#holarse

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en : Magical Bernd Ritter trying to defeat a young Lady at Magical GNU. You can see how hard try try to relax ;)

fr : Le magique Bernd Ritter  essaie de battre une jeune femme au jeu Magical GNU. Vous pouvez constater à quel point ils essaient de se relaxer ;)

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en : young lady playing MindLabyrinth at LinuxTag 2012 at Holarse Booth. Thanks :)

fr : une jeune fille jouant à MindLabyrinth sur le stand de Holarse à la LinuxTag. Merci :)

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fr : 

Mes chers compatriotes, ce message sera pour l'occasion uniquement en anglais étant donné que tout l'évenement s'est déroulé en anglais. Merci de votre compréhension. et de votre patience :)

en : 

We just came back from LinuxTag in Berlin with my wife. It has been a very interesting fair with many players coming to Holarse Booth in Hall 7.2a at Merlin Messe for Thursday and Friday 3PM events.

There we showcased MindLabyrinth and a two players' game made especially for the occasion : Magical GNU.

What went well / thanks :

Bernd Ritter from the Holarse team ( daily report here ) who kindly invited me to show my game is a great man ! Very patient, always ok to help and he really knows what an open source community means... and how to communicate. Thanks for everything ! I am in your debt :)

The Holarse Team with Mickael, Robin, Fabio/lucky & Reto were all very kind to help us with our installment, players and to show us another great side of Europe ( yes Reto, I mean Europe, switzerland included not the European Union ;)  ). You guys rock ! I hope we will meet again and I that i will be able to say a few words in German :)

Christian who made a very kind interview which I will link to as soon as I get the URL.

the players who sometimes came from other booths. They genuinely seemed to enjoy the Magical GNU Game. And we truly thank everyone of them to have accepted to lend us their minds ;) 

All the people we met there which were always eager to share / exchange points of view

Berlin which is a very pleasant green city and the people there who seem to enjoy life. Coming from France it was a huge relief to see people who actually enjoy what they do. Not something we see much here...

Now, special thanks to my wife whom I love and who helped me so much there. Nothing would have worked as well without her. Thank you !

Also I would like to thank my heart family, my step brothers, their wives and my step parents who took care of our children while we ware in Berlin. Thank you very much. Without you we could not have make it !

I would like to thank as well my father who allowed us to go by financing our trip to Berlin ! Thanks daddy :)

Now to continue on what went well : multiplayer game using MindWave Mobile headsets just work ! So Now I know that I can achieve great multiplayer projects ! However it only work on Linux since there's nothing on either Windows or Mac to allow multiplayer. it means that I may have a more lot work to do on my bluetooth drivers...

The MindWave Mobiles were very reliable and easy to put on. The directionnal arm which holds the contactor was quite always enough to make everything fit on everybody's forehead.

The wiimotes using Cwwid library. It worked like a charm :)

MindLabyrinth & Magical GNU which were updated / created so they would work on a full HD screen. 

My Mac Mini with Ubuntu 12 worked like a charm. I even did not have to use my spare bluetooth USB key since the BT receiver would allow us to play up to 3 meter without any problem.

The food ! The Wurschts ! The Beers !

Coming back to France by Schiphol allowed me to find an Otamatone ! (here also  and the best one

What went wrong :

staying two hours in Paris CDG : as always I deeply dislike this airport

with all our travels we've covered pretty much all Aribus / Boeing commercial aircrafts. But this time... We had the luxury of coming back to Bordeaux Airport using a Fokker.If you like roller-coasters and find them funny, please give it a try...

Wiimotes rechargeable batteries. I forgot to take anything to charge them... But we had spare batteries so this was not a real problem although we missed the batteries' cases.

a failed attempt to make a special event withAldebaran Roboticsteam who showcased the Nao Robot. I loosed time to make Bluetooth work on my fuduntu netbook and then we had some firewalling issue to exchange data. Would we had more time it may have been fun to control robots with the Mindwaves :)

My Ipod who said good bye the first day and for which I forgot to take a USB wire. So no Ipod, not much photos or videos...

Now in order to conclude : many thanks to all of you who participated to this event and thanks to all the people we met there !

With my wife we really think of coming back soon to Germany to try to better know you, German people :)

François