The FOSS Pod

Latest Episodes:

curl With Daniel Stenberg Jun 24, 2022

Show notes

The simple data transfer tool curl, and its associated library, are estimated to be installed on roughly 10 billion computers, VMs, and embedded devices around the world. For this ep we had a wide ranging conversation with Daniel Stenberg, curl's longtime author and maintainer, about starting up such an essential project back in the '90s, juggling the dizzying array of protocols curl supports, the decision-making process around one of the most critical open source programs in use today, and a bunch more.

SHOW NOTES

Find out (way) more about curl on its home page: https://curl.se/

Daniel blogs extensively on curl and other topics: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/

Daniel is also working on a memoir, available online: https://un.curl.dev/

The FOSS Pod is brought to you by Google Open Source. Find out more at https://opensource.google

Home Assistant With Paulus Schoutsen Jun 11, 2022

Show notes

Home Assistant is the one-stop shop to control every single smart home and IoT device you own. It's also one of the biggest open source projects around, and for this ep we sat down with its founder Paulus Schoutsen to talk about where the project is at and where it's going, how he's backing an open-source project with a company that generates revenue, the forthcoming Matter standard that will allow devices from all companies to interoperate, building and shipping a piece of hardware during the pandemic, and a bunch more.

SHOW NOTES

Find out more about Home Assistant: https://www.home-assistant.io/

Here's our Tech Pod episode 59 about Home Assistant: https://techpod.content.town/episodes/59-how-you-know-youre-living-in-the-future-s8PvcUbe

The FOSS Pod is brought to you by Google Open Source. Find out more at https://opensource.google

3D Movie Maker With Foone Turing May 27, 2022

Show notes

Foone Turing regularly performs feats of retro-computing resurrection on Twitter, but convincing Microsoft to release the source code for its classic '90s animation program 3D Movie Maker may be their greatest achievement to date. We sat down with Foone to talk about their plans for expanding 3DMM, asking a big software company to dig through their archives, ancient CompuServe nodes, illicit source-code possession, what's in their forensic data-recovery toolkit, the shocking origin of Comic Sans, and more!

SHOW NOTES

The 3D Movie Maker Github Repo: https://github.com/microsoft/Microsoft-3D-Movie-Maker

Foone's biggest Twitter thread about the project: https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1511808848729804803

A big repository of films from the 3DMM community: https://3dmm.com/movies.php

Foone's video game death generator: https://deathgenerator.com/

The FOSS Pod is brought to you by Google Open Source. Find out more at https://opensource.google

Human-Centered Design With Abbey Ripstra May 13, 2022

Show notes

Design researcher Abbey Ripstra has spent her career making technology more approachable, and nowhere has her work and expertise connected with more people than at the Wikimedia Foundation. On this ep Abbey joins us to talk about what human-centered design research means, methodologies for conducting user-experience studies in a wide range of territories and contexts, designing products for billions of people, some of the ways design and research differ in open source versus the corporate world, and more.

SHOW NOTES

Find out more about Abbey's current work at: https://wearetrimtab.com/

And read about the research she conducted at the Wikimedia Foundation here:

New Editor Experiences: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/New_Editor_Experiences

New Readers: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/New_Readers

The FOSS Pod is brought to you by Google Open Source. Find out more at https://opensource.google

Open-Source Alternatives Apr 29, 2022

Show notes

Creative software is getting more expensive all the time, but by the same token FOSS alternatives are getting more and more robust. On this ep we check in with what's new in some of the biggest open-source creative applications like Blender, Audacity, and the GNU Image Manipulation Program, plus we talk through some tips and tricks for more of our favorite open-source apps like VLC, EarTrumpet, Windows Terminal, WinMerge, and more.

The software we discussed in this ep includes:

Blender: https://www.blender.org/

Audacity: https://www.audacityteam.org/

GNU Image Manipulation Program: https://www.gimp.org/

VLC: https://www.videolan.org/vlc/

EarTrumpet: https://eartrumpet.app/

Windows Terminal: https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/windows-terminal/9N0DX20HK701?hl=en-us&gl=US

WinMerge: https://winmerge.org/

The FOSS Pod is brought to you by Google Open Source. Find out more at https://opensource.google

Project North Star With Bryan Chris Brown Apr 09, 2022

Show notes

We've often said that open source is for more than just software, and on this episode Project North Star's Bryan Chris Brown is here to prove it with a freely available, modifiable design for an augmented reality headset you can build yourself. Join us for a discussion about topics like the ins and outs of open hardware design, sourcing parts from unlikely places, printing lenses out of resin, doing architecture work in the Unreal Engine, how standards like OpenXR fit into the picture, and a whole lot more.

Check out Project North Star's extensive community documentation, and follow Bryan on Twitter.

The FOSS Pod is brought to you by Google Open Source. Find out more at https://opensource.google

Open Source 101 Mar 19, 2022

Show notes

By popular request, we're getting as fundamental as we can in this episode with a back-to-basics primer on as many open source concepts as we could come up with, which we hope will lay the groundwork for future episodes. Ever wonder about the difference between a branch and a fork, the ways copyright interacts with code, how open source extends beyond just software, or what makes a Linux distro a Linux distro? This episode is for you!

Notes

If you want to demystify software licensing, look no further than https://choosealicense.com/ and https://tldrlegal.com/

The FOSS Pod is brought to you by Google Open Source. Find out more at https://opensource.google, and learn more about their event detailing Kubernetes' move away from Dockershim here: http://goo.gle/LKL22

The FOSS Pod Manifesto Mar 03, 2022

Show notes

Three episodes in, we figured it was about time that we talk over our own origins with open source software, and then ponder the present and (attempt to) predict the future of FOSS for everyday people. Listen on for some reminiscing about Sparcstations, Will's time in a penguin suit, and our earliest tries at using Linux on the desktop, an examination of some previously corporate tech that's now being democratized in open-source form, and more.

Here's Will's old Maximum PC chronicle of using 2005-era Linux (in a penguin suit):

https://books.google.com/books?id=rwIAAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA52#v=onepage&q&f=false

The FOSS Pod is brought to you by Google Open Source. Find out more at https://opensource.google

Getting Started With Network Attached Storage Feb 18, 2022

Show notes

Building a NAS served as the gateway into free and open source software for both of us, so in this ep we're looping back around and checking in on the current state of FOSS-y network attached storage options like OpenMediaVault, TrueNAS, and Proxmox, plus dishing out some practical tips about why you'd want a NAS in the first place, some advice on hardware requirements, best practices for backups, and more.

FOSS projects for running your own NAS that we mentioned in this episode include:

OpenMediaVault: https://www.openmediavault.org/

TrueNAS: https://www.truenas.com/

Proxmox: https://www.proxmox.com/en/

And some of the turnkey hardware solutions you might pair with these projects are:

Synology: https://www.synology.com/en-us

QNAP: https://www.qnap.com/en-us/

The FOSS Pod is brought to you by Google Open Source. Find out more at https://opensource.google

OBS With Jim Bailey Feb 04, 2022

Show notes

Jim Bailey wanted a way to stream StarCraft – so he wrote his own software to do it. From humble origins, the Open Broadcaster Software has become the de facto standard for streaming video online, and we sat down with Jim to talk about the present and future of OBS, what it’s like maintaining such a critical project, getting your code vetted by NASA, and more.

Download OBS at https://obsproject.com/

The FOSS Pod is brought to you by Google Open Source. Find out more at https://opensource.google