f r e e f a c

We’re back from Montreal and LGM 2007. Had a great time, too many cool presentations to list from Gimp/Gegl, Inkscape, Krita, Scribus, Open Office and a lot more. Did I mention Blender? Martin gave a presentation about the history and current state of Blender, and I gave one about Elephants Dream/ aka project orange, an overview of how one goes about making a movie with open source software, what an open movie is, and some speculations about the future. My slides are here, but they probably don’t make much sense without the rest of the presentation- I talked (as usual) quite a bit, and showed (not enough) actual production files- but there’s only so much you can show in a short time.

Fateh and I are about to brave the 5 hour drive up to Montreal for the Libre Graphics Meeting this weekend, to hear and talk with loads of cool open source graphics people.Martin (Theeth) is giving a French language Blender talk on Saturday, and I even get to give a short talk about Elephants Dream production on Sunday right after Pippin of gegl fame. Luckily, I finally got twinview working on my little toshiba m200.

Fateh in an epic recording adventure, free software-style. My friend Jim, among other things a Jazz guitarist and free software enthusiast, kindly donated his time and use of his colorful kit to the free-factorians for a late night marathon voice recording session for the upcoming “Mancandy F.A.Q.”

For the technically curious: we used a Shure sm-58 feeding into a Tascam 4 track tape mixer ( I think made sometime in the 1990’s) into a USB Creative Soundcard into a Lenovo/Thinkpad t60 running Audacity 1.26 on Ubuntu Feisty 7.04. After the normal fumbling/cursing/fretting over noise levels/heroes watching break, we got some surprisingly OK quality audio.
And for those wondering what happened to the final Mancandy release, there’s your answer: He’s being held up by his F.A.Q, which is on hiatus till after LGM.

PS The singing was extra-curricular; the Mancandy F.A.Q is a sedate affair.