Sometime back I gave a pretty strong pan review of a couple of “toys” that were not compatible with GNU/Linux — with open standards really, since the community ensures that free software is compliant — and were therefore nothing more than a disappointment to my kids. Recently, I fully expected to repeat this depressing experience when my brother-in-law gave my son a “Flip” digital video camera, but I was pleasantly surprised: it works exactly as it should. That seemed worth a column in itself.

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This is my story about searching for Japanese pop music under a free culture license. It’s a little tricky, because the best sites for this are of course, in Japan, and not well advertised on the English web. I discovered how to use Python’s XMLRPC library to run searches using the web API for a Japanese music sharing site called “Wacca”. The results were very interesting — I found some of what I was looking for, though not all.

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Manufacturing has been getting smaller, cheaper, and more flexible for years. It’s now possible to make products as sophisticated as smart cel-phones, PDAs, toys, clothing, books, and even houses in almost any shape or form you want down to very small numbers. The mass production barrier has fallen, so that today, it’s possible for a home inventor, hobbyist, or crafter to create almost anything by assembling one-off manufactured components, either from a service or from affordable home-fabrication equipment (or a combination of these).

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People have been talking about “micropayments” since the early days of the world-wide-web, so I’m always skeptical of micropayment systems. Flattr is an interesting variation on the idea though. It’s a voluntary system, without the overhead or chilling effects associated with “pay walls” and it puts donors in control of how much they spend, allowing them to split their donations among beneficiaries based on a monthly “pie” model. The greatest asset of Flattr is its simplicity of use — similar in many ways to the various social networking services that abound on the web today. Flattr may well succeed, and it may fill a niche of financing small projects from free software to online videos.

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What exactly does it mean when Richard Stallman says that the Creative Commons’ Attribution-ShareAlike license has a “Weak Copyleft”? Why exactly is it that “Freeware” and “Non-Free Software” mean the same thing, while “Free Software” is something else entirely? And what is this business with “Free Beer”, and where can I get some? If you’ve asked yourself these questions, this column is for you.

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Often, when modelling in 3D, it’s necessary to create a “backdrop” panoramic image. Typically this shows sky and distant land which should appear behind the foreground action. One place we’ll need this for the pilot to Lunatics is for the sky in Baikonur, Kazakhstan on launch day at the beginning of the story. I had some very particular ideas about how this should look, and I want to create just the right look. Here’s how I constructed it.

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Having defined the terms that represent the core values of free culture and free software in a previous column, today I want to talk about the terms that define its boundaries: how we describe them and defend them. And what’s on the other side of them.

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One of the great advantages of using a free license for a work is that you can re-use a growing body of free-licensed source material to help you do it. But it can seem a little daunting to find the material that you both want and can legally use. Here’s a little bit of my strategy, a few tips, and some sources, including Jamendo, which I found to be the most useful for finding music. I also touch upon some useful free software tools for listening and sorting tracks.

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Hardly anyone realizes that Blender even is a video compositing and non-linear editing tool (in addition to its modeling, rendering, and animation capabilities). There are few, if any, books available on how to use it for that purpose, so Roger Wickes’ book is much needed. It contains an enormous amount of very useful information.

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We are getting very close to wrapping up the English translation of the script for “The Beautiful Queen Marya Morevna: Underground” (which is the working title of the film being produced by the Morevna Project). So it seems like a good time to talk about the software we’ve been using, which is MediaWiki.

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