A Saturday back home!

Hey everyone, happy Saturday everyone! Not that it's a special day or anything...
But anyway, I'm home! I arrived back in Latvia just this morning, so I'm also kinda tired... But I'm really happy seeing as I've got a week long holiday until school starts again. Oh well, at least I get to see my little brother, who is absolutely adorable!

But anyway, seeing as it is the random day today, I will be speaking about two rather important things to me, which some people might think its a bit odd, but I'm not really bothered.

Those two things would be the power of open-source, aka, Ubuntu; And the other thing would be the importance of the indie community, be it music or be it gaming.

I will start with Ubuntu. For those of you who do not know, Ubuntu is the most popular computer OS based on Linux, with about 12 million users! It may not seem much in comparison to Windows, or even Mac, but seeing as it's an open source platform for 'nerds' like you and I, it's quite impressive seeing that there is at least 12 million of us.

I guess when you think about it, it kind of fits in with its GUI (Graphical User Interface) name, which is Unity. From my point of view, I think it's about the fact that it is being constantly being fixed and improved by the community, so it's not only doing what you like, but you are also helping everyone else who use this platform.
Now I will be honest with you, Ubuntu can be a complete pain sometimes. While its interface seems really simple, (and it is, if you want to just browse the web...) it can actually make you go mad with the amount of errors and crashes you get. Often it won't be because of the crappiness of the system, but rather because of the amount of experimenting on it. You also have to be able to give some of your free time to learn at least the basic commands for the terminal, and the shortcut ctrl+alt+t will become your best friend, seeing as it brings up the terminal...

But you may ask why is this important? Because open-source isn't only related to Ubuntu and OS's... It also realted to most software written for Linux/Ubuntu. There are many more reasons, for one, due to the nature of open-source, a product can never be discontinued, since if there would be the need, the community would pick it up.

It also better in the terms that since it's free, it has no actual dead-lines to follow, so the developers are urged to take time and iron out any problems.

So now you can see why an open-source environment is a good place to grow...

Now my other topic is the indie community. There are many forms it takes, mainly different forms of media, like Games, Music and Film.

The thing with indie, is that this is the community that drives the development of the said media forward, because its exactly indie games that innovate and bring in new things ideas and possibilities. A perfect model of this would be the Call of Duty franchise; You don't really see it doing much new, do you? I mean, yes, one small thing or two, like new perks or a new mode in multiplayer, but generally, it has a structure that has proven to earn them lots of money, so they follow the structure being afraid of losing money. Now indie on the other hand, money for them often is only needed to launch the business, but the projects will be made out of love and the willingness to try new things. A great example of this would be Minecraft, which is only the most popular indie game within the last year. Notch, the creator, says that it started as a small project, and after he is going to be finished with it, and people will slowly become bored of it, he will release the source code of the game under the public domain, giving the opportunity to many future developers to see how did the miracle come to happen.

In the end, my main thing I wanted to talk about was indie film, and a project that I have been following for about the past year. It's done by a rather small group, with no budget at all, no processionals, and no big name software. Instead, they use a program called 'Blender', which is open-source, thus free; all the actors did their job without being paid, they did it because they love what they were doing; and the main thing is really the determination to have this project done, even if it has been in making for about 4 years... It's called Project London, here is the trailer for it:

It is absolutely beautiful I say. Go check them out at http://projectlondonmovie.com/.

It really is inspiring, but I think I have written way too much today, and I do hope that you did not get bored half way through it, or even fell asleep... See you guys next week :)

-Toms.