I’ve been using Easton Community Centre almost as long as it’s been open. I’ve also watched the changes to the building and its users over the years with great interest.
Reaching its quarter century is a great achievement for any community project and the Centre will be celebrating its 25th Anniversary later this month with a tea party on Friday, 24th October from 3.30-6.30pm.
There will be free tea and cake, as well as a children’s disco with a £1 entry fee.
It’s not very often the Bristol Post manages to come up with an exclusive, but today’s online edition proved a winner on that score.
The text below was concealed in a letter to Post from reader Stephen Farthing:
THE news of 15-year-old girl Yusra Hussien leaving Bristol to become a supporter of IS, allegedly, is a worrying outcome and I echo what Stephen Williams said, that such an objective is not only foolish but profoundly unwise.
In some ways, what Al Qaeda started in 2001 has produced many problems of his kind.
Yes, you did read that correctly: “problems of his kind“, i.e. problems like him, if you prefer to paraphrase.
The Post has exclusively revealed that Bristol West MP Stephen Williams is a problem that has been caused by Al Qaeda, an organisation never before known for its links to the UK’s Liberal Democratic Party, let alone elected members thereof.
Perhaps Mr Williams would care to comment on his links to Al Qaeda below; or alternatively perhaps the Post could employ a little more care when publishing reader’s letters where a lost or missing consonant can give a phrase a whole new meaning.
After yesterday’s Easton & Lawrence Hill Neighbourhood Forum meeting at Trinity Community Arts, local residents held a picket on a damp, drizzly Stapleton Road to draw attention to the litter and fly-tipping in east Bristol.
The protesters were supported by local councillors Marg Hickman (Lawrence Hill ward) and Afzal Shah (Easton ward), whilst a photographer from the Bristol Post also arrived to take pictures.
Other local residents also showed their support for the protesters by thumbs up signals, waves and the like, although we did get bemused looks from passengers on passing buses.
The picket also features in today’s Bristol Post, where Stacy Yelland of Up Our Street is quoted as saying:
We want to get the message out there that people are sick of this mess and there should be more respect for keeping the streets clean and tidy.
“We realise that May Gurney and the city council are doing their best – this is more about urging residents to make sure they get rid of their rubbish properly.
Picking up on Stacey’s point about disposing of rubbish properly, the city council website has full details of what can be recycled. Recyclable materials happen to include lots of what is fly-tipped, such as cardboard from traders, or dropped as litter, such as aluminium drinks cans.
When it comes to bulky items like furniture, these can be taken to the tip in Folly Lane, off Days Road, St Philips, Bristol, BS2 0QS or the other one in Kings Weston Lane, Avonmouth, Bristol, BS11 0YS. Opening times are on the council website. Alternatively, these can be collected by the council, which will collect up to three bulky items for £15. All additional items are charged at the same rate. If you receive certain benefits, you are entitled to one free bulky waste collection of up to three items every six months. Full details on the council website.
It feels as if something is finally starting to happen along the Stapleton Road corridor on the fly-tipping and litter front (as well as on other problems. Ed.). Bristol City Council has helped draw up an action plan which will see greater enforcement and education on these two matters.
However, such encouraging developments should not detract from tackling the filth of illegal dumping and litter elsewhere in the BS5 area and Bristol’s inner city in general, which are equally deserving of attention.
Wilhelm Tux, a Swiss organisation promoting the use of free software, has launched a fundraising campaign to improve LibreOffice, with the target of raising €8,000 to implement the signing of PDF documents in LibreOffice, German IT news site heise reported yesterday.
LibreOffice can already digitally sign ODF files, its native file format. However, it has no equivalent function as yet for PDF files; the relevant code is still regarded as experimental and not mature yet. Collabara, a software company specialising in free software, will use the money raised to bring the code up to the stage of production application.
Or rather the lack of proof-reading on a news report by the Western Daily Press does!
Headline writers really need to look after their vowels better. 🙂
A community market event took place earlier today on the section of Stapleton Road between Easton Way and Lower Ashley Road.
Although interspersed with showers, the event was well attended and had such attractions as food, music, bouncy castles, face painting and – at one point – a samba band adding yet more sound and vibrancy to our main local street in this part of town.
The event was organised by the local community for the local community and has evidently gone down well with the people at Bristol News, who commented:
The amazing people on Stapleton Road are having fantastic fun today and doing it for far less money than Make Sunday Special has ever done. And more importantly the community is doing it for itself. This is the “real spirit of Bristol” not the water slides, skiing clowns and ambling bands.
It also shows a different side of a place that’s frequently just regarded, particularly by the rest of Bristol, as a source of inner city problems.
I do worry when schools display lack of proficiency in the English language. After all, they are establishments whose tasks include imparting formal training in the vernacular.
In particular, they seem to have problems with the use of the apostrophe (posts passim), whether that entails its use as a possessive or as an indication of omission.
The latest example from the nursery slopes of Mount Academia was found almost on my doorstep at St. Nicholas of Tolentine RC Primary School in Pennywell Road, Bristol, which seems to think that childrens is the plural of child.
Should anyone from the school happen to be reading this, the correct punctuation is children’s. In the words of several of my old teachers: you could do better; see me after class. 🙂
The Open Knowledge Foundation is doing marvellous work in the fields of open data and open content.
The Foundation has just published version 2 of its Open Definition. This definition is released under a Creative Commons Attribution licence and is reproduced verbatim below (complete with US spellings and punctuation throughout. Ed.).
Version 2.0
The Open Definition makes precise the meaning of “open” with respect to knowledge, promoting a robust commons in which anyone may participate, and interoperability is maximized.
Summary: Knowledge is open if anyone is free to access, use, modify, and share it — subject, at most, to measures that preserve provenance and openness.
This essential meaning matches that of “open” with respect to software as in the Open Source Definition and is synonymous with “free” or “libre” as in the Definition of Free Cultural Works. The Open Definition was initially derived from the Open Source Definition, which in turn was derived from the Debian Free Software Guidelines.
The term work will be used to denote the item or piece of knowledge being transferred.
The term license refers to the legal conditions under which the work is made available. Where no license has been offered this should be interpreted as referring to default legal conditions governing use of the work (for example, copyright or public domain).
An open work must satisfy the following requirements in its distribution:
The work must be available under an open license (as defined in Section 2). Any additional terms accompanying the work (such as a terms of use, or patents held by the licensor) must not contradict the terms of the license.
The work shall be available as a whole and at no more than a reasonable one-time reproduction cost, preferably downloadable via the Internet without charge. Any additional information necessary for license compliance (such as names of contributors required for compliance with attribution requirements) must also accompany the work.
The work must be provided in a convenient and modifiable form such that there are no unnecessary technological obstacles to the performance of the licensed rights. Specifically, data should be machine-readable, available in bulk, and provided in an open format (i.e., a format with a freely available published specification which places no restrictions, monetary or otherwise, upon its use) or, at the very least, can be processed with at least one free/libre/open-source software tool.
A license is open if its terms satisfy the following conditions:
The license must irrevocably permit (or allow) the following:
The license must allow free use of the licensed work.
The license must allow redistribution of the licensed work, including sale, whether on its own or as part of a collection made from works from different sources.
The license must allow the creation of derivatives of the licensed work and allow the distribution of such derivatives under the same terms of the original licensed work.
The license must allow any part of the work to be freely used, distributed, or modified separately from any other part of the work or from any collection of works in which it was originally distributed. All parties who receive any distribution of any part of a work within the terms of the original license should have the same rights as those that are granted in conjunction with the original work.
The license must allow the licensed work to be distributed along
with other distinct works without placing restrictions on these other works.
The license must not discriminate against any person or group.
The rights attached to the work must apply to all to whom it is redistributed without the need to agree to any additional legal terms.
The license must allow use, redistribution, modification, and compilation for any purpose. The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the work in a specific field of endeavor.
The license must not impose any fee arrangement, royalty, or other compensation or monetary remuneration as part of its conditions.
The license shall not limit, make uncertain, or otherwise diminish the permissions
required in Section 2.1 except by the following allowable conditions:
The license may require distributions of the work to include attribution of contributors, rights holders, sponsors and creators as long as any such prescriptions are not onerous.
The license may require that modified versions of a licensed work carry a different name or version number from the original work or otherwise indicate what changes have been made.
The license may require copies or derivatives of a licensed work to remain under a license the same as or similar to the original.
The license may require retention of copyright notices and identification of the license.
The license may require modified works to be made available in a form preferred for further modification.
The license may prohibit distribution of the work in a manner where technical measures impose restrictions on the exercise of otherwise allowed rights.
The license may require modifiers to grant the public additional permissions (for example, patent licenses) as required for exercise of the rights allowed by the license. The license may also condition permissions on not aggressing against licensees with respect to exercising any allowed right (again, for example, patent litigation).
In February this year John Schember announced the end of the Sigil free e-book editor on the Sigil project website due to time pressures. However, now there is a new release which is due to the contribution of developer Kevin Hendrick. In addition to some bug fixes and minor improvements, Sigil 0.8.0 mainly provides plug-in support.
Like its predecessor Sigil 0.8.0 is open source and licensed under the GNU GPLv3. Nevertheless, the plug-in system was written in a way that allows plug-ins to be released under any licence their author wants and must not necessarily be open source. Plug-ins are called upon with the aid of a plug-in launchers which is itself covered by a BSD licence. The plug-ins themselves remain independent and could also be used by other applications. The new plug-in API is similar to that of Calibre, so that some Calibre plug-ins can be used with only minor changes. John Schember’s blog provides comprehensive details of the release announcement.
The new version of Sigil is available for download on the project’s Github page as source code, as well as for Windows and Mac OS. For Linux distros, the current release is already available for Arch Linux in the community repository, whilst for Fedora it is in testing. There are also packages for Ubuntu in various unofficial Launchpad repositories.
Thursday’s Bristol Post saw the welcome return to journalism of a local greengrocer, with a report featuring a superfluous apostrophe in the headline.
The writer from the fruit and vegetable trade has been rather quiet on Temple Way recently. This blog has not featured his or her work for nearly a year now (posts passim).
One question that should be asked of Localworld, owners of the Bristol Post, is whether it was it such a great idea to get rid of sub-editors?