Tootfinder

I think the most neglected thing about helping others is that you should actually ask what kind of help they need. "Helping" without actually understanding their needs is inefficient at best, and outward harmful at worse.
While this is an important thought in general, it also applies to creating patches for #FreeSoftware.

#FreeSoftwareAdvent for today: #Ansible
It's what I'm using to provision and update our renderfarm, workstations and servers. Instead of hacking shell scripts to install apps and edit config files on every new workstation you write yaml files ("playbooks") that get e…

Sonnet 040 - XL
Take all my loves, my love, yea take them all;
What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?
No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call;
All mine was thine, before thou hadst this more.
Then, if for my love, thou my love receivest,
I cannot blame thee, for my love thou usest;
But yet be blam'd, if thou thy self deceivest
By wilful taste of what thyself refusest.
I do forgive thy robbery, gentle thief,
Al…

I take this as Nature's cue to get planting. #Frogspawn on the #allotment pond and lots of it. So today in went some Broad Beans, it been far too wet in the UK to do this much sooner. #growyourown

@… I usually have my butler attend to such things. White cotton gloves, and all that.
I procured a touch screen display especially for FreshPorts. Still, he tells me, this has not facilitated destruction of the bug. Is there a driver issue?

For today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent here's a tiny tool we have used in our pipeline: pyRenamer is a simple app to rename/renumber a bunch of files.
Unfortunately it's pretty much an abandoned fork of a Python 2 app that has been abandoned for even longer ago. It still works and for renumbering there's no easier solution at hand. But for file name search & replace …

IN 2026, The leaders of America’s (former) trading partners are going to have to grapple with the political consequences of tit-for-tat tariffs.
A tariff is a tax paid by consumers, and if there’s one thing the past four years have taught us, it’s that the public will not forgive a politician who presides over a period of rising prices, no matter what the cause.
US Trade Dominance Will Soon Begin to Crack
Savvy countries will discover there’s a way to mitigate the harm inc…

For a project to be truly #OpenSource (not to mention #FreeSoftware), it really needs to:
1. Have a *public* issue tracker that enables you to browse and search through issue reports *without* having to create an account.
2. Accept issue reports, with no strings attached. Yes, expecting registration is fine. Yes, expecting some effort to file a good bug report is fine. No, expecting people to ask permission, donate or otherwise put a lot of extra work to report a problem is not.
3. Do not close issue reports as "stale". Yes, it's fine to close a report if you really believe it was fixed, or if you asked for something and the user didn't reply for a long time. It's not fine to run a bot expecting users to jump every month so that the issue report that *you are ignoring* doesn't get closed.
If a project doesn't meet these, it's just a glorified throwaway code.

In this episode, we speak with Mary C. Turner, a registered nurse and a member of the Council of Presidents of National Nurses United,
the largest nurse’s union in the US,
which is forcefully calling for the abolition of ICE.
https://therealnews.com/nurses-union-a

Largest nurses union calls to abolish ICE after Alex Pretti killing: ‘They messed with the wrong profession’
“What Alex did that day was pure instinct, pure professional behavior,” NNU President Mary C. Turner tells us. “That’s just what you do when you're a nurse.“

For #FreeSoftwareAdvent I'd like to post about open source tools that we're using in our #VFXPipeline.
On Dec. 5th let's start with #OpenImageIO (