Adventures with a Lego-cased A7K web server
Having previously built desktop and laptop cases of out Lego bricks, model building Peter Howkins has turned his attentions towards crafting a slim box to slid his A7000 into a rack, alongside other rackmount servers. Having pieced together the housing, Peter puts a legacy RISC OS machine through its paces as an internet-facing server. (2008-11-21 19:49 GMT)

Iyonix emulator mulled by developer
The open source machine emulator GXEmul could be used to create an Iyonix emulator for RISC OS users and testers of ROOL ROM images, says one prominent coder. GXEmul already includes emulation of Intel's 80321 chip, the processor used in the Iyonix, and can run NetBSD on hardware similar to Castle's computer. Anyone interested in taking a closer look can apply John-Mark Bell's initial patch to the source code. (2008-11-20 12:30 GMT)

Language support module Iconv updated
Version 0.09 of the character set conversion utility is available for download and future builds of NetSurf, which is among various applications that use it, will require this new release. The module can now perform conversions from the command line and supports ISO-8859-16 (Latin 10) plus a number of other fixes and tweaks. (2008-11-20 12:22 GMT)

Geeks celebrate RISC OS time epoch
Clock-watching nerds rejoiced this week as all modern ROS machines reached a mildly baffling milestone. The OS keeps track of the current time by storing it as the number of one hundredths of a second elapsed since midnight January 1, 1900 - and this figure ticked over to 0x5000000000 in the early hours of Tuesday, provoking excitement among some. (2008-11-20 12:12 GMT)

EeePCs and RPCEmu at ROUGOL
Monday night was curry and beer night London RISC OS users in Borough High Street, where Keith Dunlop and Bryan Hogan demonstrated RPCEmu on a little eeePC. (2008-11-17 16:46 GMT)

New driver to read and write large USB storage devices
Jeff Doggett has ported a library to create a RISC OS module that can access USB-based FAT32 storage devices greater than 2GB in size, such as memory sticks and Flash cards. Jeff said: "This is just a filing system module - there is no desktop front-end or anything user friendly. It's version 0.01 which should give you some idea that you should try it first on a test drive before letting it loose on anything valuable." (2008-11-17 16:42 GMT)

New version of design package Web Wonder released
Version 4 of the website authoring software is quietly sneaked out by author David Snell. It features a slide show creator, timer-set alerts to let webmasters know if pages fall too out-of-date and more. (2008-11-17 16:37 GMT)

The new apple of my eye
Would you swap your dusty Acorn for a polished Apple computer? Martin Hansen has been checking out the world of Steve Jobs and his range of shiny kit. (2008-11-17 16:33 GMT)