News about or from Bristol Wireless
Bristol Wireless volunteer Acesabe is doing some testing in the lab at present. Over the last couple of days, he’s taken a WRAP board (like the one shown below) and installed Voyage One on it. Voyage itself has been described by Carla Schroder, author of Linux Networking Cookbook as: “Voyage is a very stripped-down Debian […]
Bristol Wireless will be officially reopening the Computer Room at Windmill Hill City Farm, Philip Street, Bedminster on Thursday 21st October after a brief period of closure. To mark the reopening, we’ll be holding an open access drop-in session from 10am-4pm on that day to encourage new internet users to get online as part of […]
Early this morning Bristol Wireless received the sad news that Peter Ferne had passed away. 🙁 Pete had been the Chair of Bristol Wireless since its inception until ill health forced him to retire recently. Early this morning, Pete’s old friend and Bristol Wireless stalwart Rich received the following email from Pete’s wife Deb. Pete […]
There’s been a dearth of news from us for the last week or so. The reason: we’ve been moving the lab across Bristol from Stokes Croft to Windmill Hill. We moved out of Hamilton House over the weekend with the muscle of BW volunteers Jim, Rich, Woodsy and Acesabe, plus assistance from our mates Llanos […]
Yesterday afternoon your correspondent was in the Bristol Wireless lab in Hamilton House on Bristol’s Stokes Croft, catching up on some pressing Bristol Wireless administration and updating the blog, when one of life’s little irritants occurred. Hamilton House’s occasional phantom drummer started banging away (why do people who should never be allowed near percussion always […]
Today, 30th July 2010, the last Friday of July, is the 11th Annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. It’s a day to appreciate those people who look after your IT from unpacking new hardware from its box, installing operating systems, configuring said systems, fitting cabling and other infrastructure and basically dealing with anything afterwards that crops […]
On 9th June 2010 the inaugural meeting of the Bristol ICT Training Forum was held at Knowle West Media Centre (KWMC). The intention of which was to explore the possibility of starting an ICT training consortium, including collaborative bidding for funding. The following organisations were represented: John Sawbridge (City of Bristol), Jim Farrand (Bristol Wireless), […]
Yer ‘umble scribe, wearing his company secretary’s hat, has just emailed the members the following notice: NOTICE OF AGM The Annual General Meeting of Bristol Wireless for 2009 will be held at 6.00 pm on Tuesday 1st June 2010 in the Lab, Hamilton House, Stokes Croft, Bristol, BS1 3QY. It will be followed by our […]
It’s been a while (almost 2 years to the day. Ed.) since we last looked at Gnucash, the personal and small-business software that’s available for free under the GPL for Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows (news passim). Yesterday in the lab, Jules, our treasurer, announced that he’d migrated the Bristol Wireless […]
Not to be confused with tomorrow, April Fools’ Day, today, 31st March 2010 is Document Freedom Day – that time of year when those of us in the open source movement highlight the use of open standards for documents, that lifeblood of any organisation. One thought that strikes me when thinking about open formats is […]
A few years ago I stumbled across a cracking little application which helped me no end as an introduction to Linux. Wubi is an Ubuntu Linux installer designed for Windows. The great thing about this application is that the benefits of the open source world are literally just a simple mouse click away. The installation […]
Yesterday news was received from Bristol Wireless Chair Pete Ferne on the future of the Hackspace room in Hamilton House. Pete wrote: For those of you who came along to the meeting in the Hackspace last Tuesday, just a quick note to clarify what is happening with the room at Hamilton House. As you may […]
It’s 3pm on Friday afternoon (aka POETS Day. Ed 🙂 ) and the lab is in the capable hands of Jim, Stefan & your ‘umble scribe. Jim & Stefan, both freshly supplied with a hot drink are busy working away on machines for our refurbishment project, whilst yours truly is catching up on paperwork, but […]
Regular readers will be aware that Bristol Wireless wrote during September to the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer (news passim) and sent them each an Ubuntu live CD (so they could do half of Whitehall each? Ed. 😀 ). We’ve now had a reply (sort of. Ed.) from Tim Bett, Director, Commercial Delivery, […]
It’s before 10 am on a Saturday morning and there’s a dozen or so Bristol Wireless folks huddled together in Hamilton House. Besides amazement at our weekend early rising proclivities, readers are probably wondering if this gathering served some useful purpose; and of course it did – we’d all come together for a day’s networking […]
Jules, our treasurer here at Bristol Wireless, is currently on holiday in the far west of the USA; he’s also gone there with one of our VoIP telephones, which is registered on our system as an extension phone for the system at our lab in Bristol. This means the Bristol Wireless PABX telephone system is […]
It cannot have escaped the notice of anyone in the United Kingdom that, after having slipped our profligate banks billions of pounds to prop them up, the public coffers are rather empty and that consequently central government is looking around for ‘efficiency savings’ and even the Prime Minister has been forced to say the ‘c’ […]
Subscribers to our mailing list will be aware that our long-time colleague & friend Lloyd Cohen passed away suddenly and unexpectedly at the end of August. Lloyd was heavily involved in the development of the Bristol Wireless network when it evolved from a purely local area project around Easton to a city-wide infrastructure when the […]
Over the last few days Bristol Wireless volunteers Rich, Amias, Acesabe and Mark have been working to upgrade the network connection we provide to Rosevear sheltered housing scheme for the elderly in Newtown, Bristol. This has seen our volunteers at work not just in Rosevear itself, but also on the top of Twinnell House in […]
When Bristol Wireless heard about the recent break-in and theft of computers at UK student campaining group People & Planet, who are based in Oxford, they were more than happy to help by donating two snazzy refurbished Linux desktop systems complete with flat panel screens. People & Planet (P&P) are already using the machines in […]