Episode notes
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…
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FOSS and Crafts
FOSS and Crafts · Leisure & Travel · English
A podcast about free software, free culture, and making things together.
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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…
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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;…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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 :…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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