I love the melodies of Metallica songs. However, I strongly prefer instrumental music. That’s why I was very happy, when someone brought Apocalyptica to my attention: they played Metallica on four cellos. Over the years I discovered that metal or any other music sounds nice on cellos, as I learned about two more bands: 2cellos and Mozart Heroes. But I should not rush so far ahead. In the year 2000 someone introduced me to Metallica.

As you might have guessed from my previous blog posts: I love music. Colleagues, family, and friends often turn to me for suggestions if they want to listen to something new and less mainstream. This blog is about music I listen to, the first part of what will hopefully become a series. I hope you also find something interesting here! Why did I pick “Pictures at an Exhibition” when I talk about “less mainstream” music in the opening paragraph?

All Things Open (ATO) is one of my favorite conferences. This week I had the privilege to be in Raleigh, NC for the third time, and give a talk at the conference for the fourth time. I participated not just ATO, but the Community Leadership Summit. Both events were fantastic. I learned a lot, and also realized that many others have the very same problems as I have. I also had a slight overdose of AI :-)

Recently, I was looking for some new hybrid / crossover music, and someone recommended me to check out Hidden Orchestra. Listening to their album, “Creaks” was an instant love. As I learned later, it’s the music of a game. I’m not a gamer, but once seeing that it’s on sale on Humble Bundle I bought it immediately. You can listen to the whole album here: You can also find it on Bandcamp.

Last year, one of the returning questions I received was how to learn syslog-ng. My answer was that read the first few chapters of the documentation, read my blogs related to your use case, and then read a few relevant parts from the rest of the documentation. Our documentation is praised by users, but it is still a reference documentation. I was asked if a less detailed, more to the point, preferably video tutorial is available.

Recently I found that quite a few of my Twitter and Mastodon followers are working in high-performance computing (HPC). At first I was surprised because I’m not a HPC person, even if I love high performance computers. Then I realized that there are quite few overlaps, and one of my best friends is also deeply involved in HPC. My work, logging, is also a fundamental part of HPC environments. Let’s start with a direct connection to HPC: one of my best friends, Gabor Samu, is working in HPC.

Where should I begin. I bought a 4K Blu-Ray player last Autumn. I did not plan to use it for movies: this was the cheapest way of buying a player for all of my various discs. For a couple of months I really only listened to my CD/DVD-Audio/SACD collection on it. While listening to TIDAL, I realized that there is a new David Attenborough series out there (the soundtrack was recommended to me by TIDAL).

From now on, as I want to reach as many as possible, you can also read sudo and syslog-ng news from me on Mastodon. You can find my account at: https://fosstodon.org/@PCzanik Mastodon is a decentralized network of servers. I chose a server called “Fosstodon” as it is focused on open source software. Some of the projects I participate in are already there: BastilleBSD and openSUSE. As usual, next to my usual syslog-ng and sudo posts, you will also sometimes hear from me about OpenPOWER and ARM with some occasional photos from my hiking trips :-)

Once upon a time I started taking photos with a Lubitel, which is an old, very basic, and completely manual camera. In 2000 I switched from film to digital and everything could be automated. This was the time when I finally realized that having a good camera is not everything. A perfect exposure with a good camera can still result in an ugly and boring photo. Lubitel 2 When I had a fully manual film camera, I quickly learned how to do perfectly exposed photos without any tools to measure light or distance.

Once upon a time I made some time-lapse videos, but I gave up quickly. Recently I have watched yet another Attenborough nature series: The Green Planet. It was full of beautiful time-lapse recordings, and suddenly I felt the urge again to give this genre another try :-) I visited my favorite recreational area in the Pest side of Budapest: Lake Naplás. It’s an artificial lake close to the border of Budapest, which quickly turned into an important bird nesting place and a protected nature area.