Crimperman.org

Below is a guest post by a friend and colleague at Free Software Magazine – Terry Hancock.

Like me, Terry is interested in the subjects of free (as in freedom) software and free culture. With regards the latter (and unlike me) he has got off his backside and started to do something. This post describes Terry’s project to produce a science fiction “TV” series and release it under Creative Commons licences. This is both ambitious and encouraging. As you know I have focussed [my own attempts](http://www.crimperman.org/tag/freedom/] at free culture onto the church and the way “worship” resources are locked down and restricted by archaic copyright and “intellectual property” laws. One obstacle I have come across is that if resource producers do not release the material under free licences then any attempt to bring freedom back into our media and other cultural elements will fail. Terry has encountered this and “Lunatics” is an admirable response.

Right now the issue – as ever – is financial. This project is – by nature – on a much smaller budget than mainstream productions but – like the Blender open movie projects before it – it still requires some cash to get started. Also like the Blender open movies, backers get rewarded for their donation.

You may not like science fiction, you may not like the concept of Lunatics but you may know people who do. If you like the idea of free culture and are fed up with the ever-increasing tide of restrictive actions by media companies – try supporting one of the good guys.

Update

The target funding has now been reached. This is exciting news as it means there is support for such a great venture. You can still find out about the project and catch up with the latest news at the project website lunatics.tv.

Guest post – Terry Hancock

Lunatics - somebody's got to be crazy enough to go first!

Support this project

Lunatics is a story about the first permanent settlement on the Moon. Politics are inevitable, physics is implacable, and the colonists are indomitable fanatics. After all, normal people don’t really colonize new worlds, do they?

“Lunatics” itself is largely based on character comedy, but we take the science and technology very seriously. Much of the technology in planned Lunatics scripts is not only real and relatively new, but also largely ignored in prior science fiction. Perhaps the greatest realism, though, is in the way the characters are presented.

The series and all the original source material will be released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, and it will be created using (mainly) the free software Blender 3D application on GNU/Linux workstations. It is a free-culture production from end-to-end. We are taking advantage of the massive body of existing free-culture work (music, sound effect, graphics, and so on) to help make all of this possible. And once we get our series up and running (we plan to do 18 episodes a year, of about 30 minutes length each) we will be one of the biggest free culture film projects going!

What makes this possible is a fan-financed business model which has been pioneered by only a handful of free-culture projects. But it’s enough to show that it can be done.

This project will require a lot of innovation on everything from merchandising business models to real-time animation techniques.

Right now, we are trying to raise $2400 through a Kickstarter project to support pre-production work — especially paying artist Daniel Fu a commission for creating character design drawings which will be used to create the 3D characters for the series.

Backers at any level will get early access, and for those who pay just $15 or more, we have a variety of “rewards” — ranging from character art posters to the complete “Character Art Book and Writer’s Guide”.

We also have corporate sponsorship levels if you know someone who’d be interested — for $400, you can get your company logo printed prominently on our pre-production materials, and featured on the website. Needless to say, a couple of such sponsorships would go a long way towards meeting our goal (these are limited to just 4 slots to make sure we have room for your logo).

Like all projects, we have to start small and work our way up. I don’t have a fan-base of thousands to draw on yet, because Lunatics doesn’t exist… yet. But with your help, we can get there!

Thanks!

I’m doing some basic research on teaching kids to program computers. If you teach (or have taught) kids to program I’d value your response. I’m using zoomerang for this so if the survey doesn’t appear below try going to the direct page for it. If you know any ICT teachers (or just parents who teach their own kids to program – please pass this onto them.

I’ll post the results later here and on my Free Software Magazine blog.

The passion in the message here is excellent as is the quality of the video. ( h/t @theeruditefrog )

Recently I bought a Flip UltraHD camcorder and I love it. It’s simple enough for my five year old to use (really I have to prise it off her half the time), compact to not be left at home and it shoots in HD (720p). As it doesn’t have a lamp I thought I’d test it under low light conditions. I’ve uploaded the result to Youtube. The editing was done using kdenlive which is simply brilliant. The sound was good but there was some stuff on it I can’t share so I’ve overdubbed it with a great tune I found on Jamendo. Kudos to Frozen Silence.

By the way the subject is of course our lovely dog, Fizz.

The HEC website has just been launched

I’d just like to mention that my church (Hainault Evangelical Church) has launched a new website. I’m afraid this post is a little sycophantic as I’m the one who designed and developed the site but I think it has come out rather well. As well as the usual what’s on and finding us sections there’s also the chance to listen to selected sermons and talks (including some from yours truly).

It seems to have been in the planning stage forever so it’s good to get it out there. Please feel free to take a look and let me know what you think.

http://www.hainaultevangelical.org.uk

thanks

Twitter recently introduced a new feature which seems to have annoyed more than a few people. The “Who to follow” section on the sidebar recommends Twits for you to follow based upon who the people you are following are following (hang on, did I type that too many times?).

If you are using Firefox (or Iceweasel like me) then here’s a tip to get rid of this and other such annoying sections on websites.

1. Find your Firefox profile directory – on my Debian GNU/Linux system this is stored under /home/[USER]/.mozilla/firefox/ but see here for help from Mozilla on finding this.
2. In the ‘chrome’ directory (e.g. /home/[USER]/.mozilla/firefox/chrome) find and edit (or create) a file called userContent.css
3. In there add the following code:

#recommended_users {

    display: none;

    visibility:hidden;

}

1. Save the file and restart Firefox.

The #recommended_users part is the ID that Twitter give to that section within their pages. IDs like this are used for styling so it’s exactly what we need to use here. if you are looking to hide something different you need to find a way to identify it on the page. To do this you need to examine the source (View->Page Source) for the relevant page and find the content you want to hide. Wrapped around that content will be something like <div id=”recommended_users”> or similar. The bit in quotes after “id=” is the bit we’re after, only prepend a # to it in your userContent.css file. The tag may not have an id= bit but it might have a “class=” instead. In that case replace “#recommended_users” with “.class_name”. so if this were the case here it would look like…

.recommended_users {

    display: none;

    visibility:hidden;

}

You can also apply this to several IDs or classes like this..

 #recommended_users, #second_id, .third_class {
    display: none;
    visibility:hidden;
}

Just remember to separate them with commas.

Hope this helps

Document Freedom day - because freedom counts

A week or so back I announced the m108 project aimed at getting some freedom into Church resources. The Church needs to stop the trend of restricting what we permit God’s family to do with the stuff he has inspired us to make so we can worship, learn about and fellowship with Him.

Those who know me will know I care about freedom, be it free software or free culture. Today (31 March 2010) is Document Freedom day. Across the globe people who care about freedom will be marching, speaking and even eating cake with the aim of promoting free(dom) documents. In a nutshell, document freedom is about formats and standards. It’s no good giving freedom in use of a work if the file format prohibits that very freedom by forcing people to buy a particular piece of software.

This fits directly in with m108 if you ask me. Given that we are seeking to bring back sharing within the body of Christ (and I don’t mean “sharing” as a euphemism for evangelism here) it makes sense to me that the file format is important. Suppose I share with you a song I have written. I give you access to the lyrics, the recording and the music. Now suppose the lyrics are in (say) Microsoft Word format. Aren’t I forcing you to get a copy of Word to use it? Even if you use one of the great alternative programs that can read Word documents (like OpenOffice.org) ; what happens iif/when Microsoft change the format? Unless I convert it as we go, my lyrics may be left behind, orphaned in a world of upgrades. Similarly with the recording. MP3 is the ubiquitous format for such files – to the point where it’s fast becoming a label for any digital audio file regardless of the format (bit like biro or hoover). But MP3 is covered by patents and is owned by a corporation. Right now they are quite relaxed on how they let people use “their” format, insisting only on payment if you make a program that creates or plays MP3s. But what happens if they decide to increase their fee? What happens if they start to get a bit more greedy, then a bit more. We’ll be stuck, we’ll be held to ransom. There are open formats for media files, such as OGG, FLAC etc. and providing media in those will ensure longevity of the freedom we want to share.

I’m not going to insist that those contributing to m108 (or whatever it finally gets called) use only open document formats and standards – that’s why I’m posting this here and not on m108. For a start I’m not aware of an open format for music scores but then I know little of such things anyway. I do think it’s vital that open formats be encouraged within the project. If only to ensure the freedom and sharing we are trying to engender doesn’t get held to ransom by the corporate greed we are trying to avoid within the Church.

When the Church invented printing it didn’t hold onto its invention but shared it and the technology used within it. It changed the world forever. The Church may not be inventing this technology or the open standards within it but we should be equally ready to use it to change the world.

Recently I had the opportunity to help a fellow Christian blogger. The Church Mouse blog is an award winning – er – blog which has been running for around 9 months.

Like many, I follow “the Mouse” on Twitter. A short while back he tweeted a request for help with redesigning his excellent blog. I responded with an offer of help, the mouse from the vestry said yes and we set to work. The new site was released yesterday and it seems to have gone down well. Although I would like to point out that on the web “content is king”, everything else is window dressing. Still we all like to look through nice windows so…

I’m glad Mouse and his followers like the look of the site. He was kind enough to link here with a few words from his blog so I am happy to repay the compliment (oh aren’t we Christians just so lovely to each other?). So if you are new here: welcome and if not: welcome back.

If you are a Christian and haven’t yet read the Church Mouse Blog I can only recommend you do. If you are a tweeter, it wouldn’t hurt to follow him either.

Occasionally I wander over to bash.org to view the IRC quotes[1]. I found this one in the top 100 and it was too good not to repeat.

# Rabidplaybunny87: Okay, so my neighbors officially hate me
# GarbageStan23: why?
# Rabidplaybunny87: Well, me, david and andrew were having a bonfire in the backyard, and we were making s’mores and all… and suddenly we here sirens, and see a firetruck turn into the street in front of us.
# Rabidplaybunny87: So we all went running to see what was up, and our neigbor’s house was on fire!
# GarbageStan23: oh ****!
# Rabidplaybunny87: Yeah, and when we got there, the wife was crying into her husbands arms, and we were just kinda standing there, and then she saw us, and then like for 10 seconds, gave us the dirtiest look ever
# Rabidplaybunny87: Turns out, we were still holding our sticks with marshmallows on it, watching the fire….
# Rabidplaybunny87: talk about bad timing…

Original quote on bash.org

[1] For those who don’t know, IRC = Internet Relay Chat, so these are quotes from various chat rooms around the Internet.