Jitsi Meet and New Friends

 Last night I joined in a meeting of a Linux User Group in my state. I'd been meaning to physically attend a meeting for the past 18 years but never did make it happen. With the switch to everything online, I figured it would be cool to finally meet some of these folks.  

The Linux Users of Central Illinois - they announce meetings on their list: http://www.luci.org/luci-announce/ 

Turns out to be some pretty interesting folks in that group. Like those times my hubby and I attended Ohio LinuxFest in the mid-2000s. 

The point of my posting, however, is to say that it was my first time trying Jitsi Meet. You go to https://meet.jit.si/ and either type in the name of an existing meeting to join or else you start a new meeting.

At one point it wouldn't let me turn my video back on after I'd turned it off, but that may have been a browser/permissions thing. (I was using Brave as my browser, and I'm still new at using that.)

I liked Jitsi Meet and I think it has some very nice potential. 

Waylena returns to the dome Fall 2020

Video shot on my phone, put together in Blender's Video Sequence Editor. 

Python for Blender tutorials

There are a lot of tutorials out there on the topic of Python for Blender, but this series is working particularly well for me. 

I found this set through BlenderNation.

Raghav Venkat of the cordata Youtube channel has created the series as a playlist.

Python for Blender: Artist Friendly Programming Guide for Addon Development

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmGhGFnN_vMITtIKBKjPJ1h5C5i-iabqO

Stellarium remote fun

I LOVE open source software! 

Stellarium is one of the top open source software packages for desktop sky viewing. Since I won't be presenting shows in a physical planetarium any time soon, I figured I should work out how to present better online.

Stellarium has a remote web interface plugin that is pretty easy to set up.  So I'm using my giant monitor for presentation and my little monitor for controls and for programming.

I'm clumsy with the on-screen menus, so having them on a separate monitor is great! Some actions take a while to set up, so I tried a little scripting to automate some stuff.

And then I decided that rather than hunting through pull-down menus for my little scripts I should make some buttons for scripts and actions.

So I started modifying the html. 

And relied on the kindness of a stranger's blog post to expose the functionality.

Thankfully I found an Atom package to make that json readable.

I don't often spend enough time in any given language to get good at it. But in this effort, I'm digging into Stellarium scripting/javascript, html, and to find the right language for scripting actions I found myself searching the source code for the project itself.