The distinction between "firmware" and "software" these days is pretty thin. With that in mind, how should you treat non-free firmware blobs on a modern system? @mjg59 has a great post that talks through a lot of the considerations that should go into making the decision for yourself:

https://codon.org.uk/~mjg59/blog/p/to-update-blobs-or-not-to-update-blobs/

It's hard to build hardware w/o blobs. If you want details, check out my talk on Purism's attempt to build RYF-compliant hardware:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xbvMtFLOmE

#blobs #ryf #firmware #foss

YonderVerseOfBlobs

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIuBFbRJ0BA

Blog: https://blog.illestpreacha.com/wcccconstruction

#CreativeCoding #Livecoding #WCCC #WCCChallenge #Worldbuilding #sounddesign #Blobs #Construction

For this week's Creative Code challenge by @sableraph : “Construction“, YonderVerseOfBlob is coded in #SonicPi, #Python , #LiveCodeLab & #HydraVideoSynth. It plays on the theme of Construction by entering a reconstructed world of blobs (LiveCodeLab & HydraVideoSynth) with their own mini conlang (constructed language) made in Python .

#Poetry

In the Lands, Outside of our Scope
Lies a verse that constructs outside of our tropes
With languages related to the elements
And blobs reconstructing their previous movements
The Yonderverse of blobs
May render hope,
May glitchify its pixels
But would the output be vibes that can trickle?

#glitchart #Conlang #Eliterature
#newmedia #videography#animation

Blobbing blobs

#illustration #digital #colors #blobs

BlobBoard

BlogPost/Code/More Imagest: https://blog.illestpreacha.com/genuary2026perfectres

#Genuary #Genuary2026 #Livecoding #Worldbuilding #Genuary4 #Genuary14 #perfectfit #lowres #blobs

BlobBoard takes blobs and perfectly fits them in various vision board templates (Prompt 14 of Genuary 2026) and has some of the blobs in a low resolution (Prompt 4 of Genuary 2026)

Coded in #LiveCodeLab

#Poetry

Blobs are blobbing
With hopes of their season
To perform their treason
But is there a way of it stopping?

#creativecoding #coding #animation
#newmedia #spheres #geometric #3D

Another #HowTo, this time how to use #Signal on #Android without giving it broad media permissions.

Signal does not use the 2 possible secure methods of accessint photos that Android offers, and clones #Whatsapp in that regard.

By insisting on needing access to read all your images, while being a complex app connected to the internet, and the only official versions containing proprietary #Google #blobs.

Links:
- https://community.signalusers.org/t/46828
- https://community.signalusers.org/t/55725

Other messengers like #SimpleX, #Element, #ElementX, #Fluffychat, #Conversations, #Threema and more save themselves the effort and just use the builtin options, improving security by design and unnecessary code bloat.

So, how can I use Signal without trusting it with all my images?

1. Use the "Share" Portal.

That is the obvious one, and a very nice feature on Android. It allows to share any media to an application and giving it access to only that.

This also works across the #WorkProfile or #PrivateSpace and can be used by Apps like #SaveTo to transfer files.

The workflow is often slower than just using the media chooser portal, but it works. It is what I use since years.

2. Android hacks

But this is not all. Setting a profile picture or group profile picture does not work through the share portal. So we use a Feature specific to Androids Sandbox:

- All apps can save files to various default directories like Pictures, Movies, Music, Downloads, Documents; without having read access to it.
- And all apps can access files they themself saved there.

Combining these two features, you can send a picture to Signal and use the "Save locally" button to save it from within the app.

The result is that this picture will be visible in Signals internal gallery and can be selected for profile and group pictures.

Obvious downsides are
- it is a stupid workflow
- it duplicates images that you need to delete manually afterwards
- pictures might be compressed twice, losing quality

But for this very limited purpose, it is kinda fine.

Still, @signalapp please solve this very old issue!

@[email protected] @[email protected]

it's been a little while, but I've been trying some new stuff with blobs in #TouchDesigner

to be continued.....sometime....question mark⁉️

#procedural #generative #realtime3d #cgi #videoart #blobs #WIP

BlobOfMatrix

#Poetry

Blobs finding themselves
In the depths
The depths of the matrix
For this portion of their day trip

Video: https://youtu.be/2fR1Rbrdqro

For my 18th sketch of Mathober2025 (curated by @fractalkitty ) coded in #LiveCodingYoutube, BlobOfMatrix takes the 14th prompt of “Augmented Matrix” and uses the speed function to represent the matrix of Blob while the audio is coded in #SonicPi through “Recursions” (28th Prompt).

Blog: https://blog.illestpreacha.com/mathober2025matrixrecursion

#mathart #mathober2025 #mathober #mathober14 #Mathober28 #augmentedmatrix #recursion #blobs

#creativecoding #coding #audiovisual
#newmedia #scifi #animation
#math #geometricart #videography