Tech

  • Openwords on Kickstarter

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Open Data, Open Source, Tech

    Openwords, the foreign language learning app for the world’s open language data the world’s under-served languages, which was reported on some weeks ago by this blog (posts passim), recently launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter.

    At the time of writing the Kickstarter campaign has 16 days to go and aims to raise $10,000 to take the project to the next stage.

    Foreign language learning with open data

    There are millions of people around the world who can’t learn the languages in which they’re interested.

    While the learning of major languages like Chinese, Spanish and French are supported by large companies, these firms tend to ignore lesser-known languages.

    Openwords is doing things differently to solve this problem. Openwords is mining data from the public domain assets like the Wiktionary to provide educational content for all the languages, large and small.

    Openwords graphic

    So far Openwords has mined data for 1,000 languages.

    The Openwords app has various learning modules for vocabulary, hearing, typing, amongst others. In addition, the Openwords developers are working on simple sentence translation problems. Furthermore, learners have control over the content they want to learn.

    Openwords on mobile phone

    Finally, Openwords will be an open source project.

    The aim of the Kickstarter campaign is to raise $10,000, which will be enough to develop a beta model of the Openwords app.

  • Debian 8 released

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Linux, Open Source, Tech

    Debian logoYesterday Debian announced the release of Debian 8, codenamed ‘Jessie’ as the latest stable release of this popular GNU/Linux distribution.

    The release will receive support and updates for the next 5 years and has been in development for the last 24 months.

    “Jessie” ships with a new default init system, systemd. The systemd suite provides many exciting features such as faster boot times, cgroups for services, and the possibility of isolating part of the services. The sysvinit init system is still available in “Jessie”.

    The UEFI (“Unified Extensible Firmware Interface”) support introduced in the previous stable release (“Wheezy”) has also been greatly improved in Jessie. This includes workarounds for many known firmware bugs, support for UEFI on 32-bit systems, and support for 64-bit kernels with 32-bit UEFI firmware (with the latter being included only on Debian’s amd64/i386 “multi-arch” installation media).

    It’s not just the Debian project’s developers that have been working hard for the release of “Jessie”. Thanks to the huge efforts of translators working on localisation, Debian can now be installed in 75 languages.

    Trying Jessie

    If you want to try Debian 8 “Jessie” without having to install it, you can use a special image, known as a live image, available for CDs, USB sticks, and network booting set-ups. For the time being, these images are provided for the amd64 and i386 architectures only. It is also possible to use these live images to install Debian. More information is available on the Debian Live homepage.

    Upgrading

    Those wishing to upgrade to Debian 8 from a previous version, such as Debian 7 “Wheezy”, are strongly advised to read the release notes as well as the installation guide for possible issues, plus detailed instructions on installing and upgrading.

    Your correspondent has been using “Jessie” on a 5 year-old laptop for the last year (posts passim), i.e from about halfway through its time as Debian’s testing stable version and has found it to be fast, stable and reliable.

    In other Debian news, the first release of the new version of Debian Edu, the special education-related distribution, based on Debian 8 “Jessie” is now in beta.

  • Stretch: the next Debian testing stable version

    Steve WoodsLinux, Media, Open Source, Tech

    Debian logoWith Debian 8, codenamed ‘jessie’, currently frozen and due for release as the next stable release at the end of April (posts passim), many may have been wondering what the next Debian testing stable release will be.

    However, this particular question has now been answered. Writing on reddit, user dimitrifromparis has revealed the next character from the Toy Story series of films to be used as a Debian release codename.

    After the jessie release, there will be a new release codename, “stretch”, and testing will be an alias for that.

    See the Debian wiki for an overview of past Debian production release codenames.

    Besides testing stable, Debian also has a testing unstable version, named sid. Sid is never released as such and is named after Sidney, the boy next door in Toy Story who always broke his toys. Needless to say, Debian sid is definitely not recommended for production environments.

  • The Wild Wild Bristol West Hustings

    Steve WoodsBristol, Politics, Tech

    ORG logoOn Friday 24th April 2015, the Open Rights Group is supporting the Wild Wild Bristol West Hustings, a chance for local voters to quiz the candidates for the Bristol West constituency – rated by commentators as either a 2-way or 3-way marginal constituency.

    The event will be from 7.00 p.m. to 10.00 p.m. and its venue is Bristol University’s Wills Memorial Building, Park Street, Bristol BS8 1RJ (map).

    In alphabetical order, the candidates attending as this post goes to press include:

    More information about the prospective Bristol West MPs is available at http//meetyournextmp.com/event/646-wild-wild-bristol-west-your-future.

    The event is free, but in order to allocate spaces fairly, you’ll have to register via EventBrite.

    The event is being supported by ORG Bristol as part of the organisers, the Greater Bristol Alliance, a coalition of local campaign groups.

    Reposted from Bristol Wireless.

  • Hungarian universities adopt ODF

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news site, reports that Eötvös University and Szeged University in Hungary are increasing their use of Open Document Format (ODF).

    Between them the 2 universities have some 45,000 students.

    ODF logoIn addition, both universities have also signed licences with MultiRáció of Budapest for the deployment and support of 34,000 copies of EuroOffice, a free and open source office suite developed especially for the Hungarian market, but based on both major free and open source suites, LibreOffice and OpenOffice. EuroOffice is available in 2 versions – free and professional – for both Windows and Linux. It can also be installed in 7 languages – English (US variant), German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish and Hungarian – which MultiRáció claims are the native languages of 85% of the EU’s population.

    The Hungarian government decided to promote the use of both EuroOffice and ODF in schools and universities in 2014. MultiRáció’s senior software developer Kázmér Koleszár described these initiatives as “an important policy change”, given that the country’s public sector had been reliant on MS Office for the preceding 15 years.

    MultiRáció is actively involved in the ODF specification, being a member of OASIS, a non-profit consortium promoting the development, convergence and adoption of open standards for the global information society.

  • LibreOffice native language projects

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

    Although the majority of the development for LibreOffice, the world’s most popular free and open source office productivity suite, takes place in English, this doesn’t preclude non-English speakers from being involved.

    LibreOffice about window

    There’s always help needed on the localisation project, which relies on the work of the Native Language projects.

    Native Language projects are worldwide communities of LibreOffice volunteers contributing to the project in their own, native language. The Native Language projects contribute everything from localisation, testing of the localised versions of LibreOffice, users support, local promotion, documentation and much more.

    A list of available Native Language projects is posted on the Native Language projects home page and visitors are also encouraged to establish new Native Language communities.

  • Calibre 2.23 released

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Open Source, Tech

    Softpedia reports that the Calibre eBook reader, editor and library management package has been updated to version 2.23.

    The full list of changes since the last release can be seen in the changelog.

    screenshot of Calibre

    One of the major changes is the updating of the Qt cross-platform application framework bundled with Calibre to 5.4.1. This fixes various minor bugs, most notably improving text rendering on machines running Linux.

    Furthermore, the new release of Calibre now allows users to add an empty ebook in various formats to existing book records. What is more, the ability to create additional empty formats to the ‘Add empty book’ command has been implemented.

    Calibre 2.23 is available for download for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

    If you’re on a Linux machine like me, your easiest way to update Calibre to the latest version is via the command line by running the following command as root:

    wget -nv -O- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kovidgoyal/calibre/master/setup/linux-installer.py | sudo python -c "import sys; main=lambda:sys.stderr.write('Download failed\n'); exec(sys.stdin.read()); main()"

    This sets the process in motion and you’ll have the new Calibre installed in no time.

    downloading and updating Calibre via command line

  • Plastic peregrine

    Steve WoodsBristol, Oddities, Social Media, Tech

    peregrine falcon image
    Peregrine falcon
    Yesterday it was a joy to discover that the peregrine falcons which nested on the old generator house by St Philip’s Bridge were nesting there again (posts passim). Talking to a gentleman on the bridge who’d been watching them through binoculars, it would appear our urban peregrines are also adapting to our urban environment and are also learning to hunt after sunset using the city’s streetlighting.

    A couple of weeks ago, my attention was caught by peregrine calls when walking down Redcliff Street. They weren’t emanating from a falcon at all, but it’s taken your correspondent until now to track down their source. Looking up at the roof of the old, soon to be redeveloped Patterson’s building, I saw the sight below.

    fake peregrine

    Note the electric wire and turntable. It’s a plastic peregrine which looks very realistic to the local gull population. It rotates on its turntable, flaps its wings and also calls like a real falcon from time to time. It won’t fool me again.

    Update 09/04/15: Today I discovered the Redcliff Street plastic peregrine has a brother not far away in the city. He’s called Brian, lives on the roof of At-Bristol and has a Twitter account.

  • Evolve OS changes name to Solus

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Politics, Tech

    This blog reported yesterday that the developers of the Evolve OS Linux desktop operating system had received a letter from lawyers acting for the UK’s Department for Business, Innovation & Skills informing them that BIS’ OS trade mark was being infringed and that the developers would have to pick a new name.

    Evolve OS screenshot

    Ikey Doherty of the development team has now posted the following statement on Google+:

    Thank you, everyone for helping us in the naming process! In that time, one name cropped up time and time again. A name we do own, and one indicative of our history and roots. Most importantly, the longevity, history and direct, traceable link of this name provides absolute and irrefutable evidence of prior art, and all rights to the name within this context. We have purchased solus-project.com and solus-project.net. Thus, Evolve OS will now be known (once again) as Solus. The full name for the operating system component of the project (i.e. the Linux distro) is Solus Operating System – the entirety of the project is the Solus Project.

  • LibreOffice 4.4.2 released

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

    The Document Foundation has today announced the release of LibreOffice 4.4.2, the second minor release of the LibreOffice 4.4 “fresh” family, with over 50 fixes compared with LibreOffice 4.4.0 and 4.4.1.

    LibreOffice about window

    New features introduced by the LibreOffice 4.4 family are listed in the release notes.

    The Document Foundation suggests to deploy LibreOffice in enterprises and large organizations when backed by professional support by certified people, of whom the Foundation maintains a list.

    People interested in technical details about the release can see the changelogs for the bugs fixed in RC1 and bugs fixed in RC2 respectively.

    Download LibreOffice

    LibreOffice 4.4.2 is immediately available for download from http://www.libreoffice.org/download/.

    LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation. Money collected will be used to improve the project’s infrastructure and support marketing activities to increase the awareness of the project at both global and local levels.

    I’ve been using version 4.4.2 for a while now since I downloaded a pre-release development build (version 4.4.2.2) and have found it both stable and easy to use.

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