“What’s that Gromit, people have been visiting Lawrence Hill to see you in your Lodekka livery, looking like an old-style Bristol Bus Company bus in British racing green?”
Gromit attracts a crowd
“Cracking!”
Here in BS5, we’re very pleased to have one of the Gromit sculptures placed around the city as part of Gromit Unleashed – a public art exhibition in which giant sculptures of Gromit, decorated by invited artists, have been unleashed on the streets of Bristol and the surrounding area.
At the end of the art trail, the sculptures will be auctioned to raise funds for Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Appeal, the Bristol Children’s Hospital charity.
It’s always a good idea to keep one’s ears open walking around the city – or anywhere for that matter.
Yesterday lunchtime when crossing St Philips Bridge (below) my ears heard a real treat – a peregrine falcon in the heart of Bristol.
St Philips Bridge and the former Bristol Tramways power station. Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Peregrine falconFollowing the sound, I spotted the peregrine perched on a ledge near the top of the old Bristol Tramways power station, the building whose end is covered in scaffolding in the picture.
I’ve seen peregrines before near Bristol, particularly down the Avon Gorge, where I’ve spotted them nesting in the Gorge’s old quarries, but never before in the heart of the city.
Naturally, I was quite excited by this and asked Bristol’s Twitter users how unusual this was. After a couple of hours, I received a reply from naturalist and broadcaster Ed Drewitt, who informed me there was a “family of 3 chicks around Cabot Circus way” (they might help keep the city centre’s gull and feral pigeon population under control. Ed.).
Around my home patch of Easton I have over the years seen both sparrowhawks and kestrels, whilst moving further afield the patchwork of open grassland and woodland on Purdown and Stoke Park is ideal buzzard territory.
Finally, there’s one bird of prey I believe I’d heard that I’d really love someone else to corroborate. Returning home some years ago, I could have sworn I heard a tawny owl hooting in the vicinity of the railway embankment between Stapleton Road and Lawrence Hill railway stations. If anyone else has heard hooting there too, I’ll know I wasn’t imagining things. 🙂
Nearly one in two French citizens takes a computer on holiday to connect to the internet, reports Le Monde Informatique.
A survey has revealed that 47.2% of the French may take a computer on holiday this summer, with a peak of 60% in the 18-24 years old group. A majority of them plan to use the computer for an average half an hour a day (46.1% between 30 minutes and 1 hour; 17.3% more than one hour).
Once connected, 87.5% of holidaymakers will use their computer to surf the internet, 57.6% for leisure (watching films or listening to music), 37.4% for saving or retouching their photographs and 19.8% for work.
Although 91.2% of holidaymakers will be connecting from where they are staying (hotel, rented accommodation, camp site), 29.8% also want to make use of places offering wifi connections, 11.7% for surfing while travelling and 4.2% are even going to be brave enough to use their computer on the beach. A majority of them (64.3%) also complain regularly of the lack of wifi or its poor quality.
Even though the majority of holidaymakers (71.9%) give priority to relaxing during summer, spending time in front of a computer or another device has now become a priority form almost one in 10 French citizens (9.3%).
This survey was conducted by Easy Panel for Crucial.fr via the internet from 23rd to 26th April 2013 using a sample of 1,015 people owning a computer and representative of the French population.
The phrase “to spend a penny”, meaning to use a public lavatory, has its origins in the use of coin-operated locks on public toilets in the UK. When these were first introduced, the fee for use was normally one penny (1d); and it stayed at that level for decades, well into the second half of the twentieth century.
However, the cost of being caught short and having to use a public lavatory has undergone a massive inflationary rise if a report in today’s Bristol Post is to be believed.
Pictured above is an old English bank note with a face value of 10 shillings; that’s equivalent to 240 pence.
The Bristol Post report states that people could be charged up to 50p (that’s ten shillings in old money. Ed.) to spend a penny in a new block of town centre toilets in Portishead, which could cost up to £40,000 to build.
The Post quotes Portishead Town Council Clerk Jo Duffy as follows on the likely cost of spending a penny:
There would be a charge levied for using the toilets, which could be up to 50 pence per visit. However the town council is keen to keep the charge at a lower level of around 20 pence if possible.
Even 20 pence for a pee is extortionate, in my opinion.
This blog has covered the peculiarities of life in North Somerset before now (posts passim) and at least one person leaving a comment on the Post report feels relieved he’s not a resident:
Every day I wake up and thank the Lord that I don’t live in North Somerset.
The Mayflower is a steam tug preserved by Bristol Museums Galleries & Archives. She is based in the City Docks outside the M Shed. She is the oldest Bristol-built ship still afloat and is believed to be the oldest surviving tug in the world.
She was launched on 18th May 1861, cost £1,000 and was built to work on the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal and the River Severn.
This week she’s not afloat at all, but high and dry on the patent slipway of the Underfall Yard undergoing some maintenance and is due to remain there for the next week, as I gathered on Friday evening.
Tux – the Linux kernel mascotOne item I missed from my list of highs on last week’s Barncamp post was hearing Naomi from Sheffield recite the Linux Lord’s Prayer she’d devised many years earlier; I first heard Naomi recite it round the campfire in June 2010. This year at Barncamp, Naomi performed it on stage during the Open Mic session on Saturday night.
The prayer is reproduced below for those you have yet to come across it. I hope you enjoy it.
Our father, who art in /sbin,
init is thy name.
Thy PID is 1;
Thy children run
In user space as they do in kernel.
Give us this day our daily RAM
And forgive us our interrupts
As we are nice to those who interrupt us.
Lead us not into uncaught exception
And deliver us from SIGKILL
For thine is the system
And thou art the saviour
For ever and ever – until we upgrade yer!
Vater Unser, der Du da bist in /sbin,
init ist Dein Name.
Deine PID ist 1,
Deine Kinder laufen
Im Benutzermodus wie auch im Kernel.
Unser tägliches RAM gib uns heute
Und vergib uns unsere Unterbrechungen
Wie auch wir vergeben unseren Unterbrechern.
Und führe uns nicht in unbehandelte Ausnahmen
Und erlöse uns von dem SIGKILL
Denn Dein ist das System
Und die Kraft und die Herrlichkeit
In Ewigkeit – Bis wir Dich updaten!
Fedora, the community spin-off of Red Hat Linux, has announced the release of Pidora – a special remix of Fedora for the Raspberry Pi, as follows:
Pidora 18 (Raspberry Pi Fedora Remix) Release
We’re excited to announce the release of Pidora 18 – an optimized Fedora Remix for the Raspberry Pi. It is based on a brand new build of Fedora for the ARMv6 architecture with greater speed and includes packages from the Fedora 18 package set.
* * *
There are some interesting new features we’d like to highlight:
Almost all of the Fedora 18 package set available via yum (thousands of packages were built from the official Fedora repository and made available online)
Compiled specifically to take advantage of the hardware already built into the Raspberry Pi
Graphical firstboot configuration (with additional modules specifically made for the Raspberry Pi)
Compact initial image size (for fast downloads) and auto-resize (for maximum storage afterwards)
Auto swap creation available to allow for larger memory usage
C, Python, & Perl programming languages available & included in the SD card image
Initial release of headless mode can be used with setups lacking a monitor or display
IP address information can be read over the speakers and flashed with the LED light
For graphical operation, Gedit text editor can be used with plugins (python console, file manager, syntax highlighting) to serve as a mini-graphical IDE
For console operation, easy-to-use text editors are included (nled, nano, vi) plus Midnight Commander for file management
Includes libraries capable of supporting external hardware such as motors and robotics (via GPIO, I2C, SPI)
Unfortunately for Fedora, Pidora has a rather embarrassing meaning to some: in Russian, “pidora” is a derogatory word for a male homosexual. As a consequence, the following announcement has been posted on the Pidora website:
It has come to our attention that the Pidora name bears an unfortunate similarity to another word in Russian, and this has offended some community members and amused others.
Please accept our apologies for any offence caused. Our goal was to simply associate “Pi” (from Raspberry Pi) and “Fedora” (from the Fedora Project).
We are actively seeking a broadly-acceptable alternative Russian name in consultation with some community members, and will post more information shortly.
Despite its long and fascinating history, Bristol has had a reputation over time of being the graveyard of dreams. Some dreams assume concrete form and it is the lack of concrete – or any other building materials – that are the subject of local author Eugene Byrne’s new book ‘Unbuilt Bristol’, which is published today by Redcliffe Press at a very reasonable £15.00.
Unbuilt Bristol is described as ‘The city that might have been 1750-2050’. As regards the book’s content, Eugene writes:
While all your old favourites are there (all the other proposals for a bridge over the Avon Gorge, the insane 1960s/70s plan to fill in the Floating Harbour and cover it in roads etc.) there are plenty more which you won’t have heard of. Like the Victorian scheme to put Bristol’s main railway station in Queen Square, or a visionary 19th century plan to run the city’s street lighting using power generated by the rise and fall of the river Avon.
And it’s the latter idea – that visionary 19th century plan to run the city’s streetlights on tidal power from the Avon that forms the subject of this post.
River Avon – the power behind the city of Bristol. Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
The project to generate electricity from the Avon to run Bristol’s streetlights is described in Charles Wells’ A short history of the Port of Bristol’, which was published in 1909 and is available free from the Internet Archive. Regarding the amount of tidal power available and the fate of the project itself, Wells wrote:
…when proposals were first brought before the city for the introduction of electric light (November, 1881), Mr. Smith secured the appointment of a committee to consider an interesting scheme for utilising the great power of the tide in the river Avon for generating the electricity. Mr. Smith said he believed by this method a saving of about £6,000 per annum could be effected compared with the cost of generation in the ordinary way. Prof. Silvanus P. Thompson, who was on the staff of Bristol University College, had made calculations (upon data supplied by Mr. T. Howard, Dock Engineer) showing that the available tidal power at Totterdown was over 6 billions of foot pounds per annum, equal to 279,389 h.p. per tide. At Rownham the power was three times greater, and at Avonmouth over 2,000,000 h.p. per tide. To light by electricity the 4,274 street lamps then in the city would require from 4 billions to 2 billions of foot pounds per annum according to the system adopted. There was, however, no practical result from the appointment of the committee, and in March 1891 the Corporation voted £66,000 for the beginning of the present installation with an ordinary power station on Temple Backs.
Where it meets the Severn estuary at Avonmouth, the Bristol Avon has a tidal range of 15 m (49 ft), the second largest in the world, only being beaten by the Bay of Fundy in eastern Canada.
Given the present concerns about burning fossil fuels and carbon emissions, perhaps it is time to revisit generating electricity from the Bristol Avon, although one factor that could prove a disadvantage is the heavy load of silt sloshing up and down the river with every tide.
Nearly one in two French citizens takes a computer on holiday to connect to the internet, 
