Two years ago we went to the fourth ever Ohio LinuxFest at the Columbus Convention Center. We decided to go again this year to sit in on at least a few of the talks. The day started out with us running around to get Wide Open Mind t-shirts made so we could do a little promotion at the fest. Because of this, we made it about halfway through the Blender talk. Ronald Hess did some really cool demos and promised a new interface in the next version of Blender. This will be a welcome improvement for those of us who struggle to learn the intricacies of the current UI. I was a little disappointed that Big Buck Bunny was not shown, but I guess there just wasn’t enough time.

After Blender came Peace, Love and Rockets – a talk all about model rockets and avionics. Bdale Garbee showed us how you can use simple electronics to record altitude, control parachute release and gather other statistics that can be analyzed and graphed with custom software that he wrote and open sourced himself (in addition with open-sourcing the hardware designs). Leigh is now excited about getting into model rocketry.

We wrapped up the afternoon with a talk from John “Maddog” Hall on Sustainable Computing. He spoke on energy issues as well as the desire to provide low-cost, efficient internet access to every person in the world. My favorite quote was: “Everyone thinks we’re socialists, but I’m a capitalist and Richard Stallman is a capitalist. If we could just get those folks in Washington DC to become capitalists as well, we would be in good shape.

LinuxFest has been a blast both years I have attended and I always wonder why I don’t just go for the whole day. Maybe next year I will and if it sounds interesting, you should come too!

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