We would like to thank the ComicCon crew for hosting us this year. They gave us the best post in the opening of Hall 5 and we had direct view to the ongoing concert.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To manage an event with so many people and keep them clean, fed, supported, networked and safe is a gargantuan task and they deserve all the praise they can get. May the source be with you all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Special thanks to our flag and banner sponsor, VasLabs<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A big thank you to the people that actively contributed to our ComicCon presence:<\/p>\n\n\n\n We had the chance to meet new friends and reunited with old ones. Big thanks to all those that made it and to those who didn’t. Love you all!<\/p>\n\n\n\n On Saturday we met we lots of people that were asking what is it that we do and people that were more informed and offered us words of encouragement and their approval. Things became very busy by afternoon and this impacted our ability to speak with people more comfortably. The costumes were great though! We had a mishap with the lightsaber and had to be retired from the Sunday session. We made some new friends, met with long lost ones and gathered signatures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On Sunday things were less busy and we had more meaningful interactions. Made more friends, some people were educated about the subject, some wanted to learn. We gathered advice, suggestions and more signatures. Even though the lightsaber was not present on Sunday, adults and kids alike still showed interest in how to build their own. We verbally explained the basics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Minecraft boy<\/strong>: a boy in a green Minecraft T-Shirt stood in front of our ELLAK banner and was pointing on the icons. He got everything right. I asked him if we was into Linux and that’s when he started giving me advice like: “If you want to see Linux running on Apple Silicon you should try Asahi linux”. At some point the music was too loud and I couldn’t hear what he was saying. “Can you type what you are saying on my phone?”, I asked. I take out my Fairphone. “Oh, you have a Fairphone!”, he says and starts jumping up and down in joy. Not saying that figuratively. He was literally jumping up and down. I look at my phone to check what he was saying: “Tiny core Linux. Learn it!”. I sat with him for a while, being advised about all sorts of things. “Should we recruit him?”, Neofytos said jokingly. “What are you into, man. He is recruiting me!”. And then he starts lecturing me about “corporate greed”. This kid totally blew my mind!<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Star Wars girl<\/strong>: This girl sees the deconstructed lightsaber and steps in. “Are you from Start Wars?” Her phone rings: “I told you ma, I’m at the Star Wars booth. These are my people”. I had no heart to tell her that we are not really about Star Wars. She started telling us about all the Star Wars posters she has in her room and how happy she was that found other Star Wars people. She had this low cost plastic lightsaber with her. “The back fell of” she says. “Can you fix my lightsaber?”. I put some glue on the back plate. She swing the blade. She’s happy. Her ma picked her up soon after. They thanked us and went on their way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Linux boy<\/strong>: A boy steps in with his father. He sees me working on my report. “Excuse me sir. What Linux is that?”, he says. “Are you into Linux \u03c1\u03b5 \u03c6\u03af\u03bb\u03b5;”, I ask. He gives me a thumb handshake and starts telling me about his distro hopping adventures. He uses Arch by the way (TM). “I’m an old dude and a bit conservative with my systems. I don’t like surprises so I use Debian stable. But I saw CachyOS trending and decided to give it a spin. It seems to be popular among gamers that want to switch”, I said. “Ah, yes. That’s Arch based right? There is this cool tool for games called Proton. It’s like Wine but better\u2026” Clever kid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Debian teen<\/strong>: There was this teen boy that was into Linux. Pretty mature for his age. “I would like to setup my own services” he says. “You mean like self-hosting?” “Yes” he says. “I want to learn more about using the terminal.” I point him in my old LPI lecture notes, on my Forgejo instance. “The material is rather old”, I said. “Oh, that’s OK” he says. “I use Debian.” One of us \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n\n\n\n The software boy<\/strong>: A group of boys visits our booth. One kid points at the “Do you own your software or does your software own you?” question. “Can I explain what that means?”, I said. “I use my own software”, says full of pride. “Can people freely use it?”, I asked. “Yes”, he says. “How about studying it, sharing it and improving it?”, I asked. “Of course”, he says. “MIT license”. “Congrats, lad. you are a free software developer.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The camera man<\/strong>: This is the incident that inspired me to propose basic tech support for CCC attendees (see “Notes for the next one” below). A young man’s camera is full and cannot take more photos. He comes by our booth, plugs his camera on one of our demo PCs in order to delete unnecessary photos. Nothing happens. We check with May they all be blessed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Looking forward for all of these.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some people found that using AI for our questions banner was kind of ironic. The forces of chaos punished us for our hubris by making the QR codes for the “ELLAK” poster unreadable. nee stepped in and fixed it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Audacity, one the applications icons featured on our banner, is making some controversial corporate decisions. They were probably referring to some bad decisions after the takeover by the Muse Group which were later retracted:\n
Wholesome interactions<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
lsusb<\/code> and the device was detected as camera instead of storage. Fortunately we had a laptop with a micro-SD slot. We plugged his card there and cleaned the storage. He thanked us, big smile on his face, and run off to his quest.<\/p>\n\n\n\nHighlights<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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The Good<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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The not so great<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Some Criticism<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Audacity_(audio_editor)#Reception<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nNotes for the Next one<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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