Every year the staff at Rimu look forward to the latest Linux.conf.au conference. Some of us go in person, some watch online, but we all love it, and love to catch up with whats going on.
This year it was in Christchurch and Juan and I (Liz) went down to attend in person.
CULTURE
Christchurch was amazing, Juan took the time to race about on a Lime Scooter, and we all caught up with old regular LCA attendees.
Spent a fair amount of time in the common rooms where we had soldaring, RaspberryPis, DonkeyCars, and a TV hooked up to a laptop playing JackBox Games.
Spent one evening making some Ear rings with flashing LEDs for a teenage girl, explaining basic soldering, and electronics which was great.
The Penguin dinner was at The Airforce Museum and was amazing. We were able to walk around the museum, then sit down in a large clear area to eat food.
The professional delegates dinner was held at the Canterbury Uni where LCA itself was held, and was less interesting (though the food was good)
Manage to catch up with all the usual LCA attendees, including Linus Torvalds, Bdale Garbee, Dirk Hohndel, and other open source/linux “celebs”
If you ever happen to be at an LCA and see Linus or Dirk, and want to approach them, by all means do. Freindly guys! If you need a conversation starter, ask if they have been diving yet and where abouts (they usually go diving before/after LCA in the pacific Islands or Aussie).
Met this guy who had a ‘hug badge’ which rated your hug, and sent a tweet out when you hugged him! Most well hugged man at LCA i imagine!
Here are a few random other Photos of Christchurch, the room, and some amusing/cool things of note.
TALKS
I prefer a talk that i can walk away from having learnt something (tutorials) or been inspired to try something new. Some of the key stand out talks for me were the following.’
The Garden bot (Keynote)
How to make your own PCB boards (design and prototype)
Hacking Insulin pumps with open source (Keynote)
I particularly liked the opensource superhumans where Jon Oxer explains his work with those less able bodied people
As a side note, i also took part in the openhardware miniconf Jon took, and we built a DonkeyCar
I decided to learn how to program in Lua/Love2d which was actually easy and fun way to get into game development (i sometimes teach kids in my spare time)
I missed this talk in person, but have seen it before, and its a fantastic talk i though worth looking at
There were plenty of other talks i went to, you can view the entire conference at https://www.youtube.com/user/linuxconfau2019
One of the main organizers of LCA2019 owns this awesome car that runs a raspberry pi, and oodles of LEDs etc
Over all, i can happily say it was yet another sucessful LCA, and totally worth going to. Can’t wait till next year!