• Andrés will be giving the opening keynote at Causal Islands Berlin on this Friday, October 4.
  • The talk will use a Folk gadget to control slides, demonstrate Folk, and explain the technology and vision behind Folk. We'll link the recording of the talk in the newsletter next month.
  • It looks like livestream tickets are also available if you're interested

• Jessie Grosen added support to the supercollider branch of Folk for the syntax Wish $this plays note A. She and Andrés and Arcade Wise got together for some crafting and SuperCollider time, made a lot of buttons, and built a paper 'piano' on the Recurse Center Folk system:
• Omar fixed up folk-cnc after someone reached out about it (so it now works with latest Folk, which has different display dimension statement and tag statement forms now that 3D calibration is in place)
• Naveen Michaud-Agrawal implemented a 'parameters' system where you can control parameters of a page by moving a controller dial nearby:
• Arcade Wise made a bar graph system (it runs entirely in a shader):
  • “it supports anyone who claims to have graphable data” (!)
  • Graph cat:
    • 

Daniel Pipkin has been working on hand tracking. (using Robert Xiao's technique to ultimately get touch tracking, so you can touch things with your fingers)

Depth and IR data from the Kinect can now be piped through folk.

• Merged Daniel Pipkin's ESC/POS receipt printer work
• Andrés added a new keyboard shortcut: Alt-F1 to stop Folk
  • Useful for configuring the gadget when Wi-Fi is broken: plug in a USB keyboard, hit Alt-F1, and then you can use sudo nmtui by hand to set up Wi-Fi without needing to outrace the Folk process reastarting
• Omar merged subprocess death detection and reporting (as part of gadget libcamera support)
• Omar merged C++ support (as part of gadget libcamera support)
• Omar added support for drawing dashed stroke including offset, so you can animate the dashes.
  • (used for outlining the border of the gadget – shown later in this newsletter)
• Naveen added a Bezier curve drawing wish
  • 
• Naveen fixed a mailbox leak when a subprocess terminates
• Omar made a new live-build .img that has a working default up-to-date setup.folk
  • Still need to make git pull work (its remote origin is set wrong because we copied the repo)
  • I should write a script to do this automatically…

Omar: Made a new gadget design that can also fit the older/more-encased Nebra AnyBeam. Built a second gadget for Andrés (to take to Berlin!) with the Nebra AnyBeam that we had lying around, so now we have 2 gadgets.

The gadget design is now on GitHub. (Not everything is specified yet – I need to measure some bolt lengths and link some Amazon stuff.) 3D print has been fairly stable for a month or two but probably needs a new revision where the front panel is more solid (doesn't wobble, camera doesn't get knocked off).

Two big camera fixes:

1. Switched to wide-angle camera
2. Direct libcamera support in Folk instead of using libcamerify
   • + tell libcamera to configure (reduce) camera exposure time so that projected tags for calibration don't get washed out

These fixed the worst issues – it now actually calibrates! We can project onto programs! (Had to expand the camera hole in the front panel to make the wide-angle camera fit.)

First calibrated use of Omar's gadget (gadget-blue) and of Andrés's gadget (gadget-red), respectively:

• Moving dashed line around the outside of the projector area
  • Actually makes a huge difference: now you can tell where the gadget's area of effect actually is, don't have to guess, and you can see at a glance if the system is still live or if it's blocked/frozen by whether the dashed line is still moving.
  • Code you can add to ~/folk-live/setup.folk to enable this:

    • When display /disp/ has width /w/ height /h/ {
        When the clock time is /t/ {
          Wish to draw a dashed stroke with points \
            [list [list 0 0] [list $w 0] [list $w $h] \
              [list 0 $h] [list 0 0]] \
            color white width 10 dashlength 40 \
            dashoffset [expr {fmod($t, 10)*-120}]
        }
      }

• Changed the 'page fault' mechanism to run curl in background so it doesn't block the gadget awkwardly when you're pointing it at random programs

sustain/TTL

sysmon is extended (maybe will rename to custodian) to also handle reaping sustained statements when they hit their deadline

fixed some keyboard issues

workqueue display on threads page

• Our open house this month was well-attended, and we got to show off the gadgets and eink device:
  • 
  • Andrés practiced his talk for Causal Islands Berlin:
    • 

• Our next Folk open house is on the night of Monday, October 21, at our studio in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
• Andrés giving talk, following up
• Daniel continuing to work on hand tracking
• Omar will respin the gadget and meet with Ultimems
• Omar continuing to work on new evaluator

• https://teaching.ellenmueller.com/walking/2021/10/10/stanley-brouwn-this-way-brouwn-1962/
• https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/alan-kay/
• https://grafematik2024.sciencesconf.org
• https://x.com/rsnous/status/1540793581337604097 (gadget ideas)

• Send emails from Cloudflare Workers
• How Swift Achieved Dynamic Linking Where Rust Couldn't
• What is an application binary interface (ABI)?
• User guide for Borland C++ editor
• Print your digital reading list as a magazine, shipped monthly
• Newspaper Club (print your own newspaper as a service)
• Supervision, an interesting looking computer vision library
• Book design lecture from Ben Denzer via the Parsons Communication Design Lecture Series