News about or from Bristol Wireless
Some months ago Bristol Wireless were asked by Easton Community Centre to provide some new LTSP thin clients in secure cabinets, similar to those already installed in St Werburgh’s Community Centre (news passim), whilst regular readers may recall our first post on the Mk. II cabinets. The first of the cabinets was delivered to Easton […]
Martha Lane Fox, the recently appointed Champion for Digital Inclusion visited Bristol recently. I was asked to come along and give a five-minute talk about the work that Bristol Wireless has been doing to promote ‘digital inclusion’. I have reproduced my notes for the talk below; although they weren’t delivered in full on the day, […]
Your correspondent (for his sins. Ed.😀 ), in addition to filling the role of press officer for Bristol Wireless, also acts as the co-operative’s Company Secretary. As a part of that that role the following email has today been circulated on Bristol Wireless’ general mailing list: Hi all One of my duties as company secretary […]
About a week ago I wrote a piece (news passim) when the forward crew for Hacktionlab were about to depart to site, since when a discreet silence has been maintained. A partial excuse for such taciturnity was your scribe’s duties on the woodpile for the event – hard physical graft for someone used to tickling […]
Further to the previous post on the move to Hamilton House (news passim), Julien Weston writes: With a new beginning welcoming us at Hamilton House, Bristol Wireless are of course not forgetting those we are sadly leaving behind. So, we will be organising a fabulous and sumptuous LEAVING PARTY, to be held in The Zoo […]
Regular readers will be aware that Bristol Wireless’ move to Hamilton House (news passim) is imminent, i.e. this coming weekend. Quite independently of our move, the Bristol Evening Post is today carrying a feature on Hamilton House and its role in the transformation of Stokes Croft. The piece includes the following on ourselves: Among the […]
I had an email from fellow Bristol Wireless volunteer Mike last night asking if I could fiddle with the order of posts on the site to bring the last post on Hacktionlab (news passim) to the top of the BW news page. After some thought, I decided to write this post instead. For those who […]
After more than 3 very happy and enjoyable years in St Werburghs Community Centre, the Bristol Wireless lab is on the move this month to Hamilton House on Stokes Croft. Of course, moving is one of life’s stresses – and this is also true of organisations; there’s lots of sorting out and packing to be […]
Yesterday Jules, our Bristol Wireless treasurer, took delivery of a brand new Eee PC. Needless to say, Jules chose a model with Linux – a proper operating system. Moreover, ever since he bought it he has had his nose stuck in reference materials and been hacking it around to customise it to meet his needs. […]
Being on a low income it’s virtually impossible to find the money needed to gain access to the latest computer operating systems and software. Many times I’ve found myself angry at being denied access to software simply because of my economic status. I was therefore presented with two options: the first being to use pirated […]
Regular readers of Bristol Wireless News may recall that in early 2008 we had a series of secure cabinets designed and built for the public access internet suite at St Werburgh’s Community Centre – our base for the past 3 years (news passim). Last Friday Rich, one of our longest serving volunteers, spent the day […]
Following on from the two successful gatherings to date – a rural hack meeting in the Wye Valley in June 2008 (news passim) and an urban one in Leeds in October 2008 – HacktionLab is pleased to announce its next rural gathering will be taking place between Thursday 11th and Sunday 14th June 2009 and […]
If any one is interested in trying out a bit of digital Djing I would highly recommend Mixxx. I stumbled across it a few months ago whilst having a browse through the Synaptic package manager and to be honest with you, I love IT. It’s quite a simple application to use and the graphical features […]
In the Bristol area (and other less favoured parts of the 3rd planet of a lowly star on the end of an unfashionable arm of the galaxy), Bristol Wireless has built up a fair reputation as übergeeks. We’ve also done some work beyond Bristol too. Building on the latter, Bristol Wireless now wishes to extend […]
At 6 pm on Friday 3rd April, Bristol Wireless is jointly hosting a talk entitled Nowtopia at St Werburghs Community Centre (map here) in conjunction with our friends from Bristol Radical History Group and Bristol Anarchist Bookfair. The event will be of interest to radical historians and futurists, permaculturalists, free-skillers, open sourcerers, class warriors, transition […]
Yesterday our friends at Connecting Bristol hosted a Techno Footprint Green ICT Workshop, organised jointly with the council’s Sustainable City Team and The Carbon Trust. The participants came from a wide range of organisations, ranging from charities, the community and voluntary sector, local authorities, the local universities, NHS, local, national and multinational businesses. It was […]
Regular readers will be aware of the activities or our DIY wifi enthusiast Tony whose adaptation of a humble USB wifi dongle have been documented here before (news passim). Well, he’s been making further modifications… Bristol is not blessed with the most clement of climates, although its soggy grey skies prevent plenty of moisture for […]
Tony, our DIY wifi devotee, has now sent me graphic evidence of the effectiveness his fan grille-enhanced USB dongle (news passim). It’s fairly obvious from the image that there’s a clear signal boost to the dongle when attached to the grille (left-hand plot) than when used on its own (right-hand plot).
Ben, our server admin, has just announced the update of the Bristol Wireless Debian repositories. As a preface, Ben wrote: Debian 5.0 “Lenny” was released on Valentine’s Day, how sweet. I suspect that this has caused many break-ups as enthusiastic Debian Sys Admins rushed from candle-lit dinners to attend to their servers.* Anyway, Ben informs […]
If anyone’s coming along to the next Bristol Wireless monthly meeting, it’s going to be held at Hamilton House on Stokes Croft in Bristol (map here). It’s where the December Dorkbot hacklab was held (news passim). As part of the meeting, there’ll be a presentation by Amias and Jamie from the Coexist Project, who are […]