Our friends at the Western Daily Press yesterday published a less than favourable account of the inadequacy of the roll-out of so-called “super fast” rural broadband, as managed by British Telecom. In a deal between Wiltshire and South Gloucester Councils, B.T. were to receive £35.6 million of government grants (our taxes) to provide 91% coverage […]
Bristol City Council is working with the Future Cities Catapult and the Connected Digital Economy Catapult on a new open data initiative that will help Bristolians improve their city with the help of local authority data. The partners are working together to release Bristol civic data sets such as traffic management and land use databases […]
In the week a major international summit on government transparency is held in London, the Open Knowledge Foundation has published its 2013 Open Data Index, showing that governments are still not providing enough information in an accessible form to their citizens and businesses. The UK and USA top the 2013 Index, which was compiled from […]
Wedged between the M4, M5 and M32 on the northern fringe of the Bristol built-up area, Bradley Stoke has never enjoyed an exactly wonderful reputation locally or even nationally. Started in 1987, the development got caught up in the fall-out from the bursting of the housing bubble in the early 1990s, leading to it being […]
North Somerset Council – Bristol’s immediate neighbour to the south – has announced that free wi-fi will be available in almost every library across North Somerset from 1st August. This will allow library users (not ‘customers’, as stated in your press release, North Somerset! Ed.) to bring their own laptops and other devices into their […]
Earlier this week the Prime Minister was making a lot of noise in the press and elsewhere about filtering the internet (under the dubious cover of protecting children. Ed.). His pronouncements have been met with almost universal condemnation from anyone with a bit of technical knowledge, as well as those concerned with online freedom, including […]
The Bank of England recently announced that social and prison reformer Elizabeth Fry, who currently graces the English five pound note, is to be replaced by Sir Winston Churchill, leaving Elizabeth Windsor as the only woman shown on an English bank note – and that’s merely due to an accident of birth. Since the announcement, […]
The Senate and the National Assembly, the two houses of the French parliament, have agreed to make free software a priority for education, according to Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news website. This Wednesday last the National Assembly confirmed a proposal by the Senate urging higher education institutions to give preference to free […]
The Connect Lockleaze project is being widely recognised for its achievements in helping people who do not have online access to vital services. The project brings together UWE Bristol, Hewlett-Packard (HP), the Lockleaze Neighbourhood Trust (LNT), Lockleaze Primary School and Early Years Centre and the North Bristol Advice Centre (NBAC). It has created three state-of-the-art […]
Yesterday, the Bristol Wireless members of the production crew returned to Bristol from this year’s Barncamp event (the fifth that has been organised. Ed.) after clearing out all the kit. Barncamp is a joint event organised by HacktionLab, Bristol Wireless and FLOSS Manuals, and has been described by our friend Charlie as follows: …hanging out […]
Next month on the weekend from Friday 7th to Sunday 9th, BarnCamp 2013 – a weekend of hacktivism, workshops, entertainment, politics and fun in the sun – will be taking place. BarnCamp is three days of workshops, discussions, demos and practical how-to sessions looking at how technology can be useful (and dangerous) for campaigners, community […]
We learn from Accessible Bristol that tomorrow, Thursday 9th May is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). On that day people all over the world will be coming together to spread the word about accessibility and Accessible Bristol will be among them. Throughout the day the Accessible Bristol team be on Twitter answering your questions about […]
In honour of the 20th anniversary of the release of libwww into the public domain (news passim), CERN has resurrected the first ever website at http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html As screenshot of the front page of this historic site is shown below, as seen by the text-based lynx web browser. This very first website at CERN – and […]
The H Online reminds us that 20 years ago CERN in Geneva gave Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau official permission to release the libwww library free of charge, according to Berners-Lee, “to create a server or a browser, to give it away or sell it, without any royalty or other constraint”. Since then this act […]
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 […]
The Severn Beach line, which runs between Bristol Temple Meads and Severn Beach on the Severn estuary, is a fortunate part of the railway network. Some 50 years ago it was the only branch line in the Bristol area to survive the so-called Beeching axe. Today further good news arrives for Severn Beach line users: […]
A report on Joinup, the EU’s open source public sector news website, suggests that the government of Spain’s autonomous region of Galicia is considering a switch to open source office productivity tools. Galicia’s Agency for Technological Innovation and Agasol, the Galician Association for Free Software Enterprises, announced last week that they have started assessing the […]
Today is International Women’s Day and Neelie Kroes, the European Union Commissioner for the Digital Agenda, has drawn attention on her blog not only to the opportunities that ICT can provide for women, but also to the dearth of women employed in ICT. She writes: I think every woman should have the tools and skills […]
Richard Stallman, aka rms, the Founder and President of the Free Software Foundation, will be giving at talk entitled “Copyright vs Community” at 6.00 pm on Thursday 21st March at the University of Bath as part of this year’s Bath Digital Festival. Admission is free, but booking is essential. More details are available on the […]
One of the major developments of recent years has been the growth in mobile internet-capable devices and a new mobile traffic forecast update by Cisco now predicts that the human population of planet Earth will be outnumbered by internet-connected mobile devices – smartphones, laptops and tablets – by the end of the current year. That […]