FOSS and Crafts

FOSS and Crafts

By FOSS and CraftsTechnologyLeisureCrafts
Download on the App Store

FOSS and Crafts episodes

  • 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 Terminal Phase!

      • Project announcement
      • 1.0 announcement
      • Time travel debugging in Spritely Goblins, previewed through Terminal Phase
      • 1.1 announcement
      • Terminal Phase was in a Polish "Linux magazine"!
    • FOSS & Crafts' Patreon
    • Spritely Goblins, a project of the Spritely Institute
    • Blast off! A tour of Spritely Institute's tech
    • Racket
    • Guile
    • Guix
    • 8sync (Goblins predecessor). See also the Mudsync video, on that very page.
    • Raart
    • Spacewar!
    • A bit about how Spacewar lead to UNICS (later renamed Unix)
    24 min
  • 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.

    The cabinet with the cargo net off...

    And one more view!

    Links:

    • Cheap RV Living channel on YouTube
    • Vanlife subreddit
    • Built to Go! A #Vanlife Podcast
    • Foresty Forest
    49 min
  • 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

      • Donate 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 now

  • Spritely Institute is also the org that published

    • A Scheme Primer,
    which we've talked about before

  • Free 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.org

    • See the hilarious

    marketing video

  • The Lessons of Lucasfilms Habitat

    • is one of the most cited papers about virtual community designs
    of all times, and still holds up today

  • Electric 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!

    29 min
  • 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 Saturday,
    July 16, 2pm-4pm ET (6pm-8pm UTC)!
    We're planning to record this one!

    Oh, and bonus Fructure gif:

    Links:

    • The video version of this talk

    • Episode 47: What is Lisp?

    • Wisp and its associated

    SRFI-119

  • Fructure!!!

    • Watch the amazing RacketCon talk!

    38 min
  • 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"
    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 commissions

      • Patreon

      • Sophie's beginner grease pencil tutorial: 3d bonsai painting

    • Blender 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: Deadlines

    • 2: The Anxiety Cloud

    • 3: Missy's Adventures in Video Gaming

    • 4: Missy's NES cart

    • 5: Enter Kelsey the Queen

    • 6: Kelsey Claims the House for Herself

    • 7: Missy's Revenge

    • 8: Kelsey's Demand

  • HERO, a Blender Grease Pencil Showcase

  • There 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

    • 30 min
  • 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 20:00-22:00 ET!
    Come and learn some Scheme with us!

    Links:

    • Various histories of Lisp:

      • History of Lisp by John McCarthy

      • The Evolution of Lisp by Guy L. Steele and Richard P. Gabriel

      • History of LISP by Paul McJones

    • William Byrd's

    The Most Beautiful Program Ever Written
    demonstrates just how easy it is to write lisp in lisp, showing off the
    kernel of evaluation living at every modern programming language!

  • M-expressions (the original math-notation-vision for users to operate on) vs S-expressions (the structure Lisp evaluators actually operate at, in direct representational mirror of the typically, but not necessarily, parenthesized representation of the same).

  • Lisp-1 vs Lisp-2... well, rather than give a simple link and analysis,

    • have a thorough one.

  • Lisp machines

    • MIT's CADR was the

    • second iteration of the lisp machine, and the most influential
    on everything to come. Then everything split when two separate
    companies implemented it...

  • Lisp Machines, Incorporated (LMI),

    • founded by famous hacker Richard Greenblatt, who aimed to keep
    the MIT AI Lab hacker culture alive by only hiring programmers
    part-time.

  • Symbolics was the

    • other rival company. Took venture capital money, was a
    commercial success for quite a while.

  • These systems were very interesting, there's more to them than

    • just the rivalry. But regarding that, the book
    Hackers
    (despite its issues)
    captures quite a bit about the AI lab before this and then its
    split, including a ton of Lisp history.

  • Some interesting things happening over at lisp-machine.org

  • The GNU manifestio

    • mentions Lisp quite a bit, including that the plan was for the
    system to be mostly C and Lisp.

  • Worse is Better,

    • including the original
    (but the first of those two links provides a lot of context)

  • The AI winter.

    • Bundle up, lispers!

  • Symbolics' Mac Ivory

  • RISC-V tagged architecture, plus this lowRISC tagged memory tutorial. (We haven't read these yet, but they're on the reading queue!)

  • Scheme

    • There's a lot of these... we recommend Guile

    • if you're interested in using Emacs (along with Geiser), and Racket if you're looking for a more gentle introduction (DrRacket, which ships with Racket, is a friendly introduction)

  • The R5RS and R7RS-small specs are very short and easy to read especially

  • See this section of the Guile manual for a bit of... history

  • Common Lisp...

    • which, yeah there are multiple implementations, but these days
    really means SBCL with
    Sly or SLIME

  • Clojure introduced functional

    • datastructures to the masses (okay, maybe not the masses). Neat
    stuff, though not a great license choice (even if technically FOSS)
    in our opinion and Rich Hickey kinda
    blew up his community
    so maybe use something else these days.

  • Hy, always hy-larious

  • Fennel, cutest lil' Lua Lisp you've ever seen

  • Webassembly's text syntax isn't

    • technically a Lisp, but let's be honest... is it technically
    not a Lisp either?!

  • Typed Racket and

    • Hackett

  • Emacs... Lisp?... well let's just give you the tutorial!

    • The dreams of the 60s-80s are alive in Emacs.

  • The Many Faces of an Undying Programming Language

    • is a nice little tour of some well known Lisps.

  • Actually, we

    • just did an episode about Emacs,
    didn't we?

  • Digital Humanities Workshops episode

  • We guess if you wanted to use Racket and VS Code, you could use Magic Racket?!

    • We dunno, we've never used VS Code! (Are we out of touch?!)

  • What about for Guile?! Someone put some energy into

    • Guile Studio!

  • Hack & Craft!

    • 30 min
  • 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;
    Tony Garnock-Jones' History of Actors
    is maybe the cleanest writeup

  • The

    • Agoric Open Systems papers
    by Mark Miller and Eric Drexler are a good background into the
    underlying motivations that got Mark into distributed objects

  • markm-talks

    • and
    markm-more-talks
    which are mostly about object capability security topics

  • APConf 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 series

  • RSA

  • Xanadu,

    • Ted Nelson,
    and Computer Lib/Dream Machines

  • Xerox 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!)

    42 min
  • 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 the easiest thing to
    learn either, and we don't personally believe that GPG/PGP's web of
    trust model is a realistic path for user security. (But what we
    recommend instead, that's a topic for a future episode.) Still,
    a useful tool in all sorts of ways.

  • Mixing and matching these things at a low level can be tricky,

    • and unexpected vulnerabilities can easily occur.
    Cryptographic Right Answers
    has been a useful page, but the cryptography world keeps moving!

    34 min
  • 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 introduction)

    • Reflections on Trusting Trust (aka the "Thompson Attack" described in the episode)

    • virtualenv

    38 min
  • 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 what Christine read a decade ago)
    • Workrave
    • Some RSI exercises that Christine thought were effective (old, but archived on internet archive... Christine still uses them sometimes)
    1 hr 9 min

About FOSS and Crafts

From the publisher's feed

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