newsletters:2024-08
Table of Contents
August 2024 newsletter
(If you enjoy following our progress and want us to continue, definitely consider sponsoring Folk on GitHub Sponsors.)
Some links, especially if you're new to Folk:
- Our next Folk open house is on the night of Saturday, September 28, 7-9PM, at our studio in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
What we've been up to
Applications and demos
- Azlen Elza made a precision die:
- WIP: Omar has been working on a iPhone→Folk scroll demo which should be a really nice way to open imagination about how to use the system w/ traditional computers
- random video which isn't how it'll look when it's done:
- (isn't close to finished yet, may even require new evaluator because it feels like latency and frame drops degrade the experience a lot, you expect it to keep up with iPhone scrolling. good push for performance though)
- Daniel Pipkin has been looking at using depth camera (Kinect + libfreenect2) to implement touch detection
Friends and outreach
- Our open house on August 18 had snacks (thanks to Victoria), new animation programs for 3D calibration, ran our old colleague Ian Clester's music programs from last year on the downstairs system, and had good conversations about programming, the future of computing, and architecture + computing.
- Omar visited our friend Ashwin Agarwal at Recurse Center, worked a bit on the Folk system there that Jessie Grosen had set up last month (testing 3D calibration on that setup)
- Omar: was in San Francisco at the end of August (talking about a side project at !!con) – spent a lot of time showing off the handheld Folk gadget while I was there, talking about some of the possibilities, coming up with a reasonably cool demo set that can be done with laptop + current gadget
- Was nice to be able to work a bit remotely!
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- August 6: Azlen Elza & his friend Carmen visited – made precision die, drew stuff
- August 15: Kariina Altosaar visited, and we talked about how she might help out with the project and get a Folk machine set up (she'll borrow one of the Chromebook systems for now)
- Omar had just brought the gadget into Hex House that day, so we did an impromptu demo:
- August 15: Gwen Brinsmead and Colton Pierson visited – chatted about custom keyboards, agents, tangible computing
- Andrés figured out how to make Folk stickers (come to an open house if you'd like one)
Fractal
- August 6: Andrés visited Fractal University to scout out their plans for installing their own Folk system:
- then Patrick and Josh visited Folk for an hour and we chatted about Josh potentially contributing to Folk
Upstate Carolina Linux Users Group
- The Upstate Carolina Linux Users Group (UCLUG) set up Folk in a makerspace. They streamed their last meeting where one of the members presented about Briar and their Folk computer setup — here's the video at the relevant timecode (the whole video is an hour long)
- They have a keyboard editor working and gave a nice little demonstration of writing a Folk program (to make a dial that changes the radius of an orange circle) using it. It's exciting to have a group that we've never talked to download Folk and set it up themselves. Looking forward to many more people doing this in the coming months!
- Some screenshots of their setup (note: their vertical mounting solution is a ladder :) ):