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 and See Elephants Dream , aka Project Orange Big Buck Bunny Previous episodes on blender: Blender f...
Mar 03, 2024
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. These research interests were informed by a lifetime of sewing and other fiber crafts. None of this ...
Dec 10, 2023
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 Foundation 501(c)(3) vs 501(c)(6) Stitchting Free as in Freedom LKML (the Linux Kernel Mailing List) Linus Doesn't Sc...
Oct 01, 2023
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...
Sep 01, 2023
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 in action Directly compiling Scheme to WebAssembly: lambdas, recursion, iteration! Understanding the WebAssembl...
Jun 16, 2023
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: A story from hell...
May 15, 2023
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 c...
Mar 01, 2023
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 face mask (You may recognize Dan and Tall Dog Electronics of TinyNES fame ) Wikimedia Commons Project Gutenber...
Feb 01, 2023
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...
Dec 28, 2022
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 the federated social web together, of which Christine is co-author! Be sure to check out the Overvie...
Dec 01, 2022
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 rea...
Nov 13, 2022
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 with all the equipment attached: Here's what the van looks like if you come in the side door: Another, ...
Oct 01, 2022
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 ,...
Aug 21, 2022
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 Institute just published A Scheme Primer , which is more or less the text version of that presentat...
Jul 15, 2022
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...
Jun 30, 2022
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 powerful, and nerd out about the many, many kinds of Lisps out there! Announcement: Christine is gonn...
Jun 23, 2022
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...
Jun 01, 2022
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 curves instead. It's possible that in the future, something else will be recommended instead! Playin...
May 25, 2022
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 environment guix pack Nonguix (Proprietary! Nonfree! But sometimes some users need these things to get their ...
Apr 30, 2022
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 . Repetitive Strain Injuries Morgan's RSI gloves article Your Wrists Hurt, You Must Be a Programmer I...
Mar 31, 2022
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 ...
Mar 06, 2022
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 used to have ctrl key where capslock now is , and much advanced program use benefits from keyboard shor...
Feb 05, 2022
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 ...
Jan 10, 2022
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 board, preserving and carrying forward computing history! Oh yeah, and it's also running a crowdfunding ...
Dec 17, 2021
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'...
Nov 28, 2021
Wm Salt Hale joins us to talk about his dissertation on resilience in FOSS communities (especially after crisis events), the kind of impacts founder decisions can have on long-term community development, especially as seen through reactions to software vulnerabilities and license decisions. Also! Salt mentions that we're keynoting at SeaGL this weekend! It's an online conference, so maybe we'll see you there! Links: Wm Salt Hale Salt's master's thesis: Resilience in Free/Libre/Open Source Softwa...
Nov 03, 2021
Lightning round! Morgan and Christine blast through a bunch of snack-sized topics they're currently interested in, ranging from an actual FOSS video game made for the NES, to "Free Soft Wear" clothing, to compiler towers! above image from Morgan's blogpost on "free soft wear" Links: This episode's title was inspired by Ian Bicking's 2009 PyCon talk, "Topics of Interest", but it's bitrotted off the internet so we can't link you to that one. Boooooo! Nova the Squirel by... Nova the Squirrel Source...
Sep 11, 2021
In Part 1 of Women and Wool Working in the Ancient Roman Empire , we discussed the practical matters of textile production in domestic and commercial contexts. In this second episode, we look at the performative ways that textile production was used to construct women's identities. This includes the incorporation of textile tools and production into rites of passage such as marriage, childbirth, and death as a symbol of the virtuous matron. We further discuss religious use and association of tex...
Aug 30, 2021
In the first of two episodes on Morgan's dissertation we introduce the topic of women and textile production in the Roman Empire. Scholars have often viewed the domestic and commercial divide in textile production along gendered lines, associating domestic production with women in the context of the ideal of feminine virtue and commercial production with men working in centralized production centers. Here we use the cottage industry model to contextualize the role of women’s labor in the Roman t...
Aug 19, 2021
In this episode, we discuss "bikeshedding" (also known as the Law of Triviality ), the famous proposition that complex contributions and ideas (such as plans to build a nuclear power plant), often of high impact and importance, move forward with relatively little interference, whereas simple contributions and conversations (such as which color to paint a bikeshed) get caught up in committee and high-volume debate, and how this tends to impact FOSS communities. We do a (slightly dramatic) reading...
Aug 01, 2021
