Episodes
-
Blender, the absolute powerhouse of FOSS 3d (and increasingly 2d) graphics!We give an overview of the software's history, some personal history ofour relationships to the software, what it can do, and where we're excitedto see it go!
Links:
Blender
Blender history
Grease pencil
Some historical Blender videos from the NeoGeo and Not a Number days: Did It, Done It, Not a Number commercial, Come and See
Elephants Dream, aka Project Orange
Big Buck Bunny
Previous episodes on blender:
Blender for open movie productions and educationSophie Jantak on pet portraits and Blender's Grease PencilBlender Conference videos mentioned:
Inklines Across The SpiderverseMy Journey Across the Spider-Verse: from Hobbyist to HollywoodForensic Architecture - spatial analysis for human rights casesThe MediaGoblin campaign video (well, the second one)
14th anniversary animation gift to Morgan
In Unexpected Places
Seams to Sewing Pattern (a Blender plugin for making clothes and stuffed animals!) (could we make Free Soft Wear patterns with it?)
Wing It!
Wing It! Production Logs and Blenderheads
Episodes about lisp, because obviously Blender needs more lisp (who's going to do it):
What is Lisp?
Lisp but Beautiful, Lisp for Everyone
-
How do you survive in a world that is no longer optimized for makingyour own clothing when you suddenly find that modern conveniences nolonger accommodate you? As a textile historian, Morgan has beenruminating for years about women’s contributions to the domesticeconomy, the massive time investment of producing clothing for afamily, and the comparative properties of different textilefibers. These research interests were informed by a lifetime of sewingand other fiber crafts. None of this experience, however, properlyprepared her to face the reality of needing to rely on her own handsto provide large portions of her own wardrobe.
Guest co-host Juliana Sims sits down with Morgan to talk about how,in the wake of a recently developed allergy to synthetic fabrics, shenow finds herself putting that knowledge of historical textileproduction to use to produce clothing that she can wear.
Links and other notes:
Morgan presented this as a (much shorter) talk at the Dress Conference 2023Slides from the presentationMorgan's Dissertation, which we also coveredRSI Glove PatternThe quote that Morgan somewhat misremembered about a woman preparingwool before the winter:
"A thrifty countrywoman had a small croft, she and her sturdy spouse. He tilled his own land, whether the work called for the plough, or the curved sickle, or the hoe. She would now sweep the cottage, supported on props; now she would set the eggs to be hatched under the plumage of the brooding hen; or she gathered green mallows or white mushrooms, or warmed the low hearth with welcome fire. And yet she diligently employed her hands at the loom, and armed herself against the threats of winter." -- Ovid, Fasti 4.687-714
-
Missing episodes?
-
Back again with governance... part two!(See also: part one!)Here we talk about some organizations and how they can be seen as"templates" for certain governance archetypes.
Links:
Cygnus, CygwinMastodonAndroidFree Software Foundation, GNUSoftware Freedom Conservancy, Outreachy, Conservancy's copyleft compliance projectsCommons ConservancyF-DroidOpen CollectiveLinux Foundation501(c)(3) vs 501(c)(6)StitchtingFree as in FreedomLKML (the Linux Kernel Mailing List)Linus Doesn't ScaleSpritely Networked Communities InstitutePython and the Python Software Foundation, PyCon, the Python Package IndexPython PEPs (Python Enhancement Proposals), XMPP XEPs, Fediverse FEPs, Rust RFCsBlender, Blender Foundation, Blender Institute, Blender StudioBlender's historyElephants DreamMozilla Foundation and Mozilla CorporationDebian, Debian's organizational structure, and Debian's constitutionEFFOh yeah and I guess we should link the World History Association! -
Governance of FOSS projects, a two parter, and this is part one!Here we talk about general considerations applicable to FOSS projects!(And heck, these apply to collaborative free culture projects too!)
Links:
Why We Need Code of Conducts, and Why They're Not Enough, by Aeva BlackBlender Cloud and the Blender Development Fund -
WebAssembly! You've probably heard lots about it, but what the heckis it? Is it just for C and Rust programs? Can you write it by hand?(Do you want to?) And wait, how is Spritely getting involved inWebAssembly efforts? Find out!
Links:
WebAssemblyHoot! (and Hoot announcement, Andy Wingo joining, Robin Templeton joining)Lisp Game Jam - "Wireworld" - Hoot's low level WASM tooling in actionDirectly compiling Scheme to WebAssembly: lambdas, recursion, iteration!Understanding the WebAssembly text formatWebAssembly GC proposalEpisode 49: Lisp but Beautiful; Lisp for EveryoneWASIPOSIXEpisode 17: Gardening, from seedling to seasonedConway's Game of LifeWASM-4Episode 46: Mark S. Miller on Distributed Objects, Part 1Schism by Eric Holk -
F-Droid, a repository of free software for your Android devices!Christine interviews F-Droid developers Sylvia van Os andHans-Christoph Steiner as well as F-Droid board member and chair...Morgan Lemmer-Webber!
Links:
F-DroidSylvia van OsHans-Christoph SteinerF-Droid board announcementGuardian ProjectGoogle Play bans Matrix/ElementCatimaYour app is not compliant with Google Play Policies: A story from hell -
In yet another deep dive into yet another weird hobby of Christine's,we talk about how to make your own dehydrated meals!Why the heck would you want to do this?Well, maybe you want more consistent or dietary needs friendly travelfood!Maybe you want to go camping or hiking!Maybe you're sick of deciding what's for lunch and you just want toscoop a cup of meal out of a jar on your desk every day!Maybe you want to weird out your fellow conference-goers as you turn adry powder into a fully cooked meal with hot water and hot wateralone!
Links:
Making dehydrated meals overview (Christine's Kitchen 0):[YouTube][PeerTube]
Backpacking chef
Dishwasher cooking(yes it is a thing)
-
Morgan talks about "Free Soft Wear": textile processes under free culture licenses!
Links:
Morgan's talk about Free Soft Wear at the Creative Freedom Summit
Elena of Valhalla’s repository of CC BY-SA sewing patterns
Morgan's blog
Free Soft Wear index
Dice bag and simple skirt tutorials
RSI Glove pattern
Simple sweater
Layered Skirt
Kat Walsh or @[email protected]
Tall Dog Electronics face mask (You may recognize Dan and Tall Dog Electronics of TinyNES fame)
Wikimedia Commons
Project Gutenberg
Learning the sewing machine
RSI episode
FreeSewing (an open source software project that creates made-to-measure creative commons licensed sewing patterns)
-
Everyone goofs sometimes. Today we talk accidents... some happy, some not!
Links:
Decaf coffee and history of penicillin, your pop-sci "accidents of history" stories of the day. Look, this is admittedly kind of a fluff episode.Have we linked to Worse is Better before? We did? In the lisp episode?And here's the Terminal Phase episode -
Twitter is burning, and people are flocking to the fediverse. Is thefediverse ready though? How did we get here? Where should we begoing? Since Christine is co-author of ActivityPub, the primaryprotocol used by the fediverse, Morgan decides it's time to getChristine's thoughts recorded and out there... so we hop in the car aswe talk all about it!
Links:
ActivityPub, the protocolwhich wires the federated social web together, of which Christineis co-author! Be sure to check out theOverview section...it's actually fairly easy to understand!
Some of the implementations discussed (though there are many more):
Mastodon
Peertube
Pixelfed
Pleroma
A lot has been written about Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter.Here's a pretty decent timeline(though it's missing the transphobia stuff).
W3C Social Web Working Groupis where ActivityPub was standardized
OcapPub(while not complete, it lays out a lot of the core problems withthe way the fediverse has gone)
The Spritely Institute
Previous episodes on Spritely: What is Spritely?, Spritely Updates! (November 2021), and sorta kinda the Terminal Phase episode
The Presentation of Self on a Decentralized Web (PhD dissertation by ActivityPub co-author Amy Guy, partly covers its standardization)
SMTP and XMPP can be seen as decentralized "social networks" before that term took off
OStatus
pump.io is where the pump.io API came from, which is the direct predecessor to ActivityPub
StatusNet / GNU Social
Diaspora
MediaGoblin
APConf videos
Context Collapse
Early writeups from Christine some of these ideas, but are old:
ActivityPub: from decentralied to distributed social networks
magenc
crystal
golem
-
Terminal Phase!A space shooter that runs in your terminal!!!Who wouldn't be excited about that?
Not to mention that it shows off cool features ofSpritely Goblins...like time travel:
Well, Terminal Phase has been Christine's fun/downtime project for thelast few years, and one of the bonuses you can get for the rewardtiers of donating to this podcast! And yet we've never done anepisode about it! Given that a brand new (and much easier to install)release of Terminal Phase is coming out really soon, we figured now'sa good time to talk about it!
Links:
Terminal Phase!Blogposts about Terminal Phase!
Project announcement1.0 announcementTime travel debugging in Spritely Goblins, previewed through Terminal Phase1.1 announcementTerminal Phase was in a Polish "Linux magazine"!FOSS & Crafts' PatreonSpritely Goblins, a project of the Spritely InstituteBlast off! A tour of Spritely Institute's techRacketGuileGuix8sync (Goblins predecessor). See also the Mudsync video, on that very page.RaartSpacewar!A bit about how Spacewar lead to UNICS (later renamed Unix) -
Morgan and Christine walk through their (well, Morgan's) renovation ofa cargo van into a campervan. This is a very crafty episode, but we dowork in a few analogies to some FOSS (and open hardware) things!
Show notes at the end, but how about a quick visual van tour?
Back of the van, wide open!
A closer look...
Actually, let's move that solar panel aside...
Here's a better view of the cabinet with all the equipment attached:
Here's what the van looks like if you come in the side door:
Another, more diagonal view:
Safety first!
Window covers, custom fit! Reflectix goes out, fabric goes in.
The cabinet with the cargo net off...
And one more view!
Links:
Cheap RV Living channel on YouTubeVanlife subredditBuilt to Go! A #Vanlife PodcastForesty Forest -
The Spritely Institute(of which Christine is CTO) justannounced its multi-year grantby the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Weband gave a tour of its current tech!This is a big moment that's been in the works for a while, asSpritely moves hands towards real stewardship by areal nonprofit!
Also also! The video recording of the Lisp/Scheme workshop(based on A Scheme Primer) is released!Unlock Lisp / Scheme's magic: beginner to Scheme-written-in-Scheme in one hour!(PeerTube, YouTube, )
Links:
Spritely Networked Communities Institute
FFDW funding announcement
Tech tour
Donate to the Spritely Institute!
FOSS & Crafts episodes about Spritely:
The What is Spritelyepisode, where Morgan says "get in the car Christine you need totalk about your project", is the first time Christine laid out thebroader (early) plans for Spritely in depth! (In that sense,FOSS & Crafts has been here for much of Spritely's journey, as manyof our listeners know!)
Spritely Updates! (November 2021)
Less directly,Mark S. Miller on Distributed Objects, Part 1talks about much of the tech that informs Spritely's design!
Spritely Institute's jobs pagewhich will have jobs posted on it like, real soon now
Spritely Institute is also the org that publishedA Scheme Primer,which we've talked about before
Free as in Freedom has talked about how the IRShas been more cautious about granting nonprofit status to FOSS orgsin Episode 0x4E (IRS Refusal Redux)
Some background about Randy Farmer (Spritely Institute's Executive Director):
Randy co-founded Lucasfilm's Habitat,the world's first graphical massively multiplayer virtual world,which ran on the Commodore 64 in 1985 (!!!)
Revival over at neohabitat.org
See the hilariousmarketing video
The Lessons of Lucasfilms Habitatis one of the most cited papers about virtual community designsof all times, and still holds up today
Electric Communities Habitat was Habitat's followup.
Hard to find information on, but here's aRandy demo'ing the system from 1997!
The E Programming Language,on which much of Spritely is designed, came from EC Habitat.SeeMark S. Miller on Distributed Objects, Part 1for more on that (and hey, when are we getting out part 2?)
Randy co-hosts a podcast calledSocial Media Claritywhich has some interesting episodes.
See also Spritely Institute's brilliant engineer Jessica Tallonwriting about her experiencesand especially herpebble bank design!
-
Morgan's out sick! And yet Morgan is still in this episode!And that's because this episode is the audio version ofa talk by the very same name from FOSDEM 2022,co-presented by Christine and Morgan!But since Morgan isn't here, Christine fills in, and also getsa bit silly.
HACK AND CRAFT SCHEME TUTORIALS!The last live scheme tutorial went really well!And relatedly, Christine and the Spritely Institute just publishedA Scheme Primer,which is more or less the text version of that presentation!The next live verison of the sheme tutorial will be hosted atHack & Craft!Come this Saturday,July 16, 2pm-4pm ET (6pm-8pm UTC)!We're planning to record this one!
Oh, and bonus Fructure gif:
Links:
The video version of this talk
Episode 47: What is Lisp?
Wisp and its associatedSRFI-119
Fructure!!!Watch the amazing RacketCon talk!
-
The amazing Sophie Jantak joins us totalk about how she makes pet portraits (including one she made for us!)using Blender'sGrease Pencil.Hear about Sophie's process, why Grease Pencil is the right tool for her,and what her collalboration process is like on pet portrait commissions!(And yes, you can commission Sophie tool!)
BONUS FREE CULTURAL SOURCE CONTENT!We've collectively decided to release this artwork's sourcecode as a free cultural work!Get the .blend (CC BY-SA 4.0)!
HACK AND CRAFT SCHEME TUTORIALS!Also a reminder, we'll be hosting two versions of a "Intro to Scheme"tutorial during the two Hack & Craftmeetings this month!
July 2nd, 8pm-10pm ET (12am-2am UTC): First trial run of Scheme tutorial!July 16, 2pm-4pm ET (6pm-8pm UTC): Second version, we're planning to recordthis one!Links:
Sophie Jantak!
YouTube channel (lots of great grease pencil tutorials!)
Pet commissions
Patreon
Sophie's beginner grease pencil tutorial: 3d bonsai painting
Blender and Grease Pencil (hybrid 2d and 3d artwork)
Christine's cat comix (these were made for Morgan when she wasfinishing her dissertation, but maybe you'll enjoy them):
1: Deadlines
2: The Anxiety Cloud
3: Missy's Adventures in Video Gaming
4: Missy's NES cart
5: Enter Kelsey the Queen
6: Kelsey Claims the House for Herself
7: Missy's Revenge
8: Kelsey's Demand
HERO, a Blender Grease Pencil Showcase
There are a lot of good Grease Pencil tutorials online...we'll let you find them, but thisGrease Pencil Random Tips and Tricksis a nice thing to know about!
FOSS & Crafts Episode 16: Bassam Kurdali on using Blender for open movie productions and education
-
This episode is all about theLispfamily of programming languages!Ever looked at Lisp and wondered why so many programmers gush aboutsuch a weird looking programming language style?What's with all those parentheses?Surely there must be something you get out of them for so manyprogramming nerds to gush about the language!We do a light dive into Lisp's history, talk about what makes Lispso powerful, and nerd out about the many, many kinds of Lisps outthere!
Announcement: Christine is gonna give an intro-to-Scheme tutorialat our next Hack & Craft!Saturday July 2nd, 2022 at 20:00-22:00 ET!Come and learn some Scheme with us!
Links:
Various histories of Lisp:
History of Lisp by John McCarthy
The Evolution of Lisp by Guy L. Steele and Richard P. Gabriel
History of LISP by Paul McJones
William Byrd'sThe Most Beautiful Program Ever Writtendemonstrates just how easy it is to write lisp in lisp, showing off thekernel of evaluation living at every modern programming language!
M-expressions (the original math-notation-vision for users to operate on) vs S-expressions (the structure Lisp evaluators actually operate at, in direct representational mirror of the typically, but not necessarily, parenthesized representation of the same).
Lisp-1 vs Lisp-2... well, rather than give a simple link and analysis,have a thorough one.
Lisp machines
MIT's CADR was thesecond iteration of the lisp machine, and the most influentialon everything to come. Then everything split when two separatecompanies implemented it...
Lisp Machines, Incorporated (LMI),founded by famous hacker Richard Greenblatt, who aimed to keepthe MIT AI Lab hacker culture alive by only hiring programmerspart-time.
Symbolics was theother rival company. Took venture capital money, was acommercial success for quite a while.
These systems were very interesting, there's more to them thanjust the rivalry. But regarding that, the bookHackers(despite its issues)captures quite a bit about the AI lab before this and then itssplit, including a ton of Lisp history.
Some interesting things happening over at lisp-machine.org
The GNU manifestiomentions Lisp quite a bit, including that the plan was for thesystem to be mostly C and Lisp.
Worse is Better,including the original(but the first of those two links provides a lot of context)
The AI winter.Bundle up, lispers!
Symbolics' Mac Ivory
RISC-V tagged architecture, plus this lowRISC tagged memory tutorial. (We haven't read these yet, but they're on the reading queue!)
Scheme
There's a lot of these... we recommend Guileif you're interested in using Emacs (along with Geiser), and Racket if you're looking for a more gentle introduction (DrRacket, which ships with Racket, is a friendly introduction)
The R5RS and R7RS-small specs are very short and easy to read especially
See this section of the Guile manual for a bit of... history
Common Lisp...which, yeah there are multiple implementations, but these daysreally means SBCL withSly or SLIME
Clojure introduced functionaldatastructures to the masses (okay, maybe not the masses). Neatstuff, though not a great license choice (even if technically FOSS)in our opinion and Rich Hickey kindablew up his communityso maybe use something else these days.
Hy, always hy-larious
Fennel, cutest lil' Lua Lisp you've ever seen
Webassembly's text syntax isn'ttechnically a Lisp, but let's be honest... is it technicallynot a Lisp either?!
Typed Racket andHackett
Emacs... Lisp?... well let's just give you the tutorial!The dreams of the 60s-80s are alive in Emacs.
The Many Faces of an Undying Programming Languageis a nice little tour of some well known Lisps.
Actually, wejust did an episode about Emacs,didn't we?
Digital Humanities Workshops episode
We guess if you wanted to use Racket and VS Code, you could use Magic Racket?!We dunno, we've never used VS Code! (Are we out of touch?!)
What about for Guile?! Someone put some energy intoGuile Studio!
Hack & Craft!
-
Calling all programming language nerds! Distinguished computerscientist Mark S. Miller (presently at Agoric)joins us to tell us all about distributed object programming languagesand their history! We talk about actors, a bit of Xanadu, and littleknown but incredibly influential programming languages like FlatConcurrent Prolog, Joule, and E!
Actually there's so much to talk about that this episode is just partone! There's more to come!
Links:
The actor model(the core of which is sometimes distinguished from modified variantsby as being called "the classic actor model"). Long history;Tony Garnock-Jones' History of Actorsis maybe the cleanest writeup
TheAgoric Open Systems papersby Mark Miller and Eric Drexler are a good background into theunderlying motivations that got Mark into distributed objects
markm-talksandmarkm-more-talkswhich are mostly about object capability security topics
APConf keynote, Architectures of Robust Opennessby Mark S. Miller (YouTube copy)
Mark diagraming a (certificate based) object capabilities flow at Rebooting Web of Trust 2017 (when Mark and Christine first met!)
The history of Mark and company performing civil disobediance tomake cryptography available to everyone is discussed inWhen Encryption Was a Crime: The 1990s Battle for Free Speech in Software,part of a four part series
RSA
Xanadu,Ted Nelson,and Computer Lib/Dream Machines
Xerox PARC, which is where the Vulcan group happened (which is hard to find information on, sadly).
Mark mentions some of his colleagues who worked with him in the Vulcan group, including Dean Tribble (who worked on Joule, see more below) and Danny Bobrow who is famous for his groundbreaking program STUDENT (Natural Language Input for a Computer Proglem Solving System is an incredible read, detailing a program (written in lisp!) which could read algebra "word problems" written in plain English and solve them... in 1964!).
Flat Concurrent Prolog... it's tough to find things about! Presumably here's the paper Mark mentioned that Dean lead on Flat Concurrent Prolog from the Vulcan group which lead to Joule's channels. A bit more on (go figure) erights.org!
The Joule manual is still a very interesting read, if you can find the time. Talks about channels in depth.
Here's the Communicating Sequential Processes book by Tony Hoare, quite a nerdy read!
On capabilities and actors... we'll get to this more in the next episode,but for now we'll leave theOde to the Granovetter Diagrampaper here (it's a truly amazing document!)
-
In this episode we give a very (very) high level introduction tocryptography concepts. No math or programming background required!
Links:
Crypto 101,probably the BEST book for learning about cryptography concepts.And a relevant talk from PyCon!
We mentionedRSA,which is the first publicly published algorithm for public keycryptography. These days most public key cryptography useselliptic curvesinstead. It's possible that inthe future, something else will be recommended instead!
Playing around with GnuPG can be a great way to learn aboutcryptography as a user, but... it's also not the easiest thing tolearn either, and we don't personally believe that GPG/PGP's web oftrust model is a realistic path for user security. (But what werecommend instead, that's a topic for a future episode.) Still,a useful tool in all sorts of ways.
Mixing and matching these things at a low level can be tricky,and unexpected vulnerabilities can easily occur.Cryptographic Right Answershas been a useful page, but the cryptography world keeps moving!
-
Guix turns ten!We celebrate Guix's first decadeby highlighting ten great things about Guix!Hear all about functional package management, time-traveling operating systems,and why "Composable DSLs" are great!
Links:
Guix
Stories about 10 years of Guix, from the Guix blog
Nix
Cool Guix features highlighted in this episode:
Grafts (for security updates)
guix challenge
guix shell and guix environment
guix pack
Nonguix (Proprietary! Nonfree! But sometimes some users need these things to get their computers to work...)
Reproducible Builds
Bootstrappable Builds
Mes (see this video for an introduction)
Reflections on Trusting Trust (aka the "Thompson Attack" described in the episode)
virtualenv
-
This week we’re talking about Repetitive Strain Injuries(RSI). Christine and Morgan tell their stories bout over-using theirwrists from programming (prodded along by an injury) and writingacademic papers respectively. We discuss what you can do to treat orminimize the effects of these injuries then cap it off with adiscussion of RSI gloves including Morgan'sFree Soft Wear RSI glove pattern.
Repetitive Strain InjuriesMorgan's RSI gloves articleYour Wrists Hurt, You Must Be a ProgrammerIt's Not Carpal Tunnel Syndrome book (there are probably better resources out there now, this is what Christine read a decade ago)WorkraveSome RSI exercises that Christine thought were effective (old, but archived on internet archive... Christine still uses them sometimes) - Show more
