Last week I became a Discogs user. Why? I have been browsing the site for years to find information on albums. Recently I also needed a solution to create an easy to access database of my CD/DVD collection. Right now I am not interested in the marketplace function of Discogs, but that might change in the long term :-) Information overload For many years when I searched for an album, the first few hits were from YouTube and Wikipedia.

“Pass the SALT” (PTS) is a small IT security conference in Lille, France. It has less participants than speakers at the RSA conference. I gave talks at both events. RSA is a lot more prestigious event, but I still prefer PTS. Why? Small Is Beautiful As you could guess from my introduction, PTS is a small event. It is run by volunteers. It is also a free event thanks to sponsors.

Most people I talked to about buying expensive products are aware of “the law of diminishing returns”. When you buy a product, the more you pay for it the less extra quality you get for the extra spending. However, not many people recognize that the same can be said of most human activities. It is a lie that “just a little more effort” will lift you from above average to the top, as the law of diminishing returns hits even harder.

This week I am talking to Timothy Pearson of Raptor Engineering. He is behind the Talos II and Blackbird boards for IBM POWER9 CPUs. His major claim is creating the first fully owner controlled general purpose computer in a long while. My view of the Talos II and Blackbird systems is that these boards helped to revitalize the open source ecosystem around POWER more than any other efforts (See also: https://peter.

I’m not superstitious, so I never really cared about black cats, Friday the 13th, and other signs of (imagined) trouble. Last Friday (which was the 13th) I had an article printed in a leading computer magazine in Hungary, and I gave my first IRL talk at a conference in well over two years. Best of all, I also met many people, some for the first time in real life. Free Software Conference: sudo talk Last Friday, I gave a talk at the Free Software Conference in Szeged.

The first time I heard about 21unity was when I read the announcement: 21unity Joins OpenPOWER Foundation. I immediately became interested in the company, as it combines two things I am interested in: POWER and open source. Among others 21unity has its own cloud based on the POWER platform and provides Nextcloud as a service. I tried to refresh my German knowledge and read their website, but the more I read the more interesting it got and the more questions I had.

How can you make Windows easy? Install the Windows Subsystem for Linux, or WSL in short. Well, probably this is not true for everyone. However, as a Linux user, I definitely love WSL. When not using a browser or text editor, I spend my time on the command line. With WSL, you can have the familiar Linux command line environment from openSUSE also under Windows. Why Windows? Die hard Linux users might ask: why do I use Windows?

After 30 years of using the Internet and trying many communication formats, e-mail is still my favorite. However, e-mail has many problems. Spam is just annoying, but phishing and especially, spear phishing attacks can also be dangerous. A recent security training, and a Twitter thread I started about it, changed my mind completely about how I treat these harmful e-mails. phishing (fishing :-) ) The old way While most spam and some phishing can easily be filtered, spear phishing messages are unique by their nature.

I’m considered to be a server guy. I had access to some really awesome server machines. Still, when computers come up in discussions, we are almost exclusively talk about workstations. Even if servers are an important part of my life, that’s “just” work. I loved the SGI workstations I had access to during my university years. Many of my friends still occasionally boot their 30 years old Amiga boxes. The cult of Amiga One would say that the Amiga was popular in the eighties and early nineties.

My favorite and most used service for developers is the openSUSE Build Service (OBS). This is where I build syslog-ng packages first, before anywhere else. OBS is open source, highly flexible software to build software packages, and the instance at https://build.opensuse.org/ is free to use for anyone to build open source software. Best of all, it supports multiple architectures, including POWER. Open Build Service Actually the OBS acronym stands for two things.