Tootfinder

#FreeSoftwareAdvent of our VFX pipeline: the #OpenZFS filesystem.
Our current file server is running the free community edition of #TrueNAS now but up until last year we ran a bare-metal U…

#FreeSoftwareAdvent I couldn't work without LibreOffice or Thunderbird. The former is a fantastic and comprehensive office suite, and the latter is Mozilla's IMAP and POP3 email client.
I suggested using them years ago at a work meeting, and since then, Microsoft tools have been discarded in favor of their opensource alternatives.

#FreeSoftwareAdvent KeePassXC is the best password manager I've used.
Can create strong passwords, store TOTP data, organize in folders all the keys, add comments...

Day 2 of #freesoftwareadvent I use digikam for most photo management; and also it's sibling showfoto. digikam has a load of different photo tools, from the simple colour fixes, un-distortion etc - and simple album management - all the way up to some very fancy tools. It does the download from phone or camera great. showfoto is most of the basic tools but setup generally for …

#FreeSoftwareAdvent
A piece of free software I rely on at work is #Dokuwiki: https://www.dokuwiki.org
…

hmm, #freesoftwareadvent - I think I'd go for 'perf' for my first one; it's a good simple way to see where your CPU time is going inside a program or the kernel; it's got about a million options for deeper stuff, but a simple 'perf top' (as root) or 'perf record' followed by 'perf report' can give you a lot of hints, especially with the -g …

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 (

This blog post links to all my #FreeSoftwareAdvent posts which are revolving around tools used in our VFX pipeline.
https://www.comp-fu.com/2025/12/free-software-advent-2025…

And here's my wrap up of my list of #freesoftwareadvent entries.
https://www.treblig.org/daveG/advent2025.html
(Although I did wonder about ending on the…

You all deserve a break; so for my last #freesoftwareadvent I suggest the game
'Frozen bubble':
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frozen_Bubble

Frozen Bubble - Wikipedia

#FreeSoftwareAdvent finale 2025! Without these free and open source projects our pipeline couldn't exist at all:
Python, the VFX world's favourite programming language. And of course... Linux itself 🥳
Happy Holidays!

Today's important open-source software in our pipeline for #FreeSoftwareAdvent has been mentioned before. It's the video encoder/decoder #ffmpeg
We're using it to create h264 preview clips. At some point in the past it was essential for decoding proprietary files that clien…

#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…

For #FreeSoftwareAdvent I'm highlighting open-source tools in our #VFXpipeline. Today: #OpenColorIO
OCIO is a library that is part of all modern DCC applications. It color-mana…

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 …