A free, innovative educational app to teach children about the lifecycle and habitats of tadpoles has been developed and launched by computer science students the University of Bristol reports. TaddyPole is an interactive, cross-platform application created for Tadpoles.org.uk to help teach children all about tadpoles and where they live. The app was created as part […]
Speculation about the demise of Apache OpenOffice may be premature (news passim). German IT news site heise reports that a mailing list for new developers has been set up. By establishing this new list, the OpenOffice team wants to make entry to the open source project easier for programmers. After recent discussion of a possible […]
Billed as “Europe’s biggest event for the leading third sector CRM“, it’s now less than a month until CiviCRM’s Civicon 2016 in London, which is being held on 6th and 7th October. CiviCRM is the leading open source CRM for the voluntary and community sectors. CiviCon is now in its sixth year and the event […]
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 […]
VMware is to be using some parts of the Linux kernel code in its ESXi hypervisor and will therefore be infringing the GPL. A kernel developer has brought an action against this. However, the Hamburg District Court is not dealing with the content of the action.
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 […]
Hackers have succeeded in retrieving part of the Ubuntu Forums database by exploiting a security flaw in the Forum Runner extension for vBulletin. Some 2 million user names and associated email and IP addresses were stolen, Le Monde Informatique reports, although the attackers failed to obtain users’ passwords. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, announced […]
The Advocate General of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled that bulk data collection in the UK – as enabled under the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (Dripa) 2014 is illegal, except in the fight against serious crime, yesterday’s Guardian reports. The case had been brought by Labour deputy leader Tom Watson […]
The largest CiviCRM meet-up in Europe will be taking place in London on 6th and 7th October 2016. This year’s CiviCon promises to be packed with great presentations, interactive workshops, expert speakers and panels that highlight people putting CiviCRM, the leading open source CRM software for the voluntary and community sector, to use within their […]
Scientists and engineers from the Universities of Bristol and Western Australia have developed a technique for efficiently simulating a “quantum walk” on a new design for a primitive quantum computer.
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 […]
Le Monde Informatique reports that Samsung is currently developing an open source operating system tailored for the Internet of Things (IoT). Details of it will be given next month at the South Korean company’s developers’ conference. In order to gain a larger place in the world of domestic appliances, clothing, accessories and other connected items, […]
A consortium that includes engineers from Bristol University has been awarded €6.4 million to develop a new type of cloud computing server, which could lead to much faster processing, better resource allocation and lower overall power and cost.
There’s a general media adage that says never let the truth get in the way of a good story. It seems this maxim is now being applied by members of the fourth estate to that most concise social medium, Twitter. We refer to one of a series of some twenty or so tweets put out […]
Linux Mint is a great and popular Linux distribution. Unfortunately its servers were recently compromised by malicious persons. If you’ve downloaded a Linux Mint disk image recently, we advise you to read on, as the text below appeared yesterday on and is reposted from the Linux Mint blog. I’m sorry I have to come with […]
When the UK government started to prepare the ground for the latest version of the Snoopers’ Charter, the Investigatory Powers Bill, Prime Minister David Cameron was quite adamant that the government should be able to decipher encrypted material. According to The Guardian, the technologically ignorant PM is on record as saying: “In extremis, it has […]
It’s rare to find a politician that really “gets” IT. Who can forget Stephen Timms MP? He was the Minister for the Digital Economy in the last Labour government who’s on record for mistakenly stating that the IP in IP address was an abbreviation for Intellectual Property (Doh! Ed.). More recently, British Home Secretary Theresa […]
From diabetes to dementia, from depression to AIDS, large segments of the UK’s population are living with conditions that cannot be cured, but must be managed outside of the hospital environment. How technology could transform the future of healthcare has been discussed by Professor Ian Craddock from the University of Bristol at the IEEE World Forum on the Internet of Things (WF-IoT) in Milan, Italy.
Collabora, the architects of LibreOffice Online, have announced a the formation of a partnership and the release of CODE (Collabora Online Development Edition), a distribution of LibreOffice Online and ownCloud Server. The purpose of CODE is to give interested developers from any field an easy way to get early access to the very latest untested […]