Your scribe discovered yesterday that today has been designated Ada Lovelace Day by Pledgebank and is intended to promote the role of women in technology. The Pledgebank pledge for Ada Lovelace Day is: “I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 […]
On 24th March (next Tuesday) the Arnolfini is hosting a talk entitled ‘The Art and Politics of P2P. It’s free, starts at 7 pm and the speakers are Michel Bauwens, Matthew Fuller and Olga Goriunova. The presentation introduces the work of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives – a clearing house for open/free, participatory/p2p and commons-oriented […]
This coming Saturday 21st March sees Bristol Dorkbot’s regular monthly meet, only this time both the day (normally Tuesday) and venue have been changed, the latter to Hamilton House on Stokes Croft (map). Once again our friends at Bristol Dorkbot are at Hamilton House and this month’s challenge will be to Hack a Hat! (Are […]
Yesterday our friends at Connecting Bristol hosted a Techno Footprint Green ICT Workshop, organised jointly with the council’s Sustainable City Team and The Carbon Trust. The participants came from a wide range of organisations, ranging from charities, the community and voluntary sector, local authorities, the local universities, NHS, local, national and multinational businesses. It was […]
Regular readers will be aware of the activities or our DIY wifi enthusiast Tony whose adaptation of a humble USB wifi dongle have been documented here before (news passim). Well, he’s been making further modifications… Bristol is not blessed with the most clement of climates, although its soggy grey skies prevent plenty of moisture for […]
Tony, our DIY wifi devotee, has now sent me graphic evidence of the effectiveness his fan grille-enhanced USB dongle (news passim). It’s fairly obvious from the image that there’s a clear signal boost to the dongle when attached to the grille (left-hand plot) than when used on its own (right-hand plot).
Ben, our server admin, has just announced the update of the Bristol Wireless Debian repositories. As a preface, Ben wrote: Debian 5.0 “Lenny” was released on Valentine’s Day, how sweet. I suspect that this has caused many break-ups as enthusiastic Debian Sys Admins rushed from candle-lit dinners to attend to their servers.* Anyway, Ben informs […]
After taking a well earned break in January, the first Dorkbot Bristol meeting of 2009 will be on the Tuesday, 17th February 2009 at the Pervasive Media Studio, Anchor Square (above the Firehouse Restaurant) from 7pm until 10pm. It’s a free event with donations accepted for refreshments. It’ll be a ‘Show & Tell‘, an open […]
I was reminded today by a fellow labrat that there’s only one month to go to the next Adventure in Technology – Techadventure for short, as mentioned here last autumn (news passim). “An Adventure in Technology” is a party which will be held on the 28th February at the Trinity Centre in Bristol (map). Doors […]
If anyone’s coming along to the next Bristol Wireless monthly meeting, it’s going to be held at Hamilton House on Stokes Croft in Bristol (map here). It’s where the December Dorkbot hacklab was held (news passim). As part of the meeting, there’ll be a presentation by Amias and Jamie from the Coexist Project, who are […]
Bristol Wireless volunteer Tony Stone has been experimenting with increasing the range of USB wifi dongles and has come up with a splendid bit of home-made kit. In Tony’s own words: I was having trouble picking up my local WiFi hotspot. I was using a USB dongle and added an extension cable to put it […]
When I saw that as the subject line in an email we’ve received, I thought it was a great way to open a testimonial to Linux. Last week we had a visitor in the lab who bought one of our splendid £30 computers. Normally, we don’t hear from our customers: the machines just keep running […]
If you’ve still got some enthusiasm left after Saturday’s Dorkbot (news passim) down in fragrant Stokes Croft this coming Saturday, news reaches the lab that Chaostreff Bristol will be having some malarkey on Sunday 14th December in St Werburghs, as outlined in the following email from Adam that I received earlier this week via the […]
This coming weekend of Saturday 13th and Sunday 14th December looks like being a busy time for geeks and other ne’er do-wells in the Bristol area. First of all comes news that Bristol’s December Dorkbot (strapline: “people doing strange things with electricity”) is happening on Saturday 13th. Just for a change, it’s having a rest […]
The time: first thing on Monday morning this week (Groan! Ed.). The place: outside the Watershed by Bristol’s historic docks, where Rich Higgs and yer ‘umble scribe found ourselves unloading a car full of stuff – a refurbished £30 computer, the Bristol Wireless banner, blank CDs, literature, etc. – to haul inside for the South […]
Instead of the traditional Christmas-time office booze-up, Bristol Wireless is organising something slightly different this year: we’re putting on a geek quiz night as a fundraiser. Details are as follows: Venue: St Werburghs Community Centre, Horley Road, BS2 9TJ; Date and time: Friday 19th December at 7pm; Team size: 4-6 persons; Entry fee: £2.50 per […]
Yesterday the Bristol Wireless lab was graced by a visit from Ronnie Corbett – the real one that is, not the wee comic… 😉 Anyway, avid readers of BW News will remember that Ronnie was the warden at Princess Royal Gardens (news passim). He’s now retired from wardening duties for Bristol City Council, but is […]
Our old friend Shevek has just given the first notice of the next Adventure in Technology will be returning again early in 2009. Writing from the other side of the Atlantic, Shevek posted the message below yesterday to the BBLUG mailing list: Hi, We are holding the next episode of our festival of creative technology […]
Over the last few weeks Bristol Wireless volunteers have been installing seven LTSP workstations for public use in the foyer of Easton Community Centre in Kilburn Street. In keeping with our greener credentials, the Compaq workstations (also known as clients. Ed.) run on minimal power, having no moving parts such as hard disks and optical […]
Last night our friends at Trinity Community Arts (aka 3ca) held their first computer give-away for people who’d successfully completed their music technology course. It also marked the release into the wild of the first public version of Trubuntu (codenamed 0.2), Trinity’s custom edition of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. While waiting for their machines, […]