Jason van Gumster

2391 points
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Atlanta, GA

Jason van Gumster mostly makes stuff up. He writes, animates, and occasionally teaches, all using open source tools. He's run a small, independent animation studio, wrote Blender For Dummies and GIMP Bible, and continues to blurt out his experiences during a [sometimes] weekly podcast, the Open Source Creative Podcast. Adventures (and lies) at @monsterjavaguns.

Authored Comments

I tend to straddle the fence on how I work with Git (and versioning in general). I like to perform all of my versioning operations from the command line... however, graphical environments tend to give the easiest (and most attractive) means of navigating the history of a project (or a file within that project). When working with Mercurial, for example, I've gotten quite accustomed to TortoiseHg's Workbench for this purpose. Unfortunately, I haven't yet found a corresponding graphical tool for git... though Git-cola looks like it might be promising.

As mentioned in the actual lightning talk, there are a *lot* more tools available, depending on the specific task you're doing. Unfortunately, in a lightning talk I only had so much time to cover things... so I covered as wide a net as I could.

Regarding VLC in particular, it's absolutely a day-to-day workhorse when working with video content. Not only is it a great general-purpose player, but it's handy for all manner of other tasks (conversions, connecting to live media, even simple video editing). There's more to that little program than you might think at first blush.