A9home hard disc worries
A9home owners who are suffering bouts of hard disc corruption were asked this week to send their DiscKnight reports and lists of the software they use to supplier CJE Micros in order to help track down the bug. A "small number" of punters, according to developers AdvantageSix, have had their disc maps corrupted - resulting in the dreaded "Disc not understood, has it been formatted?" error. The problem can be fixed by using DiscKnight to repair the map, although the root cause is still a mystery to people on the A9home support mailing list. Ad6 are said to be working on bringing RISC OS 6 across to the 32bit ARM9-powered machine, which runs RISC OS 4.42.
Stick that in your pipeAlan Buckley has ported pipenightdreams, a Pipe Mania-clone, from Linux to RISC OS. The aim of this open source puzzle game is to create a pipeline through which water will flow through. The player must connect up different pipe segments against the clock to prevent the water from running out of pipe to flow through. You can download it from here.
Social butterflies
Forget MySpace, bebo, LinkedIn and Orkut, the place where RISC OS users hang out now is clearly Facebook. For users of modern hardware and versions of everyone's favourite minority OS, there's the RISC OS Users group to join. And for the discerning retro Acorn user, we have the Acorn computer and BBC Micro enthusiasts group.
Among all the various photos and message board posts, there's this nugget posted by one young chap: "My Dad was one of the Acorn founders, just after Curry and Hauser. He was in Cambridge from about 1981 and he was involved as a director from then onwards.
"My sister was even the little girl on the Acorn Electron box - the old man lived through the Olivetti years with them, made some good money and still has a framed BBC Micro - the 16K version - mainboard with a plaque on it that says: 'Thanks Jim for making it happen'. I personally loved Strikers Run, Dare Devil Dennis and Elite and then E-Type racing on the Archimedes. Those were the days, real floppy discs."
And finally
Calendar creater Calibre is up to version 1.20, while label printer LaBella has reached version 6.30. RISC OS Now editor Louie Smith has spoken of her printing woes and explains the delays on her bi-monthly magazine. A desktop with a menu bar is bad, one IT pundit said last week, although RISC OS and NeXT got it right with floating menus.
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