News about or from Bristol Wireless
It is with great sadness that we have to pass on the news that Linda Bell, former Chair of Bristol Wireless, passed away in her sleep on 25th January 2018 at the nursing home where she had been since Christmas 2017. Linda had a long association with Bristol’s community and voluntary section, being perhaps best […]
Bristol Wireless is pleased to announce that funding has been secured for 2 years to keep the network running courtesy of the University of the West of England (UWE) and High Tech Bristol & Bath CIC. The funding will be used to ensure the Bristol Wireless volunteers can continue to operate the network – including […]
Bristol Wireless member Nigel Legg writes: The focus of the fourth Bristol & Bath IoT meetup on Monday 21st November was security – making your things secure. There have been some DDoS attacks that used insecure internet-connected consumer goods to create botnets, and Carl Shaw from Cerberus Security Labs talked us through a process to […]
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 […]
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 […]
There’s a fair bit going on in Bristol at the moment as regards the Internet of Things (IoT) and these were reported on earlier this week by Nigel Legg, under the headline “Smart City done Smarter?“. Nigel’s post is reproduced in full below with his kind permission (with a couple of links added. Ed.). My […]
CiviCRM is a great free and open source CRM package that’s used by thousands of organisations (many in the community and voluntary sectors. Ed.) around the world to maintain their contacts database, produce email newsletters and much, much more. We at Bristol Wireless have been using CiviCRM for many years for those first two above-mentioned […]
Tomorrow is 14th February. Most people know this as Saint Valentine’s Day, when traditionally florists are overworked, restaurants overcharge and a gentleman generally has his motives questioned should he happen to buy lingerie for his lady love. 😉 However, every year 14th February is also I Love Free Software Day. It’s the day when free […]
As part of our network upgrade work, Bristol Wireless has recently retired a couple of Pentium III-powered Compaq Deskpro EN machines that were acting as network gateways and performing other roles too. As these CPUs were only produced for 4 years between 1999 and 2003, that means our hardware is rather long in the tooth. […]
Bristol Wireless has been using the free and open source CiviCRM customer relationship management software to manage its contacts for years. So we were very pleased to hear that CiviCRM’s Core Team is pleased to announce that CiviCRM version 4.7 will be released on 27th January. According to the developers, version 4.7 is packed with […]
Last weekend saw the staging of BarnCamp 2015 (in which Bristol Wireless’ volunteers have been involved since its inception. Ed.). Running from Friday 19th June to Sunday 21st, BarnCamp was as usual a low-cost rural DIY skillsharing event open to everyone, including UK activists, campaigners, people involved in social and community groups and anybody else […]
Barncamp is a low-cost, rural DIY skills sharing event open to everyone, including UK activists, campaigners, people involved in social and community groups, and anybody else with an interest in technology and how to subvert it to put it to good use. All skill levels are welcome and the organisers promise that workshops are not […]
The Secretary has just blogged again about Bristol City Council and open standards on account of fresh information that came to light over the weekend. It is reproduced verbatim below: Following the post on Friday on Bristol City Council‘s response to my open standards FoI request (posts passim), more information has come to light. It […]
Bristol Wireless’ secretary has just published the post below on his blog concerning his recent Freedom of Information Act request to Bristol City Council on the local authority’s use of open standards: A response has been received today to my FoI request to Bristol City Council on open standards (posts passim). The reply was received […]
In December 2010, 7 months after it assumed power, the UK’s coalition government issued a document (PDF) entitled Britain’s Superfast Broadband Future. In that document’s introduction, the then Culture Minister Jeremy Hunt and Minister for Culture Communications & the Creative Industries Ed Vaizey stated: Broadband is one of our top priorities. We took office earlier […]
The current hard copy of Networking magazine (to which Bristol Wireless subscribes. Ed.) reports on its front page that on account of poor take-up of the broadband connection voucher scheme (of which we’re part. Ed.), the government is revamping its offer of £3,000 to get businesses on high-speed broadband connections in 22 cities. Apparently fewer […]
Asus have kindly lent Bristol Wireless a ChromeBox for evaluation and I’ve had a chance to put it through its paces. On opening the box I was surprised by its compact form; it’s about the size of a CD case and an inch high. The boot time’s impressive, taking only a few seconds to launch […]
Local news site Bristol 24/7 carried a post today on the Super Connected Cities’ broadband connection vouchers scheme. The scheme covers 22 UK towns and cities, including Bristol Under the scheme, companies, sole traders and charities can apply for up £3,000 to gain access to high speed broadband. However, author Rob Buckland omitted one small […]
In a press release issued in the middle of last week, Bristol City Council announced that Bristol’s £5 mn. fund to provide better business broadband is set to move beyond borders the Connection Vouchers scheme is expanded. The change to the scheme means that around 2,300 small and medium-sized businesses (including registered charities, social enterprises […]