FOSS and Crafts

Blender, the absolute powerhouse of FOSS 3d (and increasingly 2d) graphics! We give an overview of the software's history, some personal history of our relationships to the software, what it can do, and where we're excited to see it go!Links:BlenderBlender historyGrease pencilSome historical Blender videos from the NeoGeo and Not a Number days: Did It, Done It, Not a Number commercial, Come and SeeElephants Dream, aka Project OrangeBig Buck BunnyPrevious 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 MorganIn Unexpected PlacesSeams 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 BlenderheadsEpisodes about lisp, because obviously Blender needs more lisp (who's going to do it):What is Lisp?Lisp but Beautiful, Lisp for Everyone

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!

WebAssembly! You've probably heard lots about it, but what the heck is 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 in WebAssembly 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

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 travel food! Maybe you want to go camping or hiking! Maybe you're sick of deciding what's for lunch and you just want to scoop 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 a dry powder into a fully cooked meal with hot water and hot water alone!Links:Making dehydrated meals overview (Christine's Kitchen 0): [YouTube] [PeerTube]Backpacking chefDishwasher cooking (yes it is a thing)

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

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 of Spritely Goblins... like time travel:Well, Terminal Phase has been Christine's fun/downtime project for the last few years, and one of the bonuses you can get for the reward tiers of donating to this podcast! And yet we've never done an episode about it! Given that a brand new (and much easier to install) release of Terminal Phase is coming out really soon, we figured now's a 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)

The Spritely Institute (of which Christine is CTO) just announced its multi-year grant by the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web and gave a tour of its current tech! This is a big moment that's been in the works for a while, as Spritely moves hands towards real stewardship by a real 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 InstituteFFDW funding announcementTech tourDonate to the Spritely Institute!FOSS & Crafts episodes about Spritely:The What is Spritely episode, where Morgan says "get in the car Christine you need to talk about your project", is the first time Christine laid out the broader (early) plans for Spritely in depth! (In that sense, FOSS & Crafts has been here for much of Spritely's journey, as many of our listeners know!)Spritely Updates! (November 2021)Less directly, Mark S. Miller on Distributed Objects, Part 1 talks about much of the tech that informs Spritely's design!Spritely Institute's jobs page which will have jobs posted on it like, real soon nowSpritely Institute is also the org that published A Scheme Primer, which we've talked about beforeFree as in Freedom has talked about how the IRS has been more cautious about granting nonprofit status to FOSS orgs in 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.orgSee the hilarious marketing videoThe Lessons of Lucasfilms Habitat is one of the most cited papers about virtual community designs of all times, and still holds up todayElectric Communities Habitat was Habitat's followup.Hard to find information on, but here's a Randy demo'ing the system from 1997!The E Programming Language, on which much of Spritely is designed, came from EC Habitat. See Mark S. Miller on Distributed Objects, Part 1 for more on that (and hey, when are we getting out part 2?)Randy co-hosts a podcast called Social Media Clarity which has some interesting episodes.See also Spritely Institute's brilliant engineer Jessica Tallon writing about her experiences and especially her pebble bank design!

The amazing Sophie Jantak joins us to talk about how she makes pet portraits (including one she made for us!) using Blender's Grease 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 source code 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 & Craft meetings 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 record this one!Links:Sophie Jantak!YouTube channel (lots of great grease pencil tutorials!)Pet commissionsPatreonSophie's beginner grease pencil tutorial: 3d bonsai paintingBlender and Grease Pencil (hybrid 2d and 3d artwork)Christine's cat comix (these were made for Morgan when she was finishing her dissertation, but maybe you'll enjoy them):1: Deadlines2: The Anxiety Cloud3: Missy's Adventures in Video Gaming4: Missy's NES cart5: Enter Kelsey the Queen6: Kelsey Claims the House for Herself7: Missy's Revenge8: Kelsey's DemandHERO, a Blender Grease Pencil ShowcaseThere are a lot of good Grease Pencil tutorials online... we'll let you find them, but this Grease Pencil Random Tips and Tricks is a nice thing to know about!FOSS & Crafts Episode 16: Bassam Kurdali on using Blender for open movie productions and education

Calling all programming language nerds! Distinguished computer scientist Mark S. Miller (presently at Agoric) joins us to tell us all about distributed object programming languages and their history! We talk about actors, a bit of Xanadu, and little known but incredibly influential programming languages like Flat Concurrent Prolog, Joule, and E!Actually there's so much to talk about that this episode is just part one! There's more to come!Links:The actor model (the core of which is sometimes distinguished from modified variants by as being called "the classic actor model"). Long history; Tony Garnock-Jones' History of Actors is maybe the cleanest writeupThe Agoric Open Systems papers by Mark Miller and Eric Drexler are a good background into the underlying motivations that got Mark into distributed objectsmarkm-talks and markm-more-talks which are mostly about object capability security topicsAPConf keynote, Architectures of Robust Openness by 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 to make cryptography available to everyone is discussed in When Encryption Was a Crime: The 1990s Battle for Free Speech in Software, part of a four part seriesRSAXanadu, Ted Nelson, and Computer Lib/Dream MachinesXerox 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 the Ode to the Granovetter Diagram paper here (it's a truly amazing document!)

Guix turns ten! We celebrate Guix's first decade by highlighting ten great things about Guix! Hear all about functional package management, time-traveling operating systems, and why "Composable DSLs" are great!Links:GuixStories about 10 years of Guix, from the Guix blogNixCool Guix features highlighted in this episode:Grafts (for security updates)guix challengeguix shell and guix environmentguix packNonguix (Proprietary! Nonfree! But sometimes some users need these things to get their computers to work...)Reproducible BuildsBootstrappable BuildsMes (see this video for an introduction)Reflections on Trusting Trust (aka the "Thompson Attack" described in the episode)virtualenv

Christine finally overcomes her fear of the sewing machine and we talk about Christine and Morgan's respective experiences learning it, and how you can pick it up too!Links:Morgan's article on Basic Sewing Patterns. Includes pictures of the dicebag and skirt! (More tutorials coming soon!)You probably know what a sewing machine is, but isn't there always more to learn?A Cultural Perspective on Gender Diversity in Computing and Building an Effective Computer Science Student Organization: The Carnegie Mellon Women@SCSAction Plan (On that note, when Christine was in college she attended a presentation by Lenore Blum about women in CS, which is where the potluck anecdote comes from.)

Morgan and Christine talk about the skills they’ve learned in their humanities backgrounds and how those have translated into their work within FOSS communities and projects. They’ll then discuss the benefits of seeking out varied skillsets within your communities, the value of looking at problems from multiple lenses, and how to use all of the tools we’ve got to promote our projects. (This episode is the audio from our SeaGL keynote of the same name!)Oh yeah, and as we said in the intro, the TinyNES campaign is going strong (see our last episode)! We met the minimum goal which means it's happening! Still a couple of weeks left (at time of writing) to get yourself an open hardware NES, but over half of the "genuine chip" ones are now sold out, so get yours while you can!Links:SeaGL, and a video of our keynote of the same nameSpritelyOkay here's Christine's old comic Lingo from nearly two decades ago, don't judge too harshly plsEmacsLaTeXRacket and Racket's picture languageMediaGoblinDigital Humanities Workshops episodeMusic Production on Guix SystemJessica Tallon and Spritely interviewFOSS Stitch episode of F&C, and ih!The Liberated Pixel CupDeb NicholsonUrchn Studios

It's time for some updates on Spritely, the project Christine founded to advance decentralized networking technology! A lot has happened since our episode about Spritely from last year (which is really where Spritely got its main public announcement)! Most notably, Jessica Tallon has joined the project thanks to a generous grant from NLNet and NGI Zero! But there's a lot more that has happened too, so listen in!ALSO! As mentioned at the end of this episode, starting with the NEXT episode, we'll begin signing off every episode by thanking donors to FOSS & Crafts Studios' Patreon! By donating you both support this podcast AND Christine's work on Spritely!Links:The Spritely ProjectFOSS & Crafts Studios' Patreon! Donate to show up in the thank-yous for upcoming episodes!The previous "What is Spritely?" of this podcastJessica Tallon joins with a grant from NLNet/NGI Zero! Plus an interview!Spritely Brux, Spritely's identity and trust management framework, which Jessica is working on (and Morgan dressed as for the costume contest)Goblin-Chat (mostly a prototype to demonstrate the underlying networking tech)Spritely Goblins, Spritely's distributed programming environment framework (and which Christine dressed as for the costume contest) (code, documentation)Work in progress port of Goblins on Guile! It's getting close!Spritely Aurie, Spritely's security-preserving runtime serialization and upgrade frameworkSafe Serialization Under Mutual Suspicion by Mark S. MillerPickling, Uneval, Unapply by Jonathan ReesOCapN, the new generation of CapTP and friends (see also What is CapTP, and what does it enable?)Coroutines, Goblins' scoped suport for them. As for why they aren't prioritized in Goblins, read up on re-entrancy attacks, including this ancient e-lang email threadGoblins' integration with Racket's asynchronous programming stuff via sync/pr (will be documented in the next tutorial version)SeaGL, where Morgan and Christine keynoted... and performed in the costume contest as the Spritely Brux and Goblins mascots!