TODO:

1. [x] Make the Luma for July open house
2. [x] Make the Substack
3. [ ] Schedule the Substack send
4. [x] Cull and note Discord links to summarize
5. [x] Fill in “What we've been up to”
6. [x] Fill in “Demos and applications” (GitHub)

If you want to stop by the studio, our next Folk open house is in the evening on Thursday, July 31, in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

If you’d be interested in attending some experimental in-person workshops we’re planning, please fill out this form. We’ll post more updates on workshops on the main folk.computer page and our Instagram page as these workshops come together.

• Andrés:
  • Kept fighting with ordering / clearing-frame bugs in the video processor:
    • 
  • Reviewed and merged Mason Jones' PR that adds support for importing GitHub gists into Folk allowing us to do things like make a gist with Folk code and run it on the table
  • I've been practicing making short social media videos of various new Folk features and programs people have been working on:
    • 
• Omar:
  • Made a PR to improve the calibration step's autorefresh and expose crop width/height. More from Omar himself:
    • “This should greatly reduce how much overhead the calibrate autorefresh imposes, especially on low-end systems. It also should feel more life. It now only refreshes once the previous frame has fully loaded, so not every 100ms (and also fixes problems where you don't see any updates because you're just constantly churning the img)”
  • Reviewed and merged Mason Jones' PR to fix an edge case with Tcl/JS interop
  • Reviewed and merged a contribution from Justin Liang that clarifies to create the `folk` user before adding permissions

• Running Folk code from a GitHub gist (thanks to Mason Jones for the initial contribution):
• Andrés wrote a git branch preview program – here, showing (in green text) that the current running branch is main:
  • 
  • On the back of it, they attached the code in this little pop-up:
    • 

Omar: two big bursts of work on the gadget this month.

One was while I was at Gradient Retreat in Canada.

Another was in preparation for our Recurse Center talk this week.

Omar: Work has sort of stalled here on trying to get calibration to work better.

(There are also still some significant blinking-out bugs when you have multiple programs out.)

I made some more nicety improvements / bug fixes to calibration (some of which I also backported to folk1):

• Made the slider range for exposure time more reasonable by default, not up to 10,000ms or whatever (if you need weird exposure time like that, just type it in)
• Text scales based on tag size so it doesn't collide with it on gadget
  • This was the bug that was fixed (see how the label text is too big and collides with tags so you can't calibrate):
    • 
• Made background color of calibrate settable from white (I ended up not using this) so you can deal with higher exposure times without washing out
• Autorefresh waits for prev frame to fully load (also backported to folk1)
• Camera now claims crop size so the calibration loads properly

I also fixed the dashed-line outline for the gadget to use the new projection stuff.

We had our open house on Monday, June 30th. It was attended by a small but enthusiastic crowd!

• Group photo:
  • 
  • Featuring: Pontus Granström, a friend of Pontus,Varun Joshi, Andrés Cuervo, Meghna Rao, Omar Rizwan
• A picture of Verun Joshi's's photo of our GitHub repo so later reference:
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• Meghna Rao turning 1. a photo of an ice cream into a little stop motion art using our animation binder program and 2. using her phone's flashlight to create a spontaneous animation:
  1. 
  2. 

• Paul and Ehmry visited Andrés at the Folk studio. Ehmry is a contributor to Synit — an experimental reactive operating system — and we spent an afternoon going through snippets of Synit's Tcl code live on the table which was a really engaging way to learn about how they're using Tcl for reactive OS operations:
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  • 
  • They had the great idea of making a stop motion animation using multiple Folk stickers
    • 
• Andrés had their (receipt printer themed) birthday party at Hex House and gave Sami Smith and Evan Kahn a tour of some shiny new Folk programs in the studio:
  • 
  • 

• Our next Folk open house is in the evening on Thursday, July 31, in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
• Omar: continue trying to make calibration work well in folk2
• Omar: try to fix blinking bugs in folk2
• Andrés: TBD

• https://avneeshsarwate-webart.netlify.app
• https://tangle-ar.app
• https://mkremins.github.io/blog/gardening-games/
• http://harmonyzone.org/blog/posts/soapbox/
• https://www.are.na/block/7547186
• https://unthinking.photography/articles/on-lacework
• https://www.archivejournal.net/essays/digital-manuscripts-as-sites-of-touch-using-social-media-for-hands-on-engagement-with-medieval-manuscript-materiality/