Chief scribe
Yesterday the lab was graced by a visit from Tarim of Bristol Hackspace. While he was here, Tarim told of about Illuminate Bath 2012. Illuminate Bath runs from Wednesday 25th to Saturday 28th January 2012, bringing beautiful and engaging projected artworks to the city centre. Banishing the gloom of January’s long evenings, this ‘festival of […]
Karel De Vriendt, a recently retired European Commission official previously involved in the Commission’s policies and activities involving open source software, has recommended that public sector organisations using open source software should join the associated open source communities, or require that their IT service providers join on their behalf, Joinup reports. Using open source does […]
Our friends at Trinity Community Arts today joined in with the protest being staged in the USA against SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) (news passim). Trinity supported the protest by adding the pop-up in the screenshot below, thus blocking access to their site. The text on the pop-up reads: Imagine a world without free knowledge […]
In the USA thousands of websites are currently involved in a protest against 2 bills known as SOPA and PIPA by blacking out their websites for 24 hours starting at midnight (local time) on 18th January 2012. A screenshot of Wikipedia’s blacked out site is shown below. Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) ( What does […]
Our friends at Easton’s Kebele Community Cooperative have asked us to let our readers know that they’re running a computer class starting this Friday 20th January 2012 from 6 pm to 7 pm in the Kebele Library (map). According to the Kebele website, the tuition comprises: Basic computer information and getting to know some of […]
Courtesy of OMG Ubuntu and OpenSure, news reaches the lab of the Ben NanoNote, the world’s smallest Linux laptop. From manufacturers Qi Hardware, we learn that the NanoNote “is an ultra small form factor computing device. The device sports a 336 MHz processor, 2GB of flash memory, microSD slot, head phone jack, USB device and […]
It’s not very often we look at education on this blog in spite of our previous involvements with LTSP (news passim) and open source use petitions (news passim), but the past couple of days have provided a couple of interesting stories that deserve examination. Firstly, The Guardian has launched a digital literacy campaign. Whilst the […]
On 23 December government ministers agreed that, by default, the Hungarian public sector will use open document standards for their electronic documents, as of April 2012. In December 2011 Hungary’s government also decided to cancel the funding of proprietary office suite licences for all schools (if only the UK government would – or could – […]
In addition to our usual fare of refurbished computers for sale, we currently have for sale 10 802.11g USB wireless adapters as shown in the picture below. If you’d like one, please arrive at the lab with £10 and it’s your’s or contact us by email to secure one! Once they’re gone, they’re gone!
We learn from the pages of El Reg that the Commodore 64 was launched 30 years ago this week. The Commodore 64 was an 8-bit home computer produced by the now defunct manufacturer Commodore International that made its debut at the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in January 1982. Volume production of the Commodore 64 started […]
It’s that time of year when good intentions abound in the form of New Year resolutions. One of the most intriguing (don’t you mean nerdy? Ed.) that has come to light comes from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in the USA, which calls upon readers to use full disk encryption on every computer they own. […]
Regular readers will remember that we had a visit from journalist Jonathan Edwards (news passim) which ultimately resulted in Bristol Wireless being the subject of a four-page feature in the Christmas 2011 edition (issue 158) of Linux Format (news passim). For those who did not take our above advice and go and buy that edition […]
2012 is fast approaching and there are two reasons for celebration in the New Year. Firstly, the United Nations General Assembly has proclaimed 2012 as the International Year of Cooperatives as an acknowledgement of the fundamental role of cooperatives in promoting the socio-economic development of hundreds of millions of people and have released a little […]
Regular users of Wikipedia will be aware that the main page showcases a different article every day; this is known as the featured article. Yesterday’s featured article was the one on Bristol’s Knowle West area. Those familiar with the Wikipedia article grading process will know just how much effort has gone into getting an article […]
To promote the implementation of the National Infrastructure for Open Data (INDA), the Brazilian Ministry of Planning, Budget and Management last week launched the beta version of the Brazilian Open Data Portal. The full version is scheduled for launch in 2012. INDA is a set of standards, technologies, procedures and control instruments for meeting the […]
But who said it? According to Joinup, it was Christian Ude, the Mayor of Munich, whose local authority is a European leader in the deployment of open source by the public sector in general and local authorities in particular. It was said in a letter to Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the EU Commission, a great […]
In common with the rest of the country, we heathens at Bristol Wireless shall be taking a festive break and closing the lab. Our arrangements are as follows: we shall be closing from lunchtime on Friday 23rd December (aka beer o’clock on POETS Day. Ed.) and will re-open for business on Tuesday, 3rd January 2012. […]
In what could be interpreted move to increase the amount of open source software used in academia (or just public sector miserliness. Ed.), Portugal’s Ministry of Education has advised the country’s schools not to renew their licences for proprietary operating systems and office applications. The ministry, in its letter addressed to all schools in October, […]
According to an analysis by the 451 Group, the proportion of open source projects that uses the GPL family of licences – the granddaddy of all free and open source licences – has been declining for several years, The H Online reported yesterday. In summer of 2008, 70% of projects were licensed under the GPL […]
It’s been an interesting day in the lab. Your correspondent arrived early in the lab and found Rich and Acesabe getting ready to out on a cabling job, running Cat6 round a new office for a client. After a while Jim turned up, followed shortly after by Chris, our newest volunteer. It’s interesting working with […]