SCaLE 10x

I went to SCaLE 10x! It was awesome! I volunteered at the Ubuntu California Loco booth, which was really awesome. The Loco people are great, and it was fun talking to Expo attendees about Ubuntu (and plugging Xubuntu, because why not) and seeing all of the booths and generally having a great time! Some highlights:

OpenShot Video Editor: I got to talk to Jonathan Thomas, the Creator and Lead Dev of the OpenShot Video Editor. I used it recently for a quick and dirty video project, and it worked quite well! This is super exciting! I've been waiting for a good video editor to land on Linux, and I think this is it! OpenShot gets overlooked a lot by serious video people like me because it appears to have a dumbed-down interface, but the truth is that it is actually quite powerful. I went to Jonathan's talk, and he demonstrated many of the capabilities it has, including the chroma key effect which can be used for green screen stuffs. It's a very serious and awesome program, and if you've been looking for a Linux video editor, it's definitely worth checking out! This is coming from someone who was formally trained on Final Cut Pro, so take me seriously!

The Open Photo Project: I only go to talk to the Open Photo guy very briefly, but I am very excited about the project! It's advertised as the "Wordpress for Photos", but you could also think of it as what Diaspora was to Facebook, Open Photo is to Flickr. Though Open Photo looks much much more promising that Diaspora. Very exciting!

VideoLan: Just putting this here because I got to talk to the VLC Devs and they are awesome. :D

The FreeBSD people were there (I got a FreeNAS cd!), and a ton of others. I played Unreal Tournament 2004 (without sound, because you need a workaround to get sound working on modern distributions) at the ZaReason LAN party which was awesome. Overall it was a really awesome experience, and I hope to go again next year! I'm kicking around preparing a talk on Linux Gaming, and open source game engine ports.