News about or from Bristol Wireless
On Friday evening the Open Rights Group organised one of a series of nationwide European Digital Rights hustings at St Werburgh’s Community Centre in Bristol. This was a chance for local people to quiz MEP candidates from the South West about their views on digital rights and ask them to sign up to the 10 […]
Today is Document Freedom Day (DFD) 2014. DFD is an annual celebration of and opportunity to promote the use of open formats and standards for digital documents and takes place on the last Wednesday in March each year. Document freedom means documents that are free can be used in any way that the author intends. […]
It’s Friday, so it’s Pi day! 😉 Bristol Wireless volunteer Michal has currently got a Raspberry Pi – the credit-card-sized single-board computer developed in the UK – up and running as an LTSP thin client. Could this be the future of cheap computing devices?
With about an hour to go before the shutters came down on Friday afternoon, Bristol Wireless responded to the Cabinet Office’s consultation on file formats for sharing and collaborating on documents with government. Our response is reproduced below. Background: we are a volunteer-run IT co-operative which has been active in the west of England for […]
Free software, we love you! 🙂 Don’t know what free software is? Find out here. Show your love for free software today by using the #ilovefs hashtag.
The January newsletter for CiviCRM, the free and open source CRM package used by Bristol Wireless, has just arrived in our inbox and it contains 3 items of interest for UK-based users. Dealing with them in strict chronological order, the first date for your diaries is a Free CiviCRM Showcase Day in Leeds on 16th […]
Tomorrow Bristol Wireless bids farewell to long-serving volunteer Andy Sabel and his partner Llanos, who are migrating south – and not just for the winter. Llanos has got a new job in Gibraltar with a prominent British betting company and Andy is moving with her (from Windmill Hill to William Hill, as some bright spark […]
Robert Ancell of Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution (which Bristol Wireless recommends for use by newcomers to Linux. Ed. ), has announced on the Ubuntu desktop mailing list that Canonical is forking the Gnome Control Centre. Robert’s email is reproduced in full below. Hi all, Ubuntu makes use of a heavily […]
Last week Bristol Wireless indulged in some internal training – something we haven’t done for a couple of years. Ably led by Ben Green and Julien Weston, Bristol Wireless volunteers are now more familiar with the ins and outs of Linux system administration, MySQL, the Puppet configuration management tool, vserver environments and web services, to […]
After our last post, about our training course coming up in November, and with the scent of knowledge ringing in their nostrils, fiery fervorous enquiries have begun streaming in. ‘What are these courses?’ ‘What the actual contents?’ they ask. To sate this need for knowledge, we’ve decided to put out some basic details of the […]
This November Bristol Wireless is offering a week of training days in its lab at Windmill Hill City Farm, Bedminster, Bristol. One topic will be covered each day of the week of the 25-29 November and there are four places available for each topic. The course topic for each day is: Monday 25th November: Hosting […]
Chris, one of our Bristol volunteers, has been blind since childhood and uses the Vimux distro for the visually impaired, coupled with the Orca screen reader for the GNOME desktop, so he’ll no doubt be very pleased to hear that a new release for Orca is imminent. According to Softpedia, is now at the Beta […]
The release schedule for Ubuntu 14.04 – the next long term support (LTS) release of this popular Linux distribution – has been published on the Ubuntu wiki. According to the schedule, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS should be released in mid-April 2014 after going through the alpha, beta and release candidate stages. Bristol Wireless recommends Ubuntu as […]
We have some really talented people volunteering at Bristol Wireless. One of them is Jules, our treasurer. Jules got really frustrated at the lack of a decent accounts package for Linux. There is GNUCash of course, which we’ve reviewed in the past, and KMyMoney. However, neither of these is really up for doing a proper […]
My week at Bristol wireless was a good one and I hope that anyone who is looking for a work experience based on computers will think about coming here. My first day was a enlightening one as they taught me all about Linux. I also got to dissasemble a computer so I learned more about […]
As an organisation, Bristol Wireless has been closely involved in campaigning against the UK government’s plans for mass communications surveillance under the Communications Data Bill, also known as the “Snooper’s Charter” by its opponents (news passim). It now appears that all this work might have been in vain. Amongst the revelations that have come to […]
Yesterday Bristol Wireless held its Annual General Meeting (news passim). About 10 members attended along with 2 guests. Part of the proceedings inevitably included the election of the committee and we’re very pleased to announce that Linda Bell has agreed to be our Chair. Linda has been a Bristol Wireless member for many years and […]
Yesterday, the Bristol Wireless members of the production crew returned to Bristol from this year’s Barncamp event (the fifth that has been organised. Ed.) after clearing out all the kit. Barncamp is a joint event organised by HacktionLab, Bristol Wireless and FLOSS Manuals, and has been described by our friend Charlie as follows: …hanging out […]
Wearing his company secretary’s outfit, your correspondent has just sent the following email and posted the following notice in the lab. NOTICE OF AGM The Annual General Meeting of Bristol Wireless for 2013 will be held at 4.30 pm on Tuesday 18th June 2012 in the Lab, Windmill Hill City Farm, Philip Street, Bedminster, Bristol, […]
In a typical knee-jerk response in the wake of the barbaric murder in Woolwich last week of Lee Rigby, allegedly by a couple of religious nutjobs, Theresa May, the UK’s control freak Home Secretary has threatened to revive the so-called “Snooper’s Charter” (news passim). In this move she has been joined on the bandwagon by […]