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: 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...

How do you survive in a world that is no longer optimized for making your own clothing when you suddenly find that modern conveniences no longer accommodate you? As a textile historian, Morgan has been ruminating for years about women’s contributions to the domestic economy, the massive time investment of producing clothing for a family, and the comparative properties of different textile fibers....

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 , Cygwin Mastodon Android Free Software Foundation , GNU Software Freedom Conservancy , Outreachy , Conservancy's copyleft compliance projects Commons Conservancy F-Droid Open Collective Linux Foundat...

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 Black Blender Cloud and the Blender Development Fund

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: WebAssembly Hoot! (and Hoot announcement , Andy Wingo joining , Robin Templeton joining ) Lisp Game Jam - "Wireworld" - Hoot's low level WASM tooling i...

F-Droid, a repository of free software for your Android devices! Christine interviews F-Droid developers Sylvia van Os and Hans-Christoph Steiner as well as F-Droid board member and chair... Morgan Lemmer-Webber! Links: F-Droid Sylvia van Os Hans-Christoph Steiner F-Droid board announcement Guardian Project Google Play bans Matrix/Element Catima Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies:...

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 d...

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 @kat@stareinto.space Tall Dog Electronics...

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 the fediverse ready though? How did we get here? Where should we be going? Since Christine is co-author of ActivityPub, the primary protocol used by the fediverse, Morgan decides it's time to get Christine's thoughts recorded and out there... so we hop in the car as we talk all about it! Links: ActivityPub , the protocol which wires...

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...

Morgan and Christine walk through their (well, Morgan's) renovation of a cargo van into a campervan. This is a very crafty episode, but we do work 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 wit...

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 re...

Morgan's out sick! And yet Morgan is still in this episode! And that's because this episode is the audio version of a 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 gets a bit silly. HACK AND CRAFT SCHEME TUTORIALS! The last live scheme tutorial went really well! And relatedly, Christine and the Spritely...

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 r...

This episode is all about the Lisp family of programming languages! Ever looked at Lisp and wondered why so many programmers gush about such a weird looking programming language style? What's with all those parentheses? Surely there must be something you get out of them for so many programming nerds to gush about the language! We do a light dive into Lisp's history, talk about what makes Lisp so p...

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 ep...

In this episode we give a very (very) high level introduction to cryptography 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 mentioned RSA , which is the first publicly published algorithm for public key cryptography. These days most public key cryptography uses elliptic...

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: 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...

This week we’re talking about Repetitive Strain Injuries (RSI). Christine and Morgan tell their stories bout over-using their wrists from programming (prodded along by an injury) and writing academic papers respectively. We discuss what you can do to treat or minimize the effects of these injuries then cap it off with a discussion of RSI gloves including Morgan's Free Soft Wear RSI glove pattern ....

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...

Morgan finally overcomes her fear of Emacs and we talk about Morgan and Christine's respective experiences learning it, and how you can pick it up too! Our talks tomorrow at FOSDEM 's Declarative and Minimalistic Computing room: Lisp but Beautiful; Lisp for Everyone Spritely Goblins Comes to Guile Switching capslock and ctrl stuff: (it's a great idea even if you don't use Emacs; many keyboards use...

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 episod...

Dan Gilbert of Tall Dog joins us to talk about the Tiny Nostalgia Evocation Square (or TinyNES for short) ! The TinyNES is an open hardware system compatible with the compatible with original Nintendo Entertainment System and Famicom cartridges and controllers. Instead of being just an emulator or FPGA-based implementation, the TinyNES uses the original 6502-derived chips and a custom circuit boar...

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 t...