Bristol Wireless News

Yesterday, Saturday 28th June, saw “An Adventure in Technology” come to Trinity Community Arts in Bristol (news passim), followed by an after-party at some city centre hostelry (although I missed the latter). It was wonderful to see the event so well supported by the local tech community: I spotted familiar faces from both the Bristol & Bath LUG and Chaostreff Bristol; Bristol Wireless also had a fairly large contingent there. I was also good to see our old friend Will Pollard from Exeter who was busy capturing the event on video.

However, it was not just geeks that made up the attendance. Other members of the human race were there, including Christine Zaba, a journalist who writes for the Grauniad and New Statesman on data protection issues and who held a discussion workshop on these during the morning session.

The day itself was a mixture of talks, demonstrations and chances to get one’s hands dirty and ranged from hybrid/electric vehicles via retro tech (supplied in large part by John Honniball) to motion capture with wi-fi and an introduction to demos (non-interactive audio-visual presentations run in real time on a computer), plus MythTV and homebrew kit, such as the Lego panning camera rig and plotter shown above. Secreted in plain view was the hardware swap shop, whose stock changed perceptibly over the day.

In all, a wonderful and fascinating day: Trinity’s Ryan even gave some us of Bristol Wireless folks a guided tour of their new training facilities upstairs. Many thanks to Shevek, all exhibitors and speakers, plus the folks at Trinity for a splendid day.

Finally, Bristol Wireless volunteer Andy Sabel took some event photos with his camera phone. Enjoy!

In its early days, Bristol Wireless relied heavily on ‘homebrew’ equipment, such as the whisky tin wifi antenna (cantenna), some of which has survived very well (news passim). We were therefore very interested to hear that, at the recent hackerspace.net 08 festival in Paris, Benjamin Henrion from Belgium’s Reseau citoyen.be was presenting a waveguide antenna made from Tetrapak packaging, which is reputed to be notoriously difficult to recycle*.

More images and brief instructions are available on this page, which also has a link to a real monster antenna in Thailand.

* = Editor’s note: Tetrapak collection and recycling has just started in Bristol. However, its environmental friendliness may be less than optimum as the collected packaging has to be shipped to Scandinavia for processing

Hat tip: global.freifunk.net

Bristol Wireless has been using OpenWrt for some time now for its network infrastructure. We’re very pleased to learn from our friends at the Freifunk blog that the OpenWrt team has announced the release of its latest version, named Kamikaze 808.

The release schedule is as follows:

• Last day in July – final release candidate: 808 RC-1 808 RC-1 will be a feature freeze and all changes after this date will be bug fixes;
• Last day in August – final release: OpenWrt Kamikaze 808 release.

The 808 Release will also include support for several new platforms/targets and come complete with the Luci interface.

More details are available on the Freifunk blog and the OpenWRT forum.

The Linux Boot Camp returns to the University of the West of England (UWE) from 30 June – 2 July this year.

It’s aimed at folks who’ve done their A levels who want to do practical technical computing and get in touch with their inner geek.

The event will involve two and a half days of technical workshops exploring many aspects of modern technology and the use of free open source software, including installing and configuring Linux, setting up home networks, web servers , routers and much more. If you already know how to do some of this stuff, don’t despair as the Linux Boot Camp’s structure will explore advanced topics in system configuration.

The numbers are limited to about 60 places, so don’t delay if you want to take part. There may also be a small number of residential places available in UWE’s student accommodation, so ask the organisers.

To book your place, contact Pat Cottrell or Craig Duffy by e-mail lbc (at) uwe.ac.uk or telephone (0117) 328 4242.

For more details, visit the Linux Boot Camp web page.

Mike Harris writes:

Hi All,

Just writing to say a GREAT BIG THANK YOU to all for coming to HacktionLab and making it a success, not only did it seem to be good fun, but it also felt very productive and useful. I do hope you all got as much as I did from it. It was great to see those of you I knew again and to meet those of you I didn’t.

So nice one all, good stuff. Looking forward to being at Climate Camp with some of you and hopefully we can organise another HacktionLab in the not too distant future.

Bests,

Mike.

And the rest of us would like to say a big ‘thank you’ to you Mike and to Mick Fuzz for coming up with the idea for Hacktionlab in the first place.

This piece, the second on Hacktionlab, was supposed to have been written on Sunday, but that didn’t happen through a combination of circumstances, so it’s being scribbled first thing on Tuesday morning following the return home of Bristol Wireless’ final site tat-down crew yesterday afternoon.

My last post ended as Saturday’s lunch was arriving. Following that all the hacktivistas were treated to workshops from Bristol Wireless’ finest – Lloyd on routing, wifi and 12 volt power systems, then Mike on audio and video streaming.

Supper soon arrived and a fine evening’s entertainment commenced with Hamish’s death-defying vegetable juggling act. As dawn started brightening the eastern sky on Sunday, a few souls were still up partying…

Sunday arrived all too soon with an accompaniment of occasional showers and the most difficult workshop of all – the settling your bar tab one! That done, it was down to the easy stuff – transferring video footage from mobile phones to a computer and then editing video using free software.

Mid-afternoon and the time for goodbyes came all too quickly and by suppertime, all that was left of Hacktionlab was 5 souls, including 3 of Bristol Wireless’ advance crew, now re-assigned to the rearguard detailed to strip down the temporary infrastructure and return the barn and camping field to their former agricultural role. We were finally off site at about 2 pm on Monday and unloading back at the lab in St Werburghs an hour or so later. A fine weekend – and a good one – had finally finished.

Many thanks to the good folks at Highbury Farm for being such congenial hosts and for the fine food. If anyone has some decent pictures and doesn’t mind them being used for the Highbury Farm website, please get in touch with them by sending an email to highburyfarm (at) hotmail.com.

Finally, here’s where to find some other Hacktionlab media elsewhere on t’interweb:

• Szymon’s Flickr photos;
• Video workshop, as edited with kdenlive.

It’s summer again (allegedly) and Bristol Wireless is sitting in the countryside playing with technology. We’re providing the technical infrastructure and running some of the workshops at Hacktionlab (news passim), which is being held this weekend at Stepping Stones Housing Co-operative, Highbury Farm in the picturesque Wye Valley. We’re using the barn as a dining and work area and have the LTSP suite set up in here, as you can see from the picture, and Lloyd has the site covered by wifi. We even have a VoIP telephone on site (some mobile networks don’t work here at all) which has a Bristol Wireless extension number.

Mike, Andy, Lloyd and myself arrived on Thursday evening as the advance party, spending yesterday (and part of Thursday evening) preparing for the main arrivals on Friday and Saturday.

As I started writing this Mike Harris has a large group of people sat around in the grass listening to an introduction to satellite technology, whilst Andy is providing sterling support as a flipchart easel.

After lunch, which is on the point of arriving, Lloyd is doing an introduction to wireless and some software-based sessions on video and aggregation are planned for later this afternoon.

The last 2 weeks yer ‘umble scribe has been to 2 events organised by DC10plus, a collaborative project that has grown up between the finalists (Bristol, Birmingham and Shropshire, Ealing, Hull, Norfolk, Nottingham, Manchester, Milton Keynes, Stratford on Avon and Sunderland) of the Government’s Digital Challenge, who have formed an alliance to spend £2 million of funding to increase digital inclusion and stimulate innovation, amongst other things.

On 3rd June Connecting Bristol’s Kevin O’ Malley and myself were up in Sunderland – winners of the Digital Challenge – for Communities Building Capacity Practitioner Workshop, in essence a good chance to look at what they’ve been doing. Our first call of the day was the Wearside Community Development Trust centre in Southwick, where we had an introduction to the day including overviews of Sunderland City Council’s Community IT, e-Neighbourhoods, Electronic Village Halls, Community e-Champions, Community of Interest websites and a demonstration of Hexagon – a communication tool. Afterwards we all piled into a minibus for a visit in the rain to 2 electronic village halls – St David’s Community Project and the Jubilee Community Centre, ending up in Easington at the old Miners’ Institute, now given a new lease of life as a Community Access Point.

There are some very strong points to the work Sunderland is doing and what they are planning for the future (e.g. the use of wireless networking using mesh technology). Perhaps I was most impressed by the concept of the e-Champions, members of the local community who encourage others in their areas to make greater use of ICT. The best story we heard was of a ladies’ slimming club who ended up doing the full CLAIT programme; that wasn’t their intention but the IT room was the only one available for hire for their meetings! The Communities of Interest websites are another strong point – cheap to set up (£100) and maintain (£20 pa). The principal positive point was the emphasis on it being people that mattered – not the technology, the latter being just a means to an end. Sunderland’s programme is nevertheless heavily biased towards the use of proprietary software – not much evidence of free/open source and one of my concerns was that by teaching people in deprived communities to use expensive proprietary packages is that it might force people into the arms of your friendly local Jolly Roger software supplier. However, I do wish to thank all the people I met in Sunderland for their hospitality, friendliness and hard work in arranging such an interesting day.

This Wednesday just passed, the DC10plus Communities Building Capacity folks came to Bristol for a day-long session at Knowle West Media Centre’s brand new building. Attendees at this event included parties from Sunderland, Ealing, Aston in Brimingham, Shropshire and Bristol. Andy Sabel and myself went along from Bristol Wireless to demonstrate free and open source software with our mobile LTSP suite running 6 thin clients and a couple of standalone laptops, including an old PIII running AntiX, a lightweight, but fully featured Linux distribution. While the delegates were busy with their morning session, Andy and myself were in the next door room setting up the suite. Facilitator Ed Mitchell gave us a spot at the end of the mid-morning break to introduce ourselves and to let people know we’d be showing off our wares at lunchtime.

Lunchtime duly arrived and Andy and myself had to nibble sandwiches between talking to our steady stream of visitors, whose tech knowledge varied from none at all to IT professionals. I believe we had people from all the delegations come to see us and experience using free and open source software, such as the GIMP image editor and the Open Office suite. Included in our kit was the power meter, enabling us to demonstrate how LTSP could save on energy bills (under 200 watts for the LTSP suite) – an important consideration these days given the trend in electricity prices. The AntiX laptop demonstrated how old hardware can be given a new lease of life and avoid the usual upgrade cycle common with some operating systems that require new, more powerful hardware just to do the same old jobs. We also gave out live CDs, which we hope are now being put to good use.

Finally, our thanks go out to Kevin of Connecting Bristol for assisting us in attending these 2 events.

Bristol Wireless is pleased to be taking part in HacktionLab, which takes place on the 13th, 14th and 15th June at Stepping Stones Housing Co-operative, Highbury Farm in the Wye Valley.

HacktionLab aims to be a rural weekend of workshops and gathering together for nerds, hackers and activists to get together and exchange ideas and skills. Some of the workshops include free software video editing, open source streaming, mobile communications using 3G and satellite technologies, LTSP and recycled computers, renewable energy, skill-sharing for video encoding, podcasting and hosting. There will be a shared cost for the event and a fifteen pound donation will be kindly requested.

Bristol Wireless will be taking along its infamous LTSP suite and lending a hand with wireless and tech.

If you’re interested in taking part then how about signing up and letting us know of your dietary requirements and joining the mailing list.

We’ve been on new ground this week at Bristol Wireless. All week we’ve had Guy and Isaac, two pupils from Fairfield High School, with us in the lab as part of their work experience.

BW: “What have you been doing with us this week?”

Guy: “We’ve been learning about Linux, LTSP, hardware, building a computer from scratch and installing the operating system and software, networks, routers and making Cat5 network cables and servers.”

Isaac: “First of all, we’ve been building computers from scratch by wiring everything to the motherboard and doing various Linux installs – Debian and Ubuntu – as well as learning various commands for configuring the system.”

BW: “Is this your first major experience with Linux and free/open source software?”

Guy: “I’ve had a dual boot Linux/Windows laptop for about a year, but this is the first real chance to explore it really and get taught how to use it.”

Isaac: “Yes. I’ve always used Windows in the past. To me, Linux seems safer and easier to use.”

BW: How do you think our setup at Bristol Wireless performs in comparison with other systems you’ve used?

Guy: “It’s faster, more interesting and generally beats other popular systems by miles. It’s the most computers I’ve ever seen with them all working properly in one place.”

Isaac: “The only other system I’ve used a lot is the one at school and the school system seems very limited in comparison.”

BW: “I hear you both installed your own web servers earlier this week and then tested their security. Whose server was breached first?”

Guy: “Sean showed and helped us to set up our own Apache2 servers. Isaac’s cracked first!”

Isaac: “His did!”

Editor’s note: at this point a bit of friendly banter breaks out between our 2 interviewees.

BW: “Has you found your week with us useful and what did you enjoy best?”

Guy: “Yes, it’s been incredibly useful, I’ve learnt a lot and also got a really cool computer out of it. My favourite command is ssh.”

Isaac: “Yes and the best thing was that we had a free rein to learn new skills and use them in a practical environment.”

BW: “Thanks for your answers and your company this week; it’s been a pleasure having you here.”