mrxvt looking for maintainers

Hi all!

mrxvt is a cool light-weight terminal emulator, not tied to a specific desktop environment and with minimal dependency. This was also one of my very first bigger contributions to Free Software. Well I had patches here and there before, but that’s one project where I stuck around longer and where I was quickly given commit rights. So it is dear to my heart. It was also my first big feature attempt since I started a branch to add UTF-8 support (actually any-encoding support), which is the normal way of things now but at the time, many software and distributions were still not working with UTF-8 as a default. Then I left for years-long wandering our planet on a motorcycle (as people who know me are aware) and because of this, drastically slowed down FLOSS contributions until a few years ago. Back as a contributor, mrxvt is not my main project anymore (you know which these are: GIMP and ZeMarmot!). I moved on.

Now I have to admit the awful truth: I don’t use mrxvt much anymore. My main reason is actually because I need dearly UTF-8 and even though I’d love to finish whatever I started on this topic years ago, I don’t have the opportunity to do this anymore. Whatever terminal I use now* is good for me.

Yet mrxvt is still used, and we have regularly people asking about its development. So this is just a small call, if not too late:

if anyone is interested into taking over mrxvt, you are welcome to do so!

I have recently moved the code from subversion (on Sourceforge) to git on gitlab. So consider this new repository as the new official upstream of mrxvt. But be it know that my goal here is not to take back active development. I just can’t make the time to it. I can only assure that I would maintain it with GI (historical maintainer who also has commit right on the new repo as well) and would review and merge any patch which makes sense. If any developer who previously had commit rights on our subversion repository asks me for, I can give you commit rights there too.

Last but not least: if anyone wants to take over, we will gladly give ownership. But please send a few patches first. We had a few people who wanted to become the upstream without even showing a piece of code. Well we want to give the baby, but making sure first we give it to someone who cares. So just make a few patches that we can review, and we’ll happily give over mrxvt.

* Full disclosure: my current terminal of choice is Guake. Well it has unfortunately its share of bugs, but I really love the “making it appear and disappear in a click”. Considering that the terminal emulator is undoubtly the software I use the most daily, making it a special one, with its own windowing (not lost in alt-tab hell) is a very good trick to me.

September 11, 2016September 1, 2017

ZeMarmot monthly report for August 2016

So what happened in August for ZeMarmot?

GUADEC

We went to the GUADEC conference, which was our first time there. Have a look to our reports in English and in Korean.

If you haven’t already, we can recommend to have a look at the record of our talk. We showed pieces of the animation work in progress.

Excerpt from ZeMarmot work-in-progress at GUADEC

Also the development being done on the animation software.

… and some numbers on what we did in GIMP (we already posted some info on our implication in GIMP earlier, if you remember), and more… Anyway rather than repeating ourselves, just check out the video. 🙂

Production

This month has been very active, both for the drawing, animating and coloring of several cuts of the pilot, as well as for the plugin development.

Just as we came back from GUADEC though, the graphics tablet of Aryeom — a Wacom Intuos 5 M — failed to work. This is bad news since these are pretty expensive. We were seeing it coming since the connection was having regular issues, but Aryeom is extra cautious with her material, so we hoped it would last longer. It did not. For a week, Aryeom had been drawing on a very old Wacom Bamboo (MTE-450, nearly 10 year old model, which Aryeom was using during her university years). Finally we found a solution saving us from having to buy a whole new tablet!

But as a bad news does Aryeom sprained her right hand’s thumb (i.e. her drawing hand) just around the end of the month! :-/ Probably she worked too much.
So that’s a bad news which requires her to rest her hand a bit now. Send her all the love you can, everyone!

That’s it for now. We’ll send more news soon, hopefully better ones.

We hope that you appreciate our project, and if this is the case, don’t forget that you can always support us either through Patreon (USD) or Tipeee (EUR).

September 4, 2016September 1, 2017

Can you save a Wacom tablet with broken USB port?

You may have already read on ZeMarmot’s Twitter a few days ago but I thought a short post may be worth it. Lately Aryeom’s Wacom tablet (Intuos 5 M) had been acting up until finally the USB port was not working at all (not the cable — of course we checked! 😛 — but the port side on the tablet).

Apparently quite a common problem with Wacom Intuos tablets (like very common; I could find many reports on the web about such problem) and the after-sales of Wacom is quite expensive unfortunately. Some people would open and solder the USB back themselves successfully. On the other hands, I could read at least one comment by someone who failed and bricked the tablet this way. Also I have not soldered anything for years and I don’t have a good soldering iron anymore.

We also had the wireless kit, so we wondered if this could not be our solution: why plug the tablet at all? But it still requires the tablet to work on battery and this one is charged… by the same USB plug! Back to case 1. But then I checked the battery, realized it looked like a very common phone battery (comparing to a Galaxy S2 battery we had there, it was the same voltage, just a slightly different form factor). So yes the solution was simply to buy a 8€ universal charger, and a second Wacom battery so that we can use one in the tablet while the other is charging.

Wacom battery charged on universal charger…

And tadaaa! Wacom tablet fixed for just a few bucks! 🙂

I’m just letting this small trick out there as a possible alternative to soldering yourself your graphics tablet, in case this happens to you too.

P.S.: yes it is written on the battery to only use the specified charger. But what do you want? We do what we can. 😉

Reminder: was it helpful? If you like our posts, you can
always support our animation film project, "ZeMarmot"
(Creative Commons by-sa), made with Free Software, for
which we also contribute back free software code, open data,
articles…
Fund us in USD on Patreon or in EUR on Tipeee! :-)

August 16, 2016September 1, 2017

Report of GUADEC 2016

Hi all!

So this year was our first GUADEC, for both Aryeom (have a look at Aryeom’s report, in Korean) and I. GUADEC stands for “GNOME Users And Developers European Conference”, so as expected we met a lot of both users and developers of GNOME, the Desktop Environment we have been happily using lately (for a little more than a year now). It took place at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.

Apart from some people we knew from Libre Graphics Meeting events over the years, we met a lot of new faces, and that’s very cool. We have to spread ZeMarmot love, right?! 🙂

IMG_20160812_144317

My first impression is the remarkable organization of GUADEC. They planned social events every day (barbecue, picnic with football, beer nights, dinners… even an ice cream truck at free price!), very well planned schedules, efficient sponsorship, workshops and hackfests, a cake for the 19th birthday… They know their geeks and we nearly never ran out of coffee (well, excepted during the hackfests ;-()!

Of course, we were not here just for the beer, there were a lot of very cool talks. I was quite interested into Endless and their OS based on GNOME. It was interesting to see the design experiment around GNOME maps too. There were also a bunch of discussion relative to security, and definitely the project on everyone’s mouth was Flatpak. This is clearly a technology that a lot of people have been waiting for, and the center of many discussions.

But also the small feedback that we got on how the GNOME Foundation works was quite insightful. Obviously this is only a small piece of it, but being able to participate and view some of the decision process, discuss about the money that the foundation had been able to raise, how it should be used, about new events around GNOME (like LAS GNOME). This all felt like an exciting time and a cool community to be part of.

IMG_20160812_145043

Another of my activities was trying to get designers interested into GIMP. For people who have followed my work a little, you know I have been really involved into getting GIMP a design revival (taking over the GUI wiki, creating an official GIMP GUI mailing list, trying to make other developers interested into this topic again and proposing some ideas here and there…), yet with very limited success so far (well I had some, but would really love if things could go forward at a better pace). I think GIMP is clearly a great software, both historically and technically. Historically because it is the root of several awesome technologies, like GTK+ (no GNOME without, right?) or lately GEGL, and because many people would call it a “flagship” for Free Software. But great technically as well: I am very amazed how good the code is. It has its zones of darkness (every software has, especially after more than 20 years of existence), because it is still well organized, clean, following clear coding standards with quality code. There is obviously a good technical maintainership. Now the GUI is less than perfect. Not because it is flawed, but because it follows here too 20-year-old design standards. Any software this age has this kind of problem, especially with design paradigms evolving faster and faster. Yet I believe a software that great deserves a chance to get a new face. So what’s the link to GUADEC? Well I have tried to approach various GNOME designers and getting them interested to GIMP again. If you are one of these designers I approached, hopefully I convinced you to give it a try. If I didn’t approach you, I may just not have known who you are, and do not hesitate to come to me. I am not saying that any complete huge redesign will happen overnight. But you definitely have open ears and we, at GIMP, are willing to discuss how to make a better user experience! We can start small.

Another reason for our presence was obviously to present our project: ZeMarmot. We were quite pleased to discover that some people knew about us. I was clearly going there thinking we would be like total strangers. But not only did some people recognize us, but we even had someone telling us his daughter was a huge fan. What? We got our first fan girl?

By the way, they had this badge machine, so while we were there, we printed and created our first hand-made badges of ZeMarmot. About 3 dozens of them. They are therefore quite exclusive so if you got some of them while being there, don’t throw them away!
Oh and by the way, that’s Creative Commons by-sa badges, like our movie! 😉

IMG_20160813_163038

IMG_20160813_163834

IMG_20160813_163851

IMG_20160813_162921

For people interested into our talk, here it is! You’ll see some quite exclusive contents with a few seconds of some cuts of the pilote. Enjoy!

And so here we are, ready to leave Germany. This was a very interesting event. We may come back next year, who knows? Only regret I have is that I was really hoping to participate to a workshop, but since our hotel was already booked, it was not made possible. Well next year maybe…

IMG_20160814_181727