Open Source Creative

TL;DR: In most cases, it’s pretty much impossible for a third party of any sort to come in and block access to an open source tool. They can make things painful and annoying, but they can’t act as a block. As for the relicensing issue, that too is also highly unlikely… but it’s also a very short-sighted perspective that, in my humble opinion, will ultimately serve as a detriment to the app (and the open source community around it)… especially in the case of creative tools.

That’s my thoughts on it at least, I’d love to know yours.

Also, as I mentioned in the intro and outro, this website now has a Resources section. Currently there’s a page for Tools that you can use in your creative projects and a page for Books for learning more about specific programs. I’d love to hear what you think of this addition to the site and what other things you think I should add in there. Just hit me up with a comment!

It comes down to this: we’re in a scenario that most of us as professional creatives should recognize. When we’re working with a client on a design or a bit of writing or animation or music, our customers have great intuition about “feeling” when something is wrong or not working in the piece. However, they don’t have the tools, language, or experience to understand why a thing isn’t working. Very rarely do they have the right solution to effectively resolve the issue. As artists and designers, we have to take their feedback and translate it to understand the central nugget of the problem that they’re pointing out.

Likewise, in the case of being users of open source software tools, we are in the role of client. We know that there’s an issue and we know that it’s been solved in other contexts… but we’re not necessarily the best-qualified to express a solution in this particular context.

We should recognize this scenario, but often we don’t. And even more frequently, our colleagues in the closed source creative world fail to recognize it even more frequently. They often mistakenly consider open source software (and its development) as a public service and that their demands are right and good, and that there’s some obligation for developers to follow them. As open source creatives, it’s incumbent upon us to gently explain to them how things really work… without being jerks in the process.

That’s what I try to cover in this week’s show.

Oh… and as I mentioned, I do have a “Python Tricks for Artists” series over on Opensource.com. The latest article is on adding some basic interactivity to scripts that you’ve already written.

Catch you next week!

That’s right! We’ve got ourselves a website. Thanks again everyone for helping choose this domain. I think opensourcecreative.org is going to be a fantastic home for this podcast and the other fun things that I’ve got brewing. But how about we actually talk about what’s in this show, yeah?

I’ve migrated all of the old podcast episodes from monsterjavaguns.com/podcast, including all of the comments on episodes there. The older shows are still listed back on that site for now. I’ll probably end up setting up some permanent redirects from those episode pages to the ones here.

And in this episode, I talk about why (and how) I’ve chosen to use a static site generator (Hugo in this case) to manage the site rather than using WordPress, as I have on so many of my other sites in the past. Static site generators offer a number of really nice benefits… and Hugo isn’t the only one out there. You may also want to check out Jekyll and Hexo as other options.

Also, since I’m using Hugo to generate the pages of this site, I can’t use the Blubrry PowerPress plugin that I was using on my WordPress site. Fortunately, I’ve found a nice podcast-oriented theme for Hugo called castanet by Matt Stratton of the Arrested DevOps podcast. I’ve of course made my own minor customizations to it (the repo is on my GitHub page), but it’s got good bones and it’s been a pleasure to work with so far.

Of course, this means that I’ll probably need to update the text of Episode 29: The Making of a Podcast… at least to link to this episode and the details here since the part on distributing to the website has now changed. I’ll get to that shortly.

I also mention in the show that the Open Source Creative now has its own Twitter account over at @osscreative. It had to be the short version of the name. Apparently “opensourcecreative” is too many characters for a username on Twitter. In any case, go ahead and give me a follow there if your the Twittering type.

And last of all, the commenting system on this new site is served using the Disqus service. Most people (I think) already have a Disqus account. That being the case, you should be able to make a comment on this episode right below this text right here. Go ahead and do it so I know it actually works. :)

Alright… that’s that. See you next week!

This week’s episode is about some critical stuff: making sure that the digital data that we produce doesn’t get lost. So we’re talking back-ups, passwords, and encryption. It may not sound like as fun and exciting of a topic as other things we’ve discussed, but it’s monumentally important. And really, the technical bits of this can be a really interesting puzzle piece together. It’s rare that I come across two people who have the same exact setup when it comes to doing their back-ups… and even rarer that they use the same password and encryption tools as well (if they use encryption at all).

Here’s a quick run-down of stuff covered in this episode:

And, as promised, here’s a link to see the rings I’ve been making out of wood for the last month or so.

That should do it. See you next week!

Late release this week folks; sorry about that. I have reasons (which I go into during the intro), but no excuses. I’ll have it up at the right time next week.

We’re on this week, though, and this week we’re talking about social media networks and the kind of love/hate relationship we have with them. We’re often at odds with the privacy policies of a lot of social media platforms. Furthermore, the level of discourse that people have on these sites isn’t always all that great. But at the same time, as people working in the creative fields, we have a need to get our work in front of an audience. Social media has the largest audiences.

What I hope to do with this show is try to ameliorate your concerns with social media and provide some tips and techniques for “juicing the algorithms” to make these platforms more tolerable to use… both in terms of personal privacy as well as in terms of social interactions.

As always, lemme know what you think!

A fun little meta show this week. This one’s a nuts-and-bolts, step-by-step walk-through of the process I go through each way to deliver podcasty goodness to your earballs. And I do it all with free and open source software. The following is a quick breakdown of each step in the process. You can use it to start your own show or to record episodes for airing on Hacker Public Radio.

Recording is done in my car using a Zoom H1 field recorder and a Røde lavaliere microphone. The specific lav mic that I got was designed to work with phones, but since Android phones have such horrid gain control, I got an adapter for it to work with the H1. Couldn’t be happier. (OK, so every now and again I catch myself eyeballing some of the higher-end field recorders, but the H1 really is a nice recorder, especially for the price). I record to PCM WAV at 44.1 kHz. I have the levels set so my audio barely ever peaks over -4 dB.

Editing of the show is done in Audacity. Aside from just doing clean-up cuts on the audio track, I use the Normalize and Compressor effects. I didn’t have the settings for those effects on-hand as I recorded, but I have them now. So here you go:

The intro and outro are recorded right into Audacity using a Plantronics USB headset (I don’t think they make my particular model any more). After the edit is finalized, I export the episode audio to a 128 kb/s MP3 file.

Metadata tagging is done using EasyTag. Be sure to include the cover image as part of the tag data, otherwise the image won’t show up when the MP3 is played in a modern media player.

Hosting for podcast episodes is done on Amazon S3, but you could just as easily use services like libsyn, podHoster, Blubrry, or even archive.org. I personally would not recommend that you use your regular shared web hosting for these files as I’ve run into trouble in the past with flaky downloading or streaming speeds when taking that route.

Incidentally, I gather analytics on the files hosted on S3 by pulling log files using s3cmd and then parsing those logs using GoAccess to generate an HTML file with pretty graphs and tables of the data. It’s what lets me know roughly how many times an episode has been downloaded.

Distribution of the podcast is currently done on WordPress using the Blubrry PowerPress plugin. It does the job of providing an in-line player and a properly structured RSS feed. In the future, I might move to using a static site generator like Hugo or Jekyll, but not yet.

Update (15 March 2017): The podcast has moved to its own domain now and is not using WordPress as a backend any longer. That, of course, means that the Blubrry PowerPress plugin is also not used. Now, I’m using a static site generator called Hugo and a podcast-oriented theme (that I’ve modified) called castanet. Check out Episode 32: The Website Lives! for more information.

And that about covers it. Yeah, I know it’s a lot of links, but hopefully you find at least some portion of this useful. If not… there’s always next episode!

Talkatcha then.

David Mcsween, Feb 16, 2017

I wish there was a way to conveniently return to older episodes… like on youtube for example ;)

Jason, Feb 16, 2017

I see what you did there. :)

I’ll look into it.

This week we have a more positive (I hope) follow-up to last week’s rant. We’re talking about comparisonitis… that feeling of “I can’t do that” when you see the incredible work of another artist or find out about another person’s level of success in a field similar to yours. I give a little hat-tip to the annual SIGGRAPH Conference and hopefully cover a few tips to help get by that comparisonitis feeling and get focused on creating our own fantastic work.

What about you? Do you ever get a sense of comparisonitis? What kinds of things do you do to beat that beast?

Missed last week, but the show is back! And boy, oh, boy… this is a ranty one. Short version: we need to change the way that we discuss the new releases of open source software tools. There’s this propensity for wanting to discuss other software or, worse, make gross generalizations about the viability of a tool based on our own limited experiences and uses cases. It’s not entirely specific to the open source community, but we do see it a lot… I daresay more than in other circles.

So yeah… this is a rant about that, and perhaps a solution (or at least a suggestion) or two about how to avoid doing it.

caetano, Feb 24, 2017

I found the thread and didn’t find the courage to read through it. How can you do that ? It gets bad so quickly. Inkscape 0.92 has such good new things to talk about. The new object manager is not even mentioned once in this thread.

Anyway to give my answers to some of your questions or remarks :

– Is it specific to open source applications or does this “comparing and discrediting” also happen when proprietary applications make new releases ?

I think the problem doesn’t lie in open source or proprietary. Blenderartists.org is one of those rare forums where we talk about programs that are not in the name of the forum (Blender artists > Inkscape). As a consequence, many people who don’t use this program seriously (or use it at all) will still stumble upon the thread and feel like talking about it, and of course their posts can hardly be pertinent. You won’t find this behavior on dedicated forums (http://forum.inkscapecommunity.com/index.php?topic=347.0 http://www.inkscapeforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=31053) or in a general forum like CG Society because it’s big enough so people will only go in the subforums for their software.

“modeling in maya feels like modeling with socks on my hands” : Something you already said but I wanted to reply to it. I think most Blender users find Blender faster for modeling but in the recent years, maya got some quite powerful modeling tools (modeling toolkit, topology based symmetry and much more) and has always had some cool features like visualizing in real time your “proportional editing” selection, editing multiple objects at the same time (allowing proportional editing on multiple objects) and many other cool things. And all the good shortcuts are there too, just not in the same place. So I think (although you don’t claim it to be) it’s not an objective statement and it’s mostly due to a lack of experience with Maya, since experienced Maya modelers are really efficient.

Jason, Feb 25, 2017

It may be a thing that specific to the BA forum, but I’ve seen it in general discussions as well when interacting with folks in meatspace. Maybe BA is a more accurate reflection of general behavior… or maybe I have a knack for finding that type of person to talk to. I can’t say for sure… neither one of those things sounds all that favorable or pleasant. :)

As for Maya… Modeling in Maya has indeed gotten better over the years (many a feature pulled from Max from years ago, but I digress), but it’s less about tools and more about approach. I’m super-comfortable rigging in Maya and animating in it is pretty nice as well. However, I personally abhor the channelbox approach that most Maya riggers seem to favor. I want my controls on the model, in the scene. Maya caters itself to a particular workflow and that workflow simply doesn’t jive with me as well as Blender does. From a proprietary tool standpoint, I was much more comfortable in Softimage than I ever have been in Maya.

I’m sure that there is some personal bias in there. I am, afterall, a Blender “old fart” and have been using it as my primary 3D tool for almost two decades now (Yow!). Short version: as I said in this episode, one is not better than the other, just different. And that’s OK. :)

First things first… we have a winner for the domain for the new Open Source Creative website (it was the .org TLD):

Thanks to everyone who participated. Keep an eye out here (or even better, subscribe to my newsletter) for word on when the site goes live.

Now, this week’s show is really a nuts-and-bolts kind of thing. As the title says, it’s how a person would go about making his or her living as an open source creative… a person whose primary creative software tools are open source. I still run into people who swear it can’t be done. In a way, this is my rebuttal. This episode stays largely generic, but i do make reference to the Blender Market, the open movie projects from the Blender Institute, and a very excellent (and timely) article about David Revoy, an illustrator and comic artist who uses open source tools and produces open content.

And as a program note, there’s a chance that there won’t be an episode next week. Hopefully that’s not true… I’m on a pretty good streak here. But things are what they are. In any case, the show will definitely have an episode after that. So keep your ears peeled.

Jay, Jan 18, 2017

Awesome and thank you, downloading now!

This week’s show is all about open content. I’ve thought about this topic a lot and I have a lot to say on the matter. I have so much to say, in fact, that I ended up needing to cut myself off a bit before I really wanted to because I’d gotten to the end of my commute. The focus of this episode is on making the business case for releasing creative work—specifically writing—under an open content license, like one of the Creative Commons variations. Basically, I’d like to see a strategy for taking what some companies in the software world (Red Hat, Canonical, SUSE) have done with building the businesses on open source software… and applying a similar strategy for creative work. I think it can be done, but I still have questions.

References in the show also include the Blender Cloud, Blender Market, and WordPress plugins and themes.

Also, I want to thank everyone who’s participated so far in the poll I posted last week regarding the domain name to where the Open Source Creative will be moving. The poll is still open, and will be until the 14th of January. So if you haven’t responded to it yet, I’d certainly appreciate it if you would. The link to the poll is right here:

And that about covers it. See you next week!