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Some news summaries maybe truncated. This is a limitation with GoogleGroups RSS feed and beyond our control unfortunately.

• Lua videos and ROUGOL meeting reminder - Back in January, Gavin Wraith gave an excellent presentation at ROUGOL
  about the programming language Lua and its use on RISC OS. See:
  [link]
  We received several requests, from inside and outside the RISC OS
  world, for it to be recorded. The videos are now available, in high
• Southampton Acorn Users Group - March meeting - The next meeting of the Southampton Acorn Users Group will take place
  on Tuesday March 9th from 19:00 until 21:00 at Itchen College, Middle
  Road, Bitterne, Southampton. We will be in room S1. Admission is
  GBP1.00 and all are welcome.
  I will have my new BeagleBoard with me. If you want to try software
• PrintPDF Version 0.70 Released - I'm pleased to announce the release of PrintPDF version 0.70. Although
  something of an "interim" version, it provides some useful new functionality
  and should give users the chance to test it prior to future updates. I
  would particularly welcome feedback and/or bug reports from anyone who uses
  it.
• Drag 'n Drop (Issue 3) Editorial column open to all - Do you have something RISC OS related that you want to get off your
  chest? Perhaps you just want to add your thoughts on what is needed
  for the platform to move forward. The Drag 'n Drop Editorial column
  (April issue) is now open to all who have an interest in the RISC OS
  platform. Perhaps the topic you want to discuss is controversial and
• WROCC Meeting 3rd March, John Cartmell. Simply CAD? Use Draw! - The next meeting of the WROCC on Wednesday 3rd march will have John
  Cartmell of Qercus and FD Games will take a look at the things that
  can be done with a RISC OS machine and the graphics software that
  comes with it.
  The meeting will be held at the usual place, West Yorkshire Sports
  & Social Club, Sandal, Wakefield.

Drobe

• BBC4's Micro Men: an interview and review - Ahead of tonight's Micro Men programme, which charts the rivalry between Sir Clive Sinclair and Acorn Computers in the early 1980s, drobe.co.uk spoke to the film's producer, Andrea Cornwell, to find out more about the show - and now you can read our review of the film
• 'Threaded' Firefox for RISC OS build released to test - An experimental build of the RISC OS port of Firefox that promises a smoother experience has been released for people to test. You'll need the latest 2.0.0.20 version and then replace its executable with the one from here. The technical bit: developer Peter Naulls has moved the browser's polling for user interaction into a separate thread to aid multitasking with the rest of the RISC OS desktop.
• In brief: Acorn World show this weekend - Archive editor Jim Nagel summarises what to expect at the retro-themed show. Official website here [Update 2] A report by iconbar.com's Phil Mellor of the sell-out show is here - with pictures
• RISCOScode.com webzine publishes autumn issue - Drobe man Martin Hansen has updated his personal web publishing endeavour, RISCOScode.com, with a new issue for the autumn. It includes interviews with an organiser of the inaugural London RISC OS show, to be held in October 2009, and Richard Hallas, plus more bits and pieces. Go check it out. It's free.
• Tanks a lot! Double USB toy driver joy - RISC OS USB guru Dave Higton has released drivers for two remote-controlled gadgets: an 'executive mayhem' tank and a mini car. Get ready to order your armoured, missile-firing kit into position and destroy your office colleagues, or instead swap your computer's circuits for your own race track with a remote-controlled banger. The source code is available and the software should work on Simtec and Castle USB stacks.

IconBar

• Furber talks ARMs - There's an interesting article up here with Steve Furber, one of the designers of the BBC Micro and ARM processor. It's been linked to from Slashdot, which is where we came across it.
• Lego Madness - Ever since Jeffrey Lee began work on porting RISC OS to developer boards such as the BeagleBoard and IGEPv2 there's been interest in putting a case around them to make them into proper computers. Both ports are still firmly in progress, so a finished-off A9-style computer isn't likely to appear for some time. That hasn't stopped some hobbyists having a go at making their own.
• RISC OS 5.16 released - RISC OS Open have announced that Castle have given the official seal of approval to RISC OS 5.16, the new version of the shared-source OS. The most prominent feature in this new version is a fix for the much-discussed year 2012 bug, where IYONIX computers would mistakenly read their real-time clock on startup if it's an odd-numbered decade.
• Paul Vigay death a mystery, a coroner has ruled - RISC OS advocate Paul Vigay, whose body was found off the coast of Portsmouth last year, left behind a list of his passwords and a note to his girlfriend saying "I love you", an inquest has heard.
• CES 2010: ARM hardware roundup - Last week saw this year's annual Consumer Electronics Show go down in Las Vegas. The world's largest consumer technology tradeshow, it's traditionally a source for many product announcements from the major manufacturers. This year there was a lot of focus on 3D TVs, e-readers, and, most importantly for us, next-generation ARM-powered goodies.

MyRISCOS

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RISC OS Open

• New IYONIX ROM release (version 5.16) - RISC OS Open (ROOL) are pleased to announce the immediate release of the very latest RISC OS ROM release from Castle Technology (Castle) for the IYONIX pc desktop computer.This is an official release from Castle and represents the second formal ROM release to include changes and improvements which have been fed back into the shared source project.You can download your copy of RISC OS 5.16, either as a softload (to try it out) or as a ROM programmer tool, from this page.Please note that in order to fix the incorrect date bug seem on some machines in 2010 with RISC OS 5.15 or earlier, you must program the ROM into Flash.
• IYONIX pc 2012 date problem - Many of you will be aware of a bug in the handling of a year counter in the IYONIX pc which means that the date on some machines changes to 2012 when they are booted. This is a software problem and a number of work-arounds already exist.However, Castle Technology feel that this is a sufficiently severe fault to justify starting work on the next official release of RISC OS 5 for the IYONIX pc – RISC OS 5.15.The latest version will not only address the date problem mentioned above, but will include many of the changes and improvements implemented since RISC OS 5.14 was released back in April 2009. Once it is available, users should program the new release into their machines using a supplied flash programmer to ensure that the date bugfix is correctly installed.Keep an eye on the RISC OS Open web site over the next week or two for further news on the testing and release process.Note to developers: the development version of RISC OS will move to 5.16 (beta) as soon as the new official version is released.
• Award for RISC OS port to Beagle Board - We are very pleased to have been awarded with the 2009 Icon Bar Best New Development Award for the ongoing Beagle Board porting work.A special thanks must go to Jeffrey Lee for all his hard work, and to everyone else who helped him. It’s been great to see people starting to turn our vision for the future of RISC OS into a reality.
• Seasons Greetings! - As Christmas and the New Year is upon us, the team at ROOL is taking a well earned holiday for a couple of weeks. As such, please expect that allocation requests, source code submissions and other enquiries will take longer for us to process than normal.Don’t panic though; we will be back in the New Year and dealing with things as normal again.May we take this opportunity to wish you all a happy holiday and prosperous New Year!—the ROOL team
• CVS repository incremental archives - To help people who want to keep a mirror of our CVS repository on their own machines, we’ve been publishing a cvs-repos tarball on our downloads pages which includes all of the repository (minus the CVSROOT directory that you have to create yourself). This tarball is automatically generated in the early hours of each morning (UK time).However, this is a bit wasteful of bandwidth and painful for people to download and dearchive every time they want to update their local mirror. So to help out, we’ve introduced three smaller tarballs:1. cvs-repos-day2. cvs-repos-week3. cvs-repos-monthThese are each rebuilt every morning but only include files which have changed in the last 24 hours, seven days or one month respectively. We hope this makes things much easier for keeping your mirrored source repositories up to date.Note: due to the way they are built, the archives do include lots of empty directories (the whole directory structure) but none of the repository files unless they changed within the specified time period.