noah Cagle decided the world needed the once obscure but beloved Linux distribution and gave it a decidedly pink refresh.

Farage, Blatant cheat failure, Darkness.

If you're looking for a laptop with tons of power and battery, look no further than the latest iteration of the System76 Lemur Pro.

Edition 2 of WROCC's mini magazine was sent out recently to subscribers.

The hardware and the software in the KIM-1 work closely together. The tiny program, less than 2KB in the two ROMs, together with the simple hardware, is very clever designed. The KIM-1 is a complete computer with two user interfaces and data storage with a simple namespace. It is one of the first 6502 computers, […]

Using the cloc utility, Michael Larabel of Phoronix discovered that Linux kernel 7.2 has over 43 million lines of code.