News about or from Bristol Wireless
Your correspondent arrived at the lab last Friday to find there was – initially at least – nowhere to sit down. We had a full complement of volunteers present – both old and new – and a couple of customers too. Looking at our volunteers, I’d like to draw your attention to 2 of them. […]
A couple of days ago, Bristol24/7 reported that Bristol is entering the race to be Europe’s top green city in 2014, so it’s perhaps appropriate to have a look at what Bristol Wireless can do as regards green IT (although, of course, we’re not the only people doing stuff like this in Bristol. Ed.). The […]
A couple of years ago, we reported on Mr Treasurer’s eeePC (news passim). Regular readers will be pleased to hear it’s still performing well, as evidenced by the following (slightly edited for greater legibility – although the hashtags have been left in! Ed.) tweets from a conversation between Mr Treasurer and the chief scribe on […]
Some Bristol Wireless members have just returned from a week’s holiday on Crete – Greece’s largest island. While there they visited Heraklion and Rethymno, 2 of the largest cities on the island, as well as staying in a small village on the south coast, and thus had ample opportunity to assess the island’s wifi. A […]
Yesterday the lab received a visit from Jon Roberts, a journalist from Future Publishing‘s Linux Format magazine. Linux Format’s strapline is ‘The #1 source for Linux’ and is also known as LXF. According to the latest ABC figures, LXF has a circulation 25,000 copies per issue. After a round of introductions and a cup of […]
Yesterday Bristol Wireless volunteers Jim and your correspondent attended the afternoon session of the two Wiki Wildlife Edit-a-thons (news passim) that were jointly organised by Wikimedia UK and Wildscreen’s ARKive project, the Bristol-based digital archive of the world’s endangered species, which has kindly donated 200 items from its text archive on endangered species to help […]
Last weekend your ‘umble scribe found a comment waiting in the moderation queue from Shearon, an old friend of Bristol Wireless. Shearon used to call in to see us regularly for a chat and Linux/networking advice when we were based in St Werburghs Community Centre. Shearon’s comment is as follows: yo woodsy how u keepin […]
Along with our friends over the road at Bristol Hackspace, Bristol Wireless gets an honourable mention in the latest Tuxradar podcast, brought to the world by Linux Format magazine. The podcast is available as both a high quality ogg or a low quality mp3. The total length of the podcast is 53:18. What’s more, we’re […]
The chief scribe had just been examining our website statistics, as provided by the excellent open source AWstats package (a contraction of Advanced Web statistics. Ed.), and thought readers may be interested in their revelations. For the first time since switching to a new host and a new platform (running the whole site on WordPress, […]
Yesterday, 12th August, marked the 30th anniversary of the birth of the personal computer (PC). On 12th August 1981, IBM announced the launch of its 5150, subsequently called the IBM PC. The 5150 was originally released with a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 CPU, 16 KB of RAM, 2 x 5¼ floppy drives and a 80 […]
Some weeks ago we gave advance notice of the forthcoming Bristol Girl Geek Dinners and Wikipedia event on Thursday 18th August (news passim). Further details have now emerged. It’s being held at the Merchant Venturers Building, University of Bristol, Woodland Road, Bristol, BS8 1UB (map) and starts at 7.00 pm. The main aim of the […]
This weekend the Bristol Wireless mobile LTSP suite made a trip to the Woodcraft Folk’s International Co-operation Camp in Nottinghamshire (news passim). Luckily our friend Sean was on hand to provide documentary evidence once it had been set up in the site’s shooting range and was in use (fortunately with no firearms in use. Ed.) […]
Yes, you did read that correctly; today, Friday 29th July is System Administrator Appreciation Day, the 12th since its inception. For 364 days of the year sysadmins toil away unappreciated, their arcane skills only really being noticed when a problem needs sorting out (and nobody can do any work at all until the sysadmin’s done […]
Some time ago, we speculated about the possible end of open source use at Bristol City Council following the decision to replace Star Office with Microsoft Office 2010 (news passim) and allegations of bad behaviour involving one of the council’s suppliers. It now seems these speculations may have been premature in the light of a […]
Your correspondent, in his guise as company secretary, has just sent the following notice to members of the co-operative and our general mailing list: NOTICE OF AGM The Annual General Meeting of Bristol Wireless for 2010 will be held at 6.30 pm on Tuesday 5th July 2011 in the Lab, Windmill Hill City Farm, Philip […]
On Monday the advance crew – by now known as the tat-down team and consisting mostly of Bristol Wireless volunteers – arrived back tired but satisfied from the rural Barncamp site up the Wye Valley. Our journey began the previous Wednesday afternoon, when the advance crew got to site after a frantic best part of […]
Public internet access in libraries is a well established service nowadays. Indeed it’s been in existence here in Bristol for so long that one hardly ever gives it a thought. However, the other day Jules, the Bristol Wireless Treasurer, emailed the chief scribe with a tale from Albany in Oregon, where he’s currently sojourning. Jules […]
Just after your correspondent had published yesterday’s LTSP round-up post (news passim), Acesabe got busy with his Twitter client, tweeting: #LTSP 4.2 & 5 running as #vserver clients on host laptop, old lappers get to live another day! He also posted the picture below online at Twitpic. The hands on the keyboard on the far […]
Earlier this week our 2 LTSP gurus, BenG and Acesabe, were busy configuring and preparing a new LTSP suite comprising some donated redundant Rock Clevo T200C laptops as the thin clients. These run on 12 volts and are being made ready for a trip to the forthcoming Barncamp 2011 up in Wye valley (news passim). […]
Two weeks ago, your correspondent made one of his regular trips to Stoke on Trent to do a routine back-up of his 79 year-old mother’s computer, which happens to be running Windows XP. The back-up went smoothly: I took a copy of her personal files to a spare hard drive of my own in a […]