Show Sidebar Log in

Category Archives: Volunteering

Stuff involving volunteers

Farewell Linda

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 […]

Thanks UWE!

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 […]

Get online at J3

Your ‘umble scribe has today received an email from Kurt James, Neighbourhood Partnership Co-ordinator at Bristol City Council, announcing an event next month in east Bristol. Bristol Libraries is organising a free (as in beer. Ed. 😀 ) digital skills workshop next month in collaboration with the Ashton, Easton and Lawrence Hill Neighbourhood Partnership and […]

Free Software Foundation Europe Summit 2016 – Not a tech conference

Free software advocates from all over Europe will be meeting in Berlin from the 2nd to the 4th of September at the FSFE Summit 2016. Apart from working on furthering the adoption of free software in Europe, the event will also be celebrating the FSFE’s 15th anniversary. One of the main missions of the free […]

First LibreOffice 5.2 bug hunting session announced

A blog post earlier this week from The Document Foundation, the organisation behind LibreOffice, the popular free and open source office productivity suite, gives details of the first bug hunting session for the forthcoming release of LibreOffice 5.2. There is also a page on the session on the LibreOffice wiki. This initial session will be […]

Wikipedia wins prestigious Spanish prize

Wikipedia, the free, collaborative encyclopaedia has been awarded Spain’s Princess of the Asturias Prize for international co-operation. The award was presented by the Spanish king and queen, the Tribune de Genève reported earlier this week. As a whole, Wikipedia comprises 37 million articles in 288 languages. “We are rewarding a brilliant and generous idea, a […]

LibreOffice 5.1 – first bug hunting session announced

Writing on The Document Foundation blog, Italo Vignoli has announced that a bug hunting session will take place from 30th October to 1st November for LibreOffice 5.1, the next planned major release of this popular open source office productivity suite. Over those 3 days, volunteers and members of the LibreOffice community will check the first […]

BarnCamp burns the nerd gag

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 […]

LibreOffice Viewer for Android released

The Document Foundation, the organisation behind LibreOffice, the most popular free and open source office suite, has announced the release of a native application for viewing ODF documents on Android devices. The app can be installed from the Google Play Store, whilst direct download of the APK will be made available at http://www.libreoffice.org/download/android-viewer. LibreOffice Viewer […]

Bath Ruby Conference 2015 announced

Bath Ruby Conference 2015 has been announced. It will be taking place on Friday, 13th March next year. To quote from the Bath Ruby Conference website: Join us in the beautiful city of Bath for a day of entertaining, informative and inspirational talks from some of the Ruby community’s favourite speakers. Details are fairly sparse […]

Less than a week to SFD 2014

It’s under a week to Software Freedom Day (SFD) 2014, which is being held this year on Saturday, 20th September. SFD is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). The organisers’ goal in this celebration is to educate the public all over the world about the benefits of using high quality FOSS […]

New round of Gnome OPW internships now accepting applications

The Gnome Outreach Program for Women (OPW) helps women get involved in free and open source software and has just announced the opening of a new round of internship applications. Women can apply for an internship to contribute to an open source project from May to August; and OPW is not just asking for applications […]

Linux Live 2014

Microsoft has announced that it will be ending support for Windows XP, now 12 years old, on 8th April 2014. The Bristol & Bath Linux Users’ Group (BBLUG) has seen this as an opportunity to introduce people currently using XP to a reliable free and open source Linux operating system and has planned an event […]

Training in the lab

Last week Bristol Wireless indulged in some internal training – something we haven’t done for a couple of years. Ably led by Ben Green and Julien Weston, Bristol Wireless volunteers are now more familiar with the ins and outs of Linux system administration, MySQL, the Puppet configuration management tool, vserver environments and web services, to […]

Orca screen reader improves Braille functions

Chris, one of our Bristol volunteers, has been blind since childhood and uses the Vimux distro for the visually impaired, coupled with the Orca screen reader for the GNOME desktop, so he’ll no doubt be very pleased to hear that a new release for Orca is imminent. According to Softpedia, is now at the Beta […]

UWE supplies recycled PCs for internet cafés in Africa

Bristol’s University of the West of England (UWE) has announced that a shipment of refurbished computers and office furniture has just arrived in Togo after an eight week voyage. The recycled equipment was refurbished by UWE student volunteers. The equipment is now being installed in 2 internet cafés in Lomé, the Togolese capital. Both internet […]

It’s AGM time – soon!

Wearing his company secretary’s outfit, your correspondent has just sent the following email and posted the following notice in the lab. NOTICE OF AGM The Annual General Meeting of Bristol Wireless for 2013 will be held at 4.30 pm on Tuesday 18th June 2012 in the Lab, Windmill Hill City Farm, Philip Street, Bedminster, Bristol, […]

Wikimedia Commons smartphone app released

Wikimedia Commons is a great resource: nearly 17 mn. freely usable media files that anyone can use for any purpose and to which anyone can contribute too! Contributing to Wikimedia Commons is also getting easier: it’s now possible to transfer images to the Commons database from an Android or iOS smartphone using a free and […]

Bath University researches internet and cognition

The University of Bath has an interesting research project on the books at present, investigating the relationship between attention and internet use and is looking for volunteers. This study consists of two phases. In phase I, participants will be asked to complete an online questionnaire measuring their internet use, different aspects of personality traits and […]