Daily Archives: Sunday, August 25, 2013

  • UWE supplies refurbished PCs for internet cafés in Togo

    UWE's surplus office furniture and PCs off to Togo
    The container being loaded for shipping to Togo
    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 cafés will be open to the public, although some time will be set aside each week for special user groups, such as orphanage children, who will receive computer training, and micro-finance clients. In addition, The cafés will provide a learning and employment opportunity for local people and aim to be profitable in about a year, earning income from providing internet access, printing and copying services.

    Jo Earl, from UWE Volunteering, co-ordinated students from UWE’s Department of Computer Science & Creative Technologies to make the computers ready for use.

    “Four volunteers worked as a team to assess the donated equipment, install operating systems and additional software. In total 84 PCs were shipped and the students worked really hard on a complex and time-consuming task,” said Jo.

    “After refurbishing the computers, our next big task was shipping the PCs from Frenchay campus,” continued Jo, who worked with UWE facilities manager Richard Bird on packing and loading the computers, printers, desks and chairs into a shipping container.

    Reposted from Bristol Wireless.

  • Ebook manager Calibre reaches version 1.0

    Ebook management software Calibre has now reached version 1.0, seven years after it was first released and a year since the last major release. Lots of new features have been added to calibre in the last year — a grid view of book covers, a new, faster database backend, the ability to convert Microsoft Word files, tools to make changes to ebooks without needing to do a full conversion, full support for font embedding and sub-setting, and many more, which are listed below. However, it should be pointed out that many of the features listed below were actually introduced during the lifetime of Calibre’s 0.9.x series.

    • A grid view of book covers
    • A new, faster database backend
    • Virtual Libraries
    • Conversion of Microsoft Word documents (.docx files)
    • New metadata download sources
    • Full support for font embedding
    • An easy to use tool to edit the Table of Contents in ebooks
    • Rewritten PDF output engine
    • New “Polish books” tool that allows users to carry out various automated clean-up actions on ebooks

    image of calibre interface

    The developers of Calibre also believe now is an appropriate time to express their thanks to all the developers who have contributed many of the major new features listed above. An incomplete list of contributors is available here.

    Calibre 1.0 is now available for download for Linux, MacOS and Windows.