As any journalist knows, an appropriate picture can add interest to what would otherwise be a dull story. However, what a quay full of cars has to do with a report on school expansion in Portishead, only the Bristol Post knows.
Evidently, the above image is so good, the Post decided to use it a second time for a completely unrelated report into Frenchay Hospital.
Both screenshots were taken from the Bristol Post website at about 7.00 a.m. on Friday. However, the ‘featured image’ might have changed by the time you read the articles. 🙂
Orca, the screen reader for the GNOME desktop used on Linux machines, is now at the Beta 2 stage for its forthcoming 3.10 release. According to Softpedia, the 3.10 Beta 2 release fixes the broken text attribute presentation for Gecko, the new sliders are now present in GNOME Shell, partially-implemented value interfaces with range of 0 to 1 are now handled and a workaround has been added for Delete and Backspace text changed events.
Moreover, Braille functions are now performed only when Braille is enabled and object:active-descendant-changed has been added to events that may be part of an “event flood”.
Finally the Polish and Slovenian translations have been updated in Orca 3.10 Beta 2.
See the fairly basic change log for all changes since the last release.
The LibreOffice Conference will officially open in less than three weeks at the University of Milan on Wednesday, 25th September, the blog of The Document Foundation reminds us. The opening session will be held in the historic CĂ Granda building, while all technical sessions and tracks will be hosted by the Department of Computer Science.
LibreOffice for all your office suite needs: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database, drawing and formulas
The conference is being sponsored by Canonical (the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. Ed.) and open source consultancy Collabora, whilst Google and CloudOn will be sponsoring the live ‘hackatons’ happening on Wednesday and Thursday evening and open source consultancy Lanedo sponsoring the food for the conference breaks.
The conference will close on Friday, 27th September with the traditional Q&A session, where project members can question The Document Foundation’s board of directors.
The conference tracks will cover the following:
Open Document Format (ODF);
LibreOffice Development;
Community Development;
Best Practice for Deployments and Migrations; and
Building a Business with LibreOffice.
For the first time during a conference, there will be a chance of sitting together with LibreOffice developers to hack the code, or just discuss the next feature.
“LibreOffice Conference comes to Italy at the right time, as during 2012 and 2013 there have been several migrations to LibreOffice in the public administrations at regional and local level,” says Italo Vignoli, a member of The Document Foundation’s board of directors and the leader of the conference team. “Meeting with the project members will encourage other public administrations and enterprises to undertake the migration to LibreOffice”.
Conference sessions will be broadcast online, as well as being recorded and made available on the conference website.
Munich City Council has announced that a total of 2,000 Linux CDs featuring the Ubuntu 12.04 Long Term Support (LTS) distribution will be given away from next Monday in Munich’s public libraries according to the German technology news site Heise. The city’s Administration and Personnel Commission decided to take this step on 19th June 2013 because Microsoft is finally ending support for Windows XP on 8th April 2014 and will not be providing any more security patches for the operating system from that date onwards.
Bavaria’s capital city thus wants to make sure first and foremost that computers which have been using Windows XP do not end up as electronic waste. Furthermore, Munich wants to be regarded as an “innovative expert in the open source sector”.
Nevertheless, the council points out that it cannot provide any support at all for the chosen Linux distribution and that users should refer to for this to suppliers in the database of the local Chamber of Commerce & Industry (IHK) and ubuntuusers.de.
The Canonical blog reports that Dell and Canonical will be launching Dell machines running Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux operating system in more than 1,000 outlets in China in the next few weeks.
Dell and Canonical will be jointly extending a range of Dell hardware pre-loaded with the Chinese language version of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS across a swathe of major Chinese cities. Sales in the original stores have proven so successful that the companies have agreed to expand to beyond 1,000 outlets.
Ubuntu’s Chinese store promotional materials
This is the latest of a series of developing partnerships in China for Ubuntu. In March 2013 it was announced that the Chinese Ministry for Industry & Information Technology had selected Ubuntu as the basis for its reference architecture for operating systems (posts passim).
The greengrocers’ – or superfluous – apostrophe has a special place if one’s selling bananas (shouldn’t that be banana’s? Ed.), but it looks sadly out of place in Bristol’s newspaper of record, which is what happened yesterday in this heartening story from the St George area of the city.
The offending punctuation even had the temerity to turn up in the item’s opening sentence, as follows:
Crofts End Church in St George has just opened the doors to it’s newly refurbished internet suite.
No doubt the bosses at the Temple Way Ministry of Truth believe the downward spiral in quality is a small price to pay for what they’re saving by not employing sub-editors.
The Independent reports today that more than 500 court cases are being thrown out or delayed each week due to failings by prosecutors or in the court system.
Government figures reveal that a total 106,859 cases before crown and magistrates’ courts were dropped or delayed in 2012, costing the public purse an estimated £17.4 mn.
Of this total the absence of an interpreter was responsible for delays to 642 cases in the year in question.
No doubt Helen Grant MP and her colleagues at the Ministry of Justice will attribute these interpreter absences as “teething troubles” with its contract with Capita Translation & Interpreting, rather than a sign of the latter’s total incompetence and yet more evidence that it was wrong to fiddle with the previous arrangements with interpreting services for courts and tribunals in the first place.
Today’s Bristol Post reports North Somerset commuters travelling to Bristol during November and December will be able to travel to work for free under a scheme set up by North Somerset Council and coach operator The Kings Ferry Ltd.
The service will link Weston-super-Mare, Clevedon and Portishead with major employment areas around Bristol, including Aztec West, Rolls Royce, Royal Mail and Airbus. Two routes will be operated: one starting in Weston and picking up in Clevedon and the other starting in Portishead.
The coaches to be used will be equipped with luxury seats, air conditioning, power sockets, drinks machines, toilets and free wifi.
This new commuter coach service will be free throughout November and December for everyone who registers at www.bristolcommute.com by the end of October.
The community around Felix Road Adventure Playground would be so grateful if you could complete the on-line petition which is below. What we are trying to do is collect 3.5k signatures to trigger a debate in the council chamber. We want to ensure that a long term sustainable solution is found for all the adventure playgrounds in the city.
Can you please sign the petition now on-line and forward this email to all your Bristol contacts.
Orca, the screen reader for the GNOME desktop used on Linux machines, is now at the Beta 2 stage for its forthcoming 3.10 release. 
