Podcast · Leisure & Travel

FOSS and Crafts

by FOSS and Crafts · English · Leisure & Travel

A podcast about free software, free culture, and making things together.

New episodes: Monthly
Latest: 3 Mar 2024
Language: English

Latest episode

3 Mar 2024

62: Blender

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 for open movie productions and education Sophie Jantak on pet portraits and Blender's Grease Pencil…

Play episodeWhatsApp Download

Earlier episodes 29 most recent

10 Dec 2023
61: A Textile Historian's Survival Guide
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 experience, however, properly prepared her to face the reality of needing to rely on her own hands…
1 Oct 2023
60: Governance, part 2
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 Scale Spritely Networked Communities Institute Python and the Python Software Foundation , PyCon ,…
1 Sep 2023
59: Governance, part 1
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
16 Jun 2023
58: WebAssembly
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 WebAssembly text format WebAssembly GC proposal Episode 49: Lisp but Beautiful; Lisp for Everyone WASI POSIX…
15 May 2023
57: F-Droid (featuring Sylvia van Os & Hans-Christoph Steiner!)
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
1 Mar 2023
56: Make your own dehydrated meals
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…
1 Feb 2023
55: Free Soft Wear
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…
28 Dec 2022
54: Oops!
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
1 Dec 2022
53: Fediverse reflections while the bird burns
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 Overview section ... it's actually fairly easy to understand! Some of the implementations discussed…
13 Nov 2022
52: Terminal Phase: a space shooter that runs in your terminal!
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…
1 Oct 2022
51: #vanlife...?
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, more diagonal view: Safety first! Window covers, custom fit! Reflectix goes out, fabric goes in.…
21 Aug 2022
50: The Spritely Institute
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 Institute FFDW funding announcement Tech tour…
15 Jul 2022
49: Lisp but Beautiful; Lisp for Everyone
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 presentation! The next live verison of the sheme tutorial will be hosted at Hack & Craft ! Come this…
30 Jun 2022
48: Sophie Jantak on pet portraits and Blender's Grease Pencil
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"…
23 Jun 2022
47: What is Lisp?
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 gonna give an intro-to-Scheme tutorial at our next Hack & Craft ! Saturday July 2nd, 2022 at…
1 Jun 2022
46: Mark S. Miller on Distributed Objects, Part 1
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;…
25 May 2022
45: A high level introduction to cryptography
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! Playing around with GnuPG can be a great way to learn about cryptography as a user, but... it's also not…
30 Apr 2022
44: Celebrating a Decade of Guix
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 computers to work...) Reproducible Builds Bootstrappable Builds Mes (see this video for an…
31 Mar 2022
43: Repetitive Strain Injuries
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 It's Not Carpal Tunnel Syndrome book (there are probably better resources out there now, this is…
6 Mar 2022
42: Learning the Sewing Machine
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…
5 Feb 2022
41: Learning Emacs
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 shortcuts): Switching on GNU/Linux Switching on Windows 10 & 11 Switching on OSX On Guix :…
10 Jan 2022
40: Interdisciplinarity and FOSS (SeaGL Keynote)
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…
17 Dec 2021
39: The TinyNES: An Open Hardware "Tiny Nostalgia Evocation Square"
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 campaign, so you can order your own and support open hardware in the best way possible: by playing…
28 Nov 2021
38: Spritely Updates! (November 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'll begin signing off every episode by thanking donors to FOSS & Crafts Studios' Patreon ! By…
3 Nov 2021
37: Salt on Resilience in FOSS
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 Software Community Data Science Collective Benjamin Mako Hill Wikipedia article on Heartbleed Debian…
11 Sep 2021
36: Topics of interest!
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 code! upcoming SNES sequel! You might need an NES emulator... Mednafen is good and can play games…
30 Aug 2021
35: Women and Wool Working in the Ancient Roman Empire, Part 2
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 textile production through the stories of the Fates, Arachne, and the Virgin Mary. We then come…
19 Aug 2021
34: Women and Wool Working in the Ancient Roman Empire, Part 1
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 textile industry, exploring the links between domestic production and commercial distribution.…
1 Aug 2021
33: Which Color Should We Paint This Episode?
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 of the original email, hold a conversation about it, and then come back to the topic with a twist…

About FOSS and Crafts

A podcast about free software, free culture, and making things together.

FOSS and Crafts is a English leisure & travel podcast from FOSS and Crafts. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: FOSS and Crafts
Language: English
Category: Leisure & Travel
New episodes: Monthly
Latest episode: 3 Mar 2024
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1523505575
Rights: Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 International

RSS feed Apple Podcasts

More English leisure & travel

Take it with you

The Melo app keeps playing with the screen off, works in the car and on your watch, wakes you to your station, and browses the whole catalogue offline. Free, no ads, no account.