It's been another busy week at Fabricatorz and here are just some of the latest goings-on:

LGM follow-up and updates

• Fabricatorz donated the rest to push the Libre Graphics Meeting pledge drive over the top (by $1!)


• As noted in many places, our great friend Kaveh has uploaded all the videos from LGM2010 Conference - you can find them all online here.


• Nicu, the original designer of the rejon avatar, wrote a nice post about LGM2010, you can read here.


• Inkscape is about to release 0.48! Please help out by testing it!


• The Open Font Library submitted an app for the Creative Commons Catalyst grant! Go Dave and crew!

Open Clip Art Library updates

• Submit your logo to the Open Clip Art Library by the 9th! There are already loads in!!! See here for contest rules and details.


• This week there was also a nice Open Clip Art Library reference in an article on making storyboards for film.


• Finally, thank you to all who helped mention the Free Culture Research Contest!

Qi Hardware updates

• Wolfgang gave a talk about Qi Hardware at Campus Party.


• Sebastien launched a nice demo of the MilkyMistOne working with a visualizer


• Harald Welte is making great progress on openbsc gprs/edge support


• There are plans for a German speaking open hardware event coming soon


• Here is a cool project to make a terminal for the Nanonote.


• Finally, here is a ning community for nanohacks (nanonote hacks)

Photo by-nc Pete Ippel

The Fabricatorz team has been busy churning out projects. Because day by day so much goes on in the Fabricatorz studio, we realized we should share more with our public! So from now on, we will be giving regular weekly updates from the Fabricatorz studio on all our goings-on and the progress of our projects.

We begin this week with a re-cap of the LGM conference which was a great success this year and well attended! Here are some highlights from the conference, in the words of LGM attendee Barry Threw:

"Some of the most interesting things at the meeting were the sessions on desktop publishing. People self publishing and developing sophisticated tools made it clear that contrary to some opinions about the directions of literary technology, new tools will only strengthen the printmaking community, not wipe it out with dedicated e-readers. The sheer ingenuity of projects solving publishing issues with freely accessible tools showed a steady movement that will with time inevitably destroy even the highest volume censored app store in the world. Excellent presentations were given on open font design by Christopher Adams (the publisher of Joi Ito’s book Freesouls) and on self publishing by Ana Carvalho at Plana Press on transitioning from closed source software to created independent comic books. Also Tom Lechner’s talk on his program Laidout shows off its many impressive features, including laying out print on an arbitrary polygon."

(And if you are interested in reading more about the conference or thinking of participating in the future, check out more details about the event at hypermodern's blog.)

On the Status.Net front - we have implemented a new desktop client:

"With StatusNet Desktop, anyone can connect to multiple StatusNet sites, including secure and private installations. It is simple to post new notices and replies, and view public, user, friends, replies, tag and group timelines. StatusNet Desktop lets you directly manage your user and group subscriptions, manage your inbox of direct messages, search for notices across all timelines and have an auto-refreshed timeline with new status updates."

If you are interested in learning more, please read here for more information.

Finally we would love to plug a project of a dear friend of ours who has made a clever comic called Bear and Fox. Bear and Fox needs to raise some funds to get printed so please take a moment to look at the Kickstarter page and give your support! Thanks so much!

As announced at the StatusNet blog, on Sunday, July 18th, Status.Net, Google Buzz, Diaspora, GNU Social, DiSo, BuddyPress, Dreamwidth, Onesocialweb, and others will be meeting in Portland Oregon for a Federated Social Web Summit, a one-day summit by those implementors working on building the federated social web. This means building upon open web protocols that allow for various web projects to interoperate. We will be addressing current implementations, successes and incompatibilities between services, as well as the future and how to implement it.

This conference will be around the same time as the Community Leadership Summit in Portland as well as OSCON.

To find out more details see here.

Join Rejon for his 31st birthday celebration and a special edition of StatusCheck Brussels at La Maison du Peuple immediately following the Libre Graphics Meeting on Friday May 28th!

For Immediate Release:

Libre Graphics Meeting announces the immediate availability of the full schedule of talks, workshops, demo sessions, and birds-of-a-feather meetings (BOFs) for LGM 2010, to be held at De Pianofabriek in Brussels, Belgium, May 27-30.

As it has for the past five years, LGM 2010's planned sessions include status reports from the major components of the open source graphics suite: the Gimp, Krita, Inkscape, Blender, Scribus, the Open Clip Art Library, and the Open Font Library. Talks include cross-application collaboration topics such as color standards and fonts, and support for critical file formats ranging from SVG vector graphics to AutoCAD DWG.

LGM 2010 will also put real-world application of open source graphics on the agenda, including several talks from professional graphic designers, print publishers, educators, typographers, and professional design mentors.
In addition to the main program track, teams will host hands-on workshops demoing Blender, Scribus, Phatch, Inkscape, and type-design. BOFs are scheduled around OpenRaster, swatch formats, fonts, and color management, as well as team meetings for the Gimp and Blender projects and professional graphic designers.

This year's LGM will mark the debut of new releases from Inkscape, sK1, LittleCMS, Open Font Library, and the premiere screening of the trailer for the Blender Foundation's Project Durian animated movie, Sintel.

To Read the Full Press Release see here