On this day in 1943 Vangelis was born. The very first CD I bought over three decades ago was composed by him: Chariots of Fire. After so many years, I still love his music. My Vangelis collection As you can see, I do not have everything by him. I do not like his earliest and latest works that much, but almost everything in between. Unfortunately I could not find everything on CD.

Last December, the CD shop where I bought most of my collection closed its doors for good. I had seen it coming — the owner had been gradually winding down the business in preparation for retirement — but after nearly 30 years of shopping there, it was still a tough moment. Stereo logo This logo belongs to Periferic Records - Stereo Kft.. Back in the nineties, during my university years, I used to look for this logo at concerts, always hoping to spot a bearded man selling an incredible selection of CDs.

Last weekend, I was welcomed to a special event in an industrial area of Budapest. Zsolt Audio – one of the best known high-end audio manufacturers in Hungary – turns 40 this year, and Zsolt Huszti, the founder, started a series of events celebrating this in the showroom next to his “factory”. We listened to some fun stories from the past 40 years, and also to music on some of his latest devices.

If you read only one long article this month, it should be The Anti-Social Century by the The Atlantic. I planned to write about tribalism for a long time, as it bothers me a lot and often puts me in trouble. Unfortunately, most people think in tribes, such as “I’m a Democrat”, “I’m a Republican”, or “You’re either with us, or against us”. Something similar also exists here in Hungary. When I agree with something that others also support, those people think that I belong to their tribe.

This week, I reorganized the speakers in my room and wanted to test the change by listening to a wide variety of music. The first piece that came to my mind was “Rhapsody in Blue” by Gershwin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhapsody_in_Blue, as I have a fantastic recording of it made by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. That said, I know that I’m not a music maniac enough, as I do not have it on vinyl, but rather as a digital download from HDTracks: https://www.

During CES Nvidia announced a new AI desktop supercomputer: Project DIGITS. Starting at $3000 it puts AI processing capabilities on the desktop what just recently needed multiple servers and a few more zeroes at the end of the price tag. As an IBM Champion for POWER my first thought was that Project DIGITS is nice, but I’d love to see something based on POWER. Of course it’s just a game of thoughts, as IBM left the workstation business many years ago, both for x86 and POWER.

This year, I was back in Brussels. I visited two conferences: CentOS Connect and FOSDEM. As usual, both events were fantastic, with great talks and nice people. And as usual, they were also exhausting and not just for introverts like me. I stayed to Belgium to recover, but that’s another story… :-) CentOS Connect Some people still ask me why I visit Red Hat events, especially because I am a proud openSUSE desktop user, while FreeBSD feels the closest to me when it comes to software design and philosophy – not to mention that it is the OS that I have been using the longest (since 1994).

Yes, I know. Bad title. After so many years only a handful of people will decipher it that I am looking for an affordable and standards compliant ARM machine for Linux & FreeBSD. It refers to a machine released 8 years ago, and a blog I wrote 4 years ago: The ARM developers workstation: Why the SoftIron OverDrive 1000 is still relevant The good news is that since my previous blog there is a lot more ARM hardware available.

Recently I was asked why the syslog-ng newsletter looks odd. At first I did not even understand what is the problem. Then I realized that I kept using the same format for the past 14 years, that was optimized for UNIX terminals :-) So, what is the problem? 14 years ago I was kindly asked by syslog-ng users to use plain text e-mails instead of HTML formatting. Of course it also means that there is no easy way to emphasize titles in the newsletter.

Recently I posted about two of my Power t-shirts. Many people responded. Some wanted to get one of the t-shirts from me, others asked me what else do I have. I cannot give you the t-shirts, but I can show you a few more :-) I must admit that only one of them has Power printed on it, but the other two are also Power-related. Genesi t-shirt The oldest t-shirt is from Genesi.