[HLUG] Something to think about over Christmas

[Matt Stone]

Phew, well that's givien me something a bit more interesting to think about
rather than worrying about whether the turkey is cooked or will the pudding
be ready in time :)

Firstly I hope everyone had a good christmas and best wishes to you all for
the new year.

My thoughts on the below are firmly entrenched in getting low cost, oss
soloutions out to charities in the area. At the moment I do some voluntary
work in a community centre and although they have their IT sorted with
microsoft solutions i'm sure there are plenty others that are crying out for
low cost pc access for people.

>From time to time we see people on this list offering up old hardware but
would it be possible to stick it into a pool for a group charity project? We
all know how useful linux can be at running on low spec machines and even
the lowest spec machine can still be useful (up until a couple of months ago
i had a 486 with 32mb running freesco happily doing all the routing for a 4
machine network in the house). Personally i'd like to see us being able to
kit out a centre to either allow free rural broadband access in a community
centre that could be used for all manner of purposes (job clubs, voip, video
conferencing, benefits advice etc etc) or the introduction of some kind of
rural communications link. A good example of what a bunch of hobbyists can
achieve is the Brighton metronet http://www.metranet.co.uk/index.htm Another
idea would be to provide free/low cost loan equipment and ongoing training
and support to disabled people in rural areas.

Anyways, thats my 2 penneth worth, hopefully i'll be able to come along to
the next meeeting and elaborate a bit further.

Happy new year everyone

Cheers
Matt



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "tundish" <tundish at thuswise.org.uk>
To: <herefordshire at mailman.lug.org.uk>
Sent: Friday, December 23, 2005 8:45 PM
Subject: [HLUG] Something to think about over Christmas


>
> If over the festive season you get bored with Carol Vorderman's DVD
> Cluedo and you need to escape the family members you've been avoiding
> all year, come and post on this thread about how we can use all this
energy.
>
> Right, I'm off to grab the sherry bottle. Have fun!
>
> > Cheers,
>
> Dave.