Bristol

  • More enforcement officers for Bristol

    Steve WoodsBristol, Media, Politics

    In the middle of the week, Bristol City Council held its annual budget setting meeting.

    As usual, it was riven with the traditional partisan ill feeling and rancour, as well as a rift over council housing rent increases within the ruling Labour group.

    However, there was one glimmer of hope amongst the gloom. As a result of an amendment put forward by a group of Labour councillors, the council will be funding more enforcement officers to tackle the city’s seemingly insuperable environmental crime problems.

    As Bristol Live reported:

    Later in the meeting, the original budget, with a Labour amendment for seven additional litter and fly-tipping enforcement officers, passed by just one vote 33-32.

    Seven additional officers is a substantial increase in the complement of the enforcement team and one would hope that these additional resources will make a significant contribution to reducing levels of environmental crime within the city, as well as an increase in the woefully low number of prosecutions carried out, together with the issuing of more fixed penalty notices (FPNs).

    Fly-tipping in Morton Street, Barton Hill
    Fly-tipping in Morton Street

    Fly-tipping in particular seems to have burgeoned during the lockdowns of the last year, fuelled in part by lower numbers of people on the street (and hence less casual surveillance/deterrence. Ed.), plus the twin booms of DIY projects and online shopping (the latter has also given rise to an increase in cardboard presented for recycling, according to Bristol Waste. Ed.).

    In the meantime, keep reporting fly-tipping, litter and other environmental crimes to Bristol City Council, Bristolians. It does make a difference.

    PS: I’ve been informed the work I do in the local area was mentioned in the meeting when the amendment was discussed.

    Update 14/07/21: Yesterday evening’s Bristol Clean Streets Forum meeting was informed that all the additional enforcement officers will be in post by the start of August.

  • Fast food litter petition

    Steve WoodsBristol, Politics, Social Media

    in 10 years of campaigning for less litter and fly-tipping in east Bristol’s Lawrence Hill and Easton wards, one constant factor has been litter generated by takeaways, particularly the major franchises like Burger King, KFC and the like.

    A petition has now been started on change.org to help tackle part of the problem, namely littering by their motorised customers, some of whom seem to have no compunction at just pitching the packaging their meal came in out of the vehicle window once their appetites have been sated.

    Fast food litter
    Fast food litter. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

    The back streets of Easton and Lawrence Hill are a good mile of so from the nearest McDonalds, Burger King or KFC, but that does not stop litter from those outlets blighting the neighbourhood.

    The relevant petition is entitled “Fast food restaurants to print vehicle reg on takeaway packaging to discourage littering” and reads as follows:

    The recent break in fast food companies business has given us time to be able to start to clean up the streets once littered with empty McDonald’s bags, KFC boxes and other takeaway restaurant litter.
    KFC has been back open merely a couple of days and already pictures of carelessly discarded boxes are circulating on the internet. Let’s not slip back to where we were in terms of litter before the Covid lockdown. Let’s make compulsory that all drive through restaurants, who sell takeaway food, have to print the purchasers vehicle registration onto their bags or boxes. This will make it much easier to trace the litter back to the purchaser and result in a fine or preferably litter picking duties. I am proposing the idea of 3-4 stickers around the size of the bottom of the restaurants cup, printed with date/time and car registration, placed onto the bottom of the bags, cups and boxes to make it difficult for repeat litterers to remove their details without spilling the remaining contents into their cars/vans. The restaurants CCTV will back up this evidence with pictures of the driver and vehicle to provide solid evidence that they were the purchaser of said litter. The fine or community hours need to be big enough to cover costs of enforcement officers investigation times, resulting in nobody “slipping the net”.
    If we can reach 100,000 signatures I can show clear public interest and go straight to the Secretary of state for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and demand change. As this could result in a fine for the offenders this will make it much more appealing to the government to pass as law and thus resulting in a cleaner environment for everyone to enjoy.
    Please help your local and national environment by merely signing this petition and sharing on social media platforms and as many large groups as you can, making a small but very needed step in the right direction.
    Thank you good citizens.

    Sign the petition.

    If the petition is successful, that just leaves how to resolve the problem of those on foot who litter after eating their takeaways whilst walking home… 🙁

  • Abandoned cycle removal – a Bristol how-to

    Steve WoodsBristol, Politics

    Cycling has undergone an upsurge in popularity in recent times due to it being a healthy and convenient mode of transport.

    Nevertheless, this increase in popularity does have some drawbacks, one of which is damaged or abandoned cycles  being left attached to cycle racks or other street furniture, like this typical example on Lawrence Hill by the station steps.

    Damaged, abandoned cycle attached to Sheffield stand

    Even though I’ve been involved for a decade with trying to stem the tide of litter and fly-tipping that blight our streets, I was uncertain of the procedure to follow to report dumped bikes and get them removed.

    I therefore turned to the Community Engagement Team of Bristol Waste, a council-owned company responsible for recycling and waste collections and street cleansing, for advice.

    The relevant part of their response is quoted below.

    The process is – logging a web form under street cleansing (https://www.bristol.gov.uk/streets-travel/street-that-needs-cleaning) and then provide the details of where the bike is. The crew will go and cut it off and dispose of it. If it looks like its owned by someone, then we put a notice on for 3 weeks and then go back and remove it if still there.

    That seems very simple indeed.

    Thanks, for your helpful reply, Bristol Waste!

    I now hope others will join me in keeping the streets free of abandoned clutter.

    NB:: as abandoned bikes are not specifically mentioned in the drop-down list of items that can be reported for attention, I chose to class it as ‘Litter‘. 😀

  • Insert word of choice

    Steve WoodsBristol, Oddities, Politics

    For many years the garage sitting at the apex of the junction of Russelltown Avenue, Cannon Street and Whitehall Road in BS5 has featured a changing sequence of slogans painted by Stan Jones, who lives in the house to which the garage belongs.

    It was 2017 when I first noticed it and, at that time, it focussed on the madness of Brexit.

    Garage wall featuring Exit Brexit slogan
    Exit Brexit

    In 2019 its message was still focussed on Brexit but had been repainted to featur the wording “Buck Foris” (fine use of a Spoonerism there. Ed.) and “Fromage not Farage“, so I think it’s fair to say Stan is not impressed with the right-leaning part of what passes for Britain’s political class.

    In 2019 Stan’s efforts accidentally suffered the attentions of Bristol City Council’s fight against graffit. There was, however, a happy outcome as Stan received an apology and some paint from the corporation, as the Bristol Post reported at the time.

    Below is Stan’s latest contribution, which really needs no further comment from me.

    Text on building reads What the [insert word of choice] is happening?
    Stan’s latest (shame about the tags)

     

  • The new benchmark – as long as you’re white

    Steve WoodsBristol, Oddities

    On a rare excursion into town, I happened to notice that Castlemead, the city’s tallest office block, is currently undergoing a refurbishment and is surrounded by site hoardings which have the usual aspirational developer’s blurb splashed across it, as can be seen below.

    General view of shuttering surrounding Castlemead site
    General view of the Castlemead site on Lower Castle Street

    Besides being the new benchmark, the refurbisher’s website describes Castlemead as follows:

    Castlemead is a city landmark office building and offers high quality refurbished open plan accommodation from 3,450 – 11,128 sq ft and the UK’s First Platinum Plus 100 Cyclingscore Accredited facilities.

    With 360 panoramic views over Bristol’s cityscape and Castlepark [sic] and with the Cabot Circus regional shopping, dining and leisure destination on your doorstep, why locate your business anywhere else?

    Nevertheless, a quick glance at the images chosen to illustrate this landmark office building’s quality reveals one glaringly obvious fact.

    This quality is only available to white people. All the figures shown are invariably Caucasian. There’s not a BAME face to be seen anywhere either on the site’s hoardings or in the CGIs used on the dedicated website.

    Happy office drones at Castlemead 1
    Spot the BAME face 1
    Happy office drones at Castlemead 2
    Spot the BAME face 2

    According to the city council’s website, 16% of the city’s population of 463,400 persons belongs to a black or minority ethnic group. That’s over 74,000 people.

    When will developers realise and start to portray a more accurate picture of our city in their very expensive fantasy doodlings?

    After all, this is not the first time the absence of non-white faces from new Bristol property developments has been pointed out. It is a phenomenon that was first highlighted back in 2009 by a fellow local blogger.

    One would have expected the city’s major property moguls to have learned something by now and made a start on accurately portraying all the kinds of people in the city who will ultimately be occupying their benchmark and landmark buildings.

    Sadly, nothing appears to have changed.

  • Focus on OCR

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Open Source, Tech

    The way a completed translation has been produced has changed markedly over the decades since my first days as a translator for Imperial Tobacco in Bedminster, Bristol.

    In those days I’d write out the translation in longhand from printed source material and take my manuscript to the typing pool where it would be transformed into typescript.

    The next big change came with my learning how to touch-type. By this time I was a freelance with no more access to a typing pool.

    In my early freelance days, it was rare to get editable copy that one could overkey with one’s usual word processor, spreadsheet or presentation package. The standard way of working was still from hard copy propped up in a copyholder alongside one’s keyboard.

    Then there came a large surge in the use of formats such as PDF – Portable Document Format. This format enables documents, including text formatting and images, to be presented in a manner independent of application software, hardware and operating systems.

    If the PDF was text-based, one could simply export the text as plain ASCII text or copy and paste it into a word processor.

    However, if I had an image-based PDF to work with, my usual answer was to print it out as hard copy to be propped up in a copyholder alongside my keyboard. This was very expensive in terms of paper and other consumables for the printer, even with a machine as parsimonious as my trusty mono laser printer, whose cartridge was good for printing 3,000 or so pages of copy.

    In addition to the expense of printing, there was a far greater drawback to bear in mind, i.e. one could easily miss a sentence or paragraph from the original text when keying in the translated from a hard copy original, with the consequent implications for the quality of the finished work and the client’s satisfaction with it.

    Then I discovered OCR – Optical Character Recognition – the mechanical or electronic conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text.

    Here’s a short video explaining the basics of OCR.

    My preferred OCR package is gImageReader and – as with the software I recommend for use by translators – is open source and available for both Linux and Windows.

    Gimagereader in action on Italian language PDF
    gImageReader in action on Italian language PDF

    gImageReader provides a simple graphical front-end to the tesseract OCR engine. The features of gImageReader include:

    • Importing PDF documents and images from disk, scanning devices, clipboard and screenshots;
    • Process multiple images and documents in one go;
    • Manual or automatic recognition area definition;
    • Recognising to plain text or to hOCR documents;
    • Recognized text displayed directly next to the image;
    • Post-processing of the recognised text, including spellchecking;
    • Generating PDF documents from hOCR documents.

    I generally just stick scanning the input file to plain text, which can then be fed into a regular office suite for translation. If your office suite can handle HTML that’s the format gImageReader outputs as its hOCR output.

    The tesseract OCR engine mentioned above can also be enhanced with language packs for post-recognition spellchecking, as mentioned in the features above. At present, tesseract can recognise over 100 different languages.

    In addition to GUI-based OCR, there are also Linux packages available which can perform OCR via the command line interface.

    My tool of choice here is OCRmyPDF.

    ocrmypdf in action in KDE Konsole terminal
    ocrmypdf being used in KDE’s Konsole terminal to add OCR layer to Spanish language PDF

    OCRmyPDF is a package written in Python 3 that adds OCR layers to PDFs and, like gImageReader, also uses the tesseract OCR engine.

    Using OCRmyPDF on the command line is simplicity itself (as shown in the screenshot above:

    ocrmypdf -l [language option] inputfile.pdf outputfile.pdf

    More complicated command options are possible, but after using that simple string above, you’ll be able to extract the text from your formerly image-based PDF ready for translation.

    By way of conclusion depending on the software itself, OCR packages can also extract text from images such as .jpg files.

  • A penny for your thoughts?

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

    If there’s one thing that can be said about language, it’s that it’s dynamic. Blink for a second and you might miss the coining of a neologism or an old turn of phrase becoming obsolete.

    The latter in particular can have amusing consequences, especially if re-used by someone possibly too young to appreciate the original connotations of the word or phrase.

    One such most likely occurred today in a Bristol Post piece about free travel in the Bristol area on Unibus services.

    The item’s second paragraph reads as follows:

    Passengers will able to hop on the Unibus U2 service, from Monday February 18 until Friday, February 22 without spending a penny.

    To someone of my age (rapidly approaching where I qualify for a pass for free bus travel. Ed.), the phrase has connotations other than obtaining buckshee travel.

    As Collins Dictionary helpfully points out:

    If someone says that they are going to spend a penny, they mean that they are going to go to the toilet. [British, old-fashioned, politeness]

    old coin-operated public toilet lockThe origins of the phrase stretch back to the Victorian era and refer to the use of coin-operated locks on public toilets in the UK. Such locks were first used in a public toilet outside London’s Royal Exchange in the 1850s.

    The phrase “to spend a penny” has now largely died out and been forgotten, except by those with greying hair, due to changes to public toilets themselves (many of which have been closed by austerity-hit local authorities. Ed.) and changes in the charges to use a toilet. Last time I looked while on my travels, the toilets at Manchester Victoria railway station cost an exorbitant 20p, i.e. 4 shillings or 48 times the original cost of one penny.

  • The ultimate cheese toastie?

    Steve WoodsBristol, Oddities

    Earlier this week, Bristol City Council’s licensing committee voted to ban the sale of toasted cheese sandwiches in a north Bristol park due to concerns about anti-social behaviour (posts passim).

    Whilst doing background research for that post, your correspondent discovered what must count as the world’s ultimate cheese toastie, particularly if the main metrological criterion for the snack’s assessment is its cholesterol content.

    Enjoy! 😀

  • Cheese toastie shocker

    Steve WoodsBristol, Media, Oddities, Politics, Social Media

    Yesterday’s online version of the Bristol Post (now renamed Bristol Live. Ed.) carried a shocking item about a hitherto unknown catalyst for violence: the toasted cheese sandwich.

    According to the Post, this humble snack may not be served at a proposed catering concession in Monk’s Park in Bristol’s Southmead district “amid fears a proposed hot food van could attract booze-fuelled anti-social behaviour and motorbike gangs“.

    The Post continues:

    Councillors have agreed to grant a provisional licence for cold food, such as ice cream, and tea and coffee in Monk’s Park, Biddestone Road.

    But the vendor would be barred from selling hot snacks following dozens of objections from residents, a ward councillor and the headteacher of a nearby secondary school.

    A provoker of violence, accompanied by tomato soup.
    A provoker of violence, accompanied by not quite so provocative tomato soup. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

    However, the fear of violent behaviour was not the only concern for banning hot food: councillors on the city council’s public safety and protection committee also feared children from the next-door school would be tempted to skip lessons due to the lure of grilled fermented curd.

    Following the committee’s decision the concession will now be put out to tender.

    However, the story does not end there. When your correspondent posted about the article on Twitter, one person to respond was local artist Dru Marland, whose response about fermented curd addiction was hilarious.

    XDru's tweet reads they start 'em on Dairylea slices, and before you know it they're mugging pensioners for their next fix of Stinking Bishop

    For a more complete understanding of the violence-inducing properties of cheese, I should have asked the committee about their opinions of more exotic varieties of fermented curd, such as Roquefort or Graviera, but pressure of time dictated otherwise. 🙂

    Update: Not forty-eight hours after Bristol was opened to national and international ridicule over this affair, Bristol Live reports that residents of Bristol’s Cotham district have branded a hot food catering van an “appalling idea“. You couldn’t make this stuff up!

  • Post exclusive: fire brigade incident at non-existent tower block

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities

    One thing is certain about life in Bristol: it’s quite unlike living anywhere else and can sometimes be well beyond the borders of the surreal.

    This feeling is enhanced by reading the Bristol Post, city’s newspaper of (warped) record.

    Just skimming casually through the Post website, readers may easily miss some real exclusives, such as this fire brigade incident reported yesterday by Heather Pickstock, who is alleged to be the paper’s North Somerset reporter.

    As shown in the screenshot above, Ms Pickstock informs readers as follows in this fine piece of creative writing:

    screenshot of part of article

    Crews from Southmead, Temple, Kingswood, Hicks Gate, Bedminster and Pill were called at 9.46pm yesterday to reports of smoke billowing from the sixth floor of a high rise block a Littlecroft House, Pip Street, Eastville.

    There’s just one thing wrong with the above sentence: it’s completely incorrect; there’s no Pip Street in Eastville and no high rise block called Littlecroft House either.

    A research technique known to ordinary mortals, but not to Ms Pickstock, affectionately known as “5 minutes’ Googling” reveals there’s a a council tower block called Little Cross House in Phipps Street, Southville, a good four miles across the city from Eastville.

    The Bristol area can breathe a sigh of relief that Ms Pickstock does not work as a call handler on the 999 emergency switchboard. 😉

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