Chief scribe
Microsoft announced “important changes for customers buying enterprise software and cloud services in British pound [sic]” in a blog post yesterday. However, private individuals buying MS products will not be affected as these pricing changes will not apply to consumer software or consumer cloud services. Furthermore, these changes will not affect business customers existing orders […]
A report (PDF) produced by Opendata France and sent to Axelle Lemaire, the Secretary of State for Digital Affairs and the Secretary of State for Local Authorities reveals that the use of open data in average size towns is still far from being widespread, today’s Le Monde Informatique reports. Bringing together the local authorities committed […]
The strangest occurrences could affect the running of networks. For instance, part of Bristol Wireless’ own network was once knocked out of action by a squirrel trying to store nuts for the winter inside a piece of our hardware. However, it’s not just small operators like ourselves that run this risk as big boys Virgin […]
After 4 very happy years at Windmill Hill City Farm, Bristol Wireless has moved. Our move has taken us from south of the River Avon in Bedminster back to Easton where Bristol Wireless started over 14 years ago as an idea in the minds of some under-employed local techies. More than that we’ve moved into […]
German IT news website heise and our old friends The Register are joint sponsors of the Building IoT London event to be held in March 2017. The former reported at the end of last week that software developers doing professional work on the Internet of Things have until 7th October to suggest proposals for presentations […]
Earlier this week the Northampton Chronicle reported that businesses in the town could be line for faster broadband. In the early noughties, Yorkshire-based Kingston Communications (formerly the city of Hull’s Telephone Department – the only non-nationalised part of the UK telephone network – and now renamed the KCOM Group. Ed.) laid several kilometres of fibre-optic […]
The Welsh Government in Cardiff Bay has announced new plans to improve children’s IT skills, today’s Wales Online reports. All aspects of the curriculum for Welsh schoolchildren will include digital skills for the first time this term to prepare pupils better for life, with such skills not being confined solely to information and communications technology […]
A free, innovative educational app to teach children about the lifecycle and habitats of tadpoles has been developed and launched by computer science students the University of Bristol reports. TaddyPole is an interactive, cross-platform application created for Tadpoles.org.uk to help teach children all about tadpoles and where they live. The app was created as part […]
Your ‘umble scribe has today received an email from Kurt James, Neighbourhood Partnership Co-ordinator at Bristol City Council, announcing an event next month in east Bristol. Bristol Libraries is organising a free (as in beer. Ed. 😀 ) digital skills workshop next month in collaboration with the Ashton, Easton and Lawrence Hill Neighbourhood Partnership and […]
A Bristol academic is to chair a major augmented reality conference, the University of Bristol reports. Professor Walterio Mayol-Cuevas of Bristol University’s Department of Computer Science is to chair the 2016 ISMAR conference, the most prominent academic conference on augmented and mixed reality, which is being held from 19th-23rd September in Mérida, Mexico. Augmented and […]
Next week, demonstrators will gather at a meeting of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in Lisbon, Portugal to make the same demand as was made at the last major W3C meeting in March: stop streaming companies from inserting DRM into the HTML standard on which the Web is based. The protest is being organised […]
As part of the strategy to create a single European digital market, the European Commission is preparing to invest €120 mn. to promote access to wireless connectivity in public places under the heading of Wifi4EU. According to Le Monde Informatique, this could see up to 6,000 publicly accessible wifi access points deployed, whilst the Commission’s […]
Speculation about the demise of Apache OpenOffice may be premature (news passim). German IT news site heise reports that a mailing list for new developers has been set up. By establishing this new list, the OpenOffice team wants to make entry to the open source project easier for programmers. After recent discussion of a possible […]
Billed as “Europe’s biggest event for the leading third sector CRM“, it’s now less than a month until CiviCRM’s Civicon 2016 in London, which is being held on 6th and 7th October. CiviCRM is the leading open source CRM for the voluntary and community sectors. CiviCon is now in its sixth year and the event […]
Pirate Party MEP Julia Reda ended this year’s QtCon, free software community conference with a keynote speech on, inter alia, free software in the European public sector. Ms Reda explained how proprietary software has often left regulators in the dark, becoming a liability for (and often a threat to) citizens’ health and well-being. As an […]
When your ‘umble scribe first started using the GNU/Linux operating system over a decade ago, the default office suite for most Linux distributions was OpenOffice. However, it now looks as if OpenOffice just could be heading towards the software graveyard if other members of the development team concur with an email from the chairman of […]
This afternoon, our members Nigel Legg and Benedict Gaster turned up at the lab with the piece of hardware shown below that’s going to be tested on the Bristol Wireless network. It’s an IoT gateway configured under LoRaWAN, a Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) specification, that’s fully open source. Not only is it open […]
Yesterday the Labour Party’s digital democracy manifesto (PDF) was launched by embattled party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, The Register reports. For ordinary citizens perhaps the most significant feature is its universal service commitment. We will deliver high speed broadband and mobile connectivity for every household, company and organisation in Britain from the inner city neighbourhoods to […]
Web Africa reports that Uganda’s ICT Ministry has recently developed a free and open source software (FOSS) policy. The aim of the policy is to regulate the deployment of open source software and use of open standards to accelerate innovation and develop local content. Commenting on the use of FOSS, Frank Tumwebaze, Uganda’s Minister of […]
Twenty-five years ago today, 25th August, an unknown Finnish computer science student called Linus Torvalds wrote the following email to the comp.os.minix mailing list. Hello everybody out there using minix – I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing […]