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).
Bristol Wireless volunteer Tony Stone has been experimenting with increasing the range of USB wifi dongles and has come up with a splendid bit of home-made kit. In Tony’s own words: I was having trouble picking up my local WiFi hotspot. I was using a USB dongle and added an extension cable to put it […]
Over the last few weeks Bristol Wireless volunteers have been installing seven LTSP workstations for public use in the foyer of Easton Community Centre in Kilburn Street. In keeping with our greener credentials, the Compaq workstations (also known as clients. Ed.) run on minimal power, having no moving parts such as hard disks and optical […]
In case you hadn’t heard, last weekend saw the climax of this year’s Climate Camp near Kingsnorth, Kent. Bristol Wireless was in attendance, providing kit and tech support for the Be The Media centre, including Camp Radio (archive here). As usual, the event was powered by renewable energy: indeed, as can be seen below, the […]
In its early days, Bristol Wireless relied heavily on ‘homebrew’ equipment, such as the whisky tin wifi antenna (cantenna), some of which has survived very well (news passim). We were therefore very interested to hear that, at the recent hackerspace.net 08 festival in Paris, Benjamin Henrion from Belgium’s Reseau citoyen.be was presenting a waveguide antenna […]
Ben Green writes: We are in Debian Weekly News! We are down the bottom with: “Co-operative Breathes New Life into Old Machines with Debian” We’re in the news for the 21st April 2008 and the actual piece in question highlighted by Ben reads: Co-operative Breathes New Life into Old Machines with Debian “Bristol Wireless is […]
In the last few weeks, the lab has paid host to some newer versions of Toshiba’s perennial Satellite line of notebooks. Our mobile LTSP suite runs on donated Toshiba satellites that are over 12 years old! 
The new batch is a bit newer – they’re mere youngsters of 3 or 4 years vintage. They’ve […]
Do you work in the voluntary or community sector? Do you want to learn how free and open source software (FOSS) can meet your ICT needs and save you money? Then make a date in your diary to visit the Social Source Conference (PDF flyer here) being hosted by Bristol Wireless at St Werburghs Community […]
Here at Bristol Wireless we do as much as we can to re-use and extend the working life of old computer hardware. Through our Byteback partnership We are able to sell reconditioned machines for just £50. We recognise that sometimes it is appropriate to purchase new hardware, and when new purchases are made it is […]
Author’s note: The following is an article I’ve written for an Easton newsletter being set up in the new year. I’ve posted it here because I mention Bristol Wireless and their contribution to recycling waste electrical and electronic equipment towards the end. The Problem More than a million tonnes of waste electrical and electronic equipment […]
Bristol Wireless was recently contacted on behalf of the Healing Hands Network to see if we could help provide a laptop computer for Amir, a 27-year old resident of Sarajevo and Bosnian civil war victim, to enable him to turn his life around and help him gain the qualifications to find work. After being nearly […]
Bristol Wireless warmly invites all interested in its work and free/open source software to the Cube Cinema in Dove Street on Sunday, 17th June to celebrate more than 5 years’ activities in Bristol. Starting at 5 pm, Bristol Wireless will be showing all aspects of its work, including historic video footage of past achievements, the […]
Here at the lab, we’re busy preparing a new server for an LTSP install for CSV Environment. Of course, we had to buy the box in – this time from Dell – paying the inevitable ‘Windows tax’ in the process since it came with an unwanted copy of Windows Vista and we intended to feed […]
Following a talk down the pub the other night, Mike Harris of Psand went and checked the unused, 5 years old, home-made wireless cantenna on the roof of his current digs that used to connect to Bristol Wireless’ network and it still worked! Anyway, here’s the story in his own words: Hi All, Just thought […]
Our thanks are due to National Deposit Friendly Society, a mutual friendly society based in Clifton and providing personal insurance and finance products, who have kindly donated a number of PC’s, laptops and printers to Bristol Wireless. They were donated due to one of their employees, Clare Stevenson, being aware of our project. She has […]
One of the founding principles of Bristol Wireless has been to extend the life of computer hardware and the latest manifestation of this is that, in collaboration with Byteback, we are now able to offer the public fully functioning, refurbished PCs for the ridiculously cheap price of £50. All the machines have a thorough health […]
Bristol Wireless are pleased to be able to have relaunched its PC giveaway project. We have distributed another 15 machines in the first month of 2006. Receipt of machines is linked to completion of “First Time on Line” the UFI funders basic skills assessment website. PCs donated by Institute of Physics Publishing (av.800Mhz/256MB/40GB) were data […]
Myself, Dez and 2 of his students went to the BuildIt project at the Park in Knowle on Monday afternoon to start the refurbishment of the IoPP donated machines earmarked for distribution in the Bannerman Road Project. There do not appear to be many current students on BuildIT (which has also just changed its name!), […]