Author Archives: Blender Fox

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About Blender Fox

Recreational road-runner, blender/CG rookie, linux user (LE-1, LPIC-1, SUSE CLA 11, SUSE 11 Tech Spec), programmer, avid tinkerer (I'm always breaking things), self-confessed anime & manga otaku & japanophile

Project Gooseberry – A Letter from Ton & Francesco

Received this today:

The Gooseberry crowd-funding campaign is over!

Unfortunately we didn’t get enough funding in to make a feature length movie. We do have a lot of support though – over 4500 people donated or subscribed. That’s more than enough to start working on the Pilot of the film.

You can read a lot more about it here:
http://gooseberry.blender.org/campaign-wrap-up-the-pilot/

In a later email you will be contacted about refunds, cancellations, or activations of pledges. We won’t do anything without your explicit approval. Just give us a bit of time to handle it well.

Please read the following carefully, one of the cases applies yours.

1) PayPal and Bank pledges
If you paid us already you will be contacted today or tomorrow. You then can decide whether you prefer a refund or if want to support the film project after all.

2) Credit card pledges
If you have pledged using a Credit Card, no charges have happened yet. We will contact you early next week with an option to cancel the pledge, or to activate it. We will not charge any card without your permission.

3) Cloud pledges
If you promised to join Blender Cloud if we made our target, you will get contacted next week too.

4) Active Cloud Subscriptions
If you already joined Blender Cloud, you will get contacted next week with our plans for further development of Blender Cloud, and how the Pilot project will fit in. We hope you stay on board, but a subscription can be cancelled any time.

You can contact us any time with questions. We do our best to handle emails within a day!

Thanks,

The Blender Cloud team:
– Ton Roosendaal
– Francesco Siddi

Related articles

Gooseberry Targets not met, new Plan Announced | BlenderNation

 

The Blender Institute has stopped the Gooseberry campaign now that it’s clear that the updated target of 5,000 supporters cannot be met. Ton presents a slimmed down version of the project which will still lead to substantial improvements of Blender. Of course, each supporter gets the choice to keep his pledge in place or to withdraw it now.

 

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Dynamic IP Workaround

If you rely on remote access to your home computer but cannot be bothered with having to record your external IP each time then you can use DynDNS or No-IP, but they rely on installing their own tools to update their systems, and in some cases, want you to pay for the service. I have found a (somewhat convoluted) way of an alternative means, which should work under most Linux environments.

  1. Install the packages “at” and “grive” (at allows you to schedule tasks from command line with simple timing syntax. Grive is a console-based Google Drive syncing tool) — note, however, that grive may not be present in all repositories.
  2. Setup Grive.
  3. Add this script to the grive directory and name it externalIP.sh:

IP=wget -q -O - checkip.dyndns.org|sed -e 's/.*Current IP Address: //' -e 's/<.*$//'
HOST=host $IP | cut -d ' ' -f5
echo $IP $HOST | tee externalIP.txt
grive
echo ‘cd {path-to-your-grive-folder};./externalIP.sh’ | at now + 2 hours

  1. Make the script executable
chmod +x externalIP.sh
  1. Run the script ONCE
$ ./externalIP.sh
XX.X.XXX.XXX your-hostname.
Reading local directories
Synchronizing folders
Reading remote server file list
Detecting changes from last sync
Synchronizing files
sync "./externalIP.txt" doesn't exist in server, uploading
Finished!
warning: commands will be executed using /bin/sh
job 278 at Tue May 6 22:48:00 2014

What the script does is determine the external IP address of your machine, do a reverse lookup on it, write the results to a text file, then sync it with Google Drive. What you can do is read the text file (externalIP.txt) off your Google Drive storage via the web interface at http://drive.google.com, and you can then access it remotely, using either the IP or the hostname. The last line schedules the script to be run again in two hours from now (in case your IP address changes), this is the “job 278” line.

It should also be noted that the scheduling carries on between reboots.

Related articles

Look Up

We’re probably all guilty of staring at our devices too much. I’m just as guilty. But this is an interesting watch. No slating, no demonising, just a plea to take a break from social networking for a bit.

I’m pleased I’m not on Facebook….

Dvořák – Symphony No. 9 Allegro con fuoco Official Music Video – YouTube

I’m an avid classical music listener, but I’m not quite sure what to make of this…. o.O

Qian Lingyun and Liu Jie: China firefighters fall to their deaths in Shanghai | Metro News

China is mourning the loss of two young firefighters who fell hand-in-hand to their deaths while battling a 13th floor apartment blaze in Shanghai.

A member of the public captured the tragic moment the pair were swept away from a balcony as they tried to extinguish the fire, the Daily Mail reports.

Liu Jie, 20, was pushed towards the balcony by a sudden explosion before his colleague Qian Lingyun, 23, tried to grab his hand and save his life.

However, the weight was too much for him to hold, and the pair were pulled from the apartment and fell to the pavement below.

Fire brigade spokesman Jian Ku said: ‘Firemen always watch each other’s backs, they look after each other, this tragic death shows the strength of that bond between colleagues.

‘Guarding one another in life, inseparable in death.’

Qian Lingyun and Liu Jie: China firefighters fall to their deaths in Shanghai | Metro News.