The Phrygian Cap

Pencil is an animation/drawing software. It lets you create traditional hand-drawn animation (cartoon) using both bitmap and vector graphics. It is intended to be a simple program enabling anyone to make 2D animation.

Pencil is free and open source.

blender + python + randomness

I started looking into blender python scripting yesterday, and was very happy and surprised of how easy it is. After few hours playing with a tutorial. I made the code to generate the random forms above.

It is very fun. Give it a try!

something is definitely wrong when protests say "save the human" and not "save the whale" or some other tortured species. and yes, that's a penguin holding the sign.


in a whole different topic... my kudos to trent reznor for his vision of how music should be released in the digital times.

Let's take away the ethics and social impacts of free software for a second, and let's see free software and and propietary software as evolving information species in a darwinian world, our culture, fighting for the same resources.

Free software follows a meme evolution. Propietary software follows a secrecy method. Which sounds like a more succesful method of evolution? Which species will outrule the other eventually?

Even farther, which is a more natural approach and blends best with the environment?

"The whole idea of a meme is that it's information that is copied with variation and selection. So any idea that is copied from person to person is a meme. But an idea that you think up for yourself and is not expressed is not a meme. The emphasis has to be on copying, because that's what makes evolution possible. Lots of ideas are never copied at all. They just go to a couple people and then they fizzle out." susan blackmore

Being free and making information free... is human nature, we are just machines to propagate memes.

python + clutter + flickr

flickbook is an automatic slideshow made by searching flickr's explore with recursive tags. thought for automatic web, one time only, time specific, random lovers video art/installation.

Still in beta but already fun to watch. my goal is to let it work in an art gig I commited too but can't attend to since I'm 1,000 km away and can't fly those days. I actually have it running in fullscreen as my screensaver.

Enjoy


can't see the screencast above? click here

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The idea with 5-A-Day is simple - everyone in the Ubuntu community works to tend to at least five bugs every day. When we say tend to, this naturally depends on the kind of contributor you are. As such:

• If you are a developer - you could fix five bugs, package fixes etc.


• If you are a user - you can help triage and confirm bugs, contribute your experience to bug reports. Test bugs and share your experiences.


• If you are an upstream contributor - you could help forward bugs upstream and help to get these bugs fixed.

jono bacon talks about it.
jorge castro talks about it.
daniel holbach talks about it.

You can also make Ubuntu even better, you would be surprised how easy it is. Join 5 a day! Lift off!

If I want open source running my machines, why would my portable music player be any different? And since I love freedom, rockbox is my choice.

"Rockbox is an open source firmware replacement for a growing number of digital audio players. Rockbox aims to be considerably more functional and efficient than your device’s stock firmware while remaining easy to use and customisable. Rockbox is written by users, for users. Not only is it free to use, it is also released under the GNU public license, which means that it will always remain free both to use and to change.

Rockbox has been in development since 2001, and receives new features, tweaks and fixes each day to provide you with the best possible experience on your digital audio player. A major goal of Rockbox is to be simple and easy to use, yet remain very customisable and configurable. We believe that you should never need to go through a series of menus for an action you perform frequently. We also believe that you should be able to configure almost anything about Rockbox you could want, pertaining to functionality."

One of the best features for me are the Ogg support, awesome theme full customization (there are even some Ubuntu and Ubuntu Studio inspired themes), and seeing the music as a storage device (because sharing is caring). I've been using it for over 2 years and it works great and code is being improved daily.

Check the list of supported hardware, maybe you can switch and give a new free life to your player.

“What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world remains and is immortal.”

Albert Pike

Gran Kanaria; G = Guadec. K = aKademy.

2009

"Do you use top? When you run top what is the top process?
TOP!

top is like "Hey man good news, I've found the problem... I'm the problem! Huh. Who would've thought that, don't run me" Allright, top, listen, it is true you have become the problem, but you were not the problem when I endeavor to find what the problem is.

Actually it is funny, I was talking to a costumer about this [...] the top problem is the top 8 processes are 8 different tops from 8 different admins logged into the box trying to figure out what's going on. So 1 or more tops, that's the top problem.

Indeed, that is a problem and the reason is the methodology top uses. top goes around every process and asks it a question, doesn't scale with the number of processes. You have 5,000 processes, top is going to be the top process."

Bryan Cantrill

0:18:45 in this video

Because the terminal can be aesthetic and easy on the eye I've been investigating a little about vim color schemes, and made my own based on the Vim Tango color scheme by Michele Campeotto.

Gotan Vim color scheme

How to use:
1) move gotan.vim file to ~/.vim/colors/
2) add line "colorscheme gotan" in ~/.vimrc
3) enjoy
4) tweak
5) share

Factoid:

111111111 * 111111111 =

12345678987654321

In previous ages the word 'art' was used to cover all forms of human skill. The Greeks believed that these skills were given by the gods to man for the purpose of improving the condition of life. In a real sense, free software has fulfilled the greek ideal of art; it should not only improve the developers, but also improve the world.

Why do we feel guilt when we google ourselves?

I'm taking my first steps in OpenSolaris... and so far so good. Enjoying it very much.

I have been for years in the comfortable shade of GNU/Linux. It does feel adventurous, uneasy and evening frightening running around new places, but it's worth it as I'm seeing some new-to-me landscapes under the sun. Which are making me think and reconsider concepts I had tattoo-d in my brain.

I have ahead of me loads of learning about some very cool stuff like ZFS and DTrace.

For those of you who don't know about them. ZFS is a very fast file system that redesigns the concept, using virtual storage pools, integrating snapshots and clones of this pools, and much more. DTrace is a dynamic tracing framework that lets you troubleshoot in real time the applications and even the OS, amazingly with ver little performance loss.

"Only the educated are free."
Epictetus

freedom leads to knowledge. knowledge leads to freedom.

If you were to create a free/open source dj app how would you call it?

In the near future I'm going to start a personal python-gstreamer project consisting in a sound file player resembling a dj mixer. A basic application to handle music files, with two inputs, pitch bending, mixing, and pre-listening in a second sound output. But I don't know how to name it, so I'm calling for help.

Give me names! The one I like best will be the final name of the project.

As a reference, my vj app is named freemix.

The voting of the final name will be done by the Ubuntu Studio team.

they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

in the digital times, creating a wikipedia article about someone must be the sincerest form of flattery.

Wednesday I arrived back after five days in Dublin. Had a blast in such a nice city, small but with the offer and life of a european capital. The best thing is that I've got good news... I'm moving there soon.

I've got an offer for an internship in Sun working on free software and I'm going to take it. Lots of cold wet weather, Guinness, Spire, celtic music, Grafton, Liffey, Lua, and spanish tourists await me in the future, and I'm very happy about it.