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Tag Archives: volunteering

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 […]

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 […]

Happy 15th birthday, Wikipedia

This week, Wikipedia reaches its fifteenth birthday. These days the free online encyclopaedia is the world’s seventh most popular website and now includes more than 38 million articles in 289 languages, all maintained by an army of volunteer editors and contributors. Andy Mabbett, one of that army of editors and contributors, has been musing on […]

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 […]

Registration for Barncamp 2015 now open

Barncamp is a low-cost, rural DIY skills sharing event open to everyone, including UK activists, campaigners, people involved in social and community groups, and anybody else with an interest in technology and how to subvert it to put it to good use. All skill levels are welcome and the organisers promise that workshops are not […]

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 […]

Coming soon: Manchester’s first Free Software festival

Coming soon: the fair city of Manchester is holding its first Free Software festival between Monday 3rd February and Saturday, 8th February 2014. To quote from the FSFE Manchester website: We are delighted to announce that FSFE-mcr and friends will be running a whole week of Free Software fun in Manchester’s very first Free Software […]

0 A.D. Alpha 15 “Osiris” released

Just before the end of last month Wildfire Games announced the release of 0 A.D. Alpha 15 “Osiris”. 0 A.D. is a real time strategy game and the new release comes with additional functions. It’s available free of charge for Linux, Mac and Windows and is licensed under Version 2 of the GPL. The Alpha […]

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 […]

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 […]

Introducing Krash Accounts

We have some really talented people volunteering at Bristol Wireless. One of them is Jules, our treasurer. Jules got really frustrated at the lack of a decent accounts package for Linux. There is GNUCash of course, which we’ve reviewed in the past, and KMyMoney. However, neither of these is really up for doing a proper […]