Same - I make most of my living from Blender and I occassionally use 1 or 2 paid add-ons. With the recent improvements to the compositor and the editor, it has even replaced the last piece of Adobe software I was using - After Effects - very nice feeling. I donate to Blender after every paid job too.
For anyone that wants actually seamless switching of video and data, look to professional AV switchers and KVM. This Lindy 5x2 HDMI + USB KVM is the business [1]. I use one because I constantly switch between Mac and Linux while working on the same project and the couple of seconds of black really gets tedious pretty quickly.
Had great fun with this today, thanks! Makes me think I'd love a compact hackable point'n'click glitch camera that you can load with glitch patches. Like a lomo and a guitar pedal had a baby.
this on an e-reader would be lovely. perhaps limiting the adding / removal of the source list to once a week or month would add another layer of purposefulness to it. want!
I recently launched this poster design and customisation project. It's built entirely from home with just my wife and I working on it.
The idea came from us realising our official address might have the wrong townland. Townlands being the smallest official land division in the country, with fairly ancient origins.
Digging into official maps, old maps and ongoing efforts to digitally map and research the original underlying Irish language names of the now mostly anglicised place names, was a very fun rabbit hole to dive into.
I also realised I'd never seen a map of Ireland composed of just the townland boundaries: of which there are an atonishing (to me anyway) 61,112, give or take.
A lot of people in Ireland, particularly in the countryside, are quite passionate about their townland/s. They don't carry any social complexities like teams or flags, but they do offer colour and meaning in a sort of linguistic interface to the land and its occupants. For example, the meaningless sounding townland Brockra is derived from the Irish An Bhrocraigh, or the place of badgers.
By combinging data from OpenStreepMap, Loganim[0], townlands[1] and other sources, we built a dataset which we would use as the foundation for a poster design. We designed the poster and built the customisation engine in parallel, letting one influence the other.
We built the whole thing in 3 weeks including website, a preview request and approval system, email and print API integration. This wouldn't have been possible without AI development tools, Claude code in this case.
The Python-based poster builder modifies SVG template layers to a spec file, a style file and a place name sidecar file. It uses Inkscape headless to outline text and CairoSVG for rasterization. This runs on an old linux PC at home, the website is built with caard and the e-commerce stack is Cloudfare worker, Stripe and Supabase.
Sample posters and previews of custom posters are available on the website. Hope it's of interest to some!
congratulations on the work so far - looks interesting, will try it out. reminds me of Microsoft’s Courier tablet [0] concept from 2009, which I was naively obsessed with for a while.
It is! - except it's to hide the fly tower from the outside. The fly tower wasn't part of the original design. The first resident theatre company to be - the Royal Shakespeare company insisted upon one so the architects but came up with the genius idea of hiding it with a conservatory. I discovered this when working in the theatre space. I went exploring the fly tower (as you do) and opened a door at the top. I assumed I'd see some dark service corridor, but instead emerged into the warm, humid, nighttime air of a huge conservatory - it was easily the most magical architectural experience I've ever had.
just a thought on B - being an island in Europe, it’s common for people in Ireland to refer to the rest of Europe as ‘the continent’. It feels like Irish people see ourselves as definitely part of the EU but less so as a geographic part of Europe. Or something
This is the best version of this kind of thing, thanks! I like how a sound fades in over a second or two when you enable it, it might be nice if it also faded out when you disable it. Especially for when you're sound 'DJing' to find the right mix.
One of the few closed-source applications I can't do without. They have a very fair pricing model that's designed with their user base in mind. Live productions are seasonal and / or short-lived and the company understands that users (individuals, theatre companys, venues etc.) likely don't need a licence for every day of the year. They allow you to rent licenses (split into audio, video, lighting) by the day AND 100% of every rental goes towards store credit. I recently used years of store credit to buy a full video licence for the first time. I'd like to thank QLab for making an incredible piece of software with such a fair and thought out pricing model!
Since the free app is fully featured, I see the $8 as the paid version, as opposed to just for sync. But I think they're doing themselves a disservice listing it like this. I use Syncthing to sync my obsidian note 'vault', and by having my Mac's Syncthing directory in iCloud, it also syncs notes to my iPhone. This gives you a free◊, cross-platform markdown notes solution. Oh and since Syncthing has a Synology NAS package, I also sync my notes to a NAS.
◊ I just donated to Syncthing for the first time. It's fantastic
Does exactly what I needed. Found this after rummaging around for an external drive one time too many. After pluggin / unplugging six drives, I realised I had moved what I was looking for to a seventh.
Apologies in advance if this is super obvious! I've tried apps to free up storage but now I just do two things: every so often, especially after completing a large project, I delete everything in ~/Library/Caches. Right now, it's 56GB. MacOS immediately starts repopulating it with current, required cache, but it does make a difference. The other simple fix is order applications by size in Finder, delete the largest ones that you don't use. A big chunk could be iCloud, so you could 'remove download' on larger directories that have downloaded to your device.