Spyke

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linux

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Stable Linux distro with up to date packages

What is your definition of stability? I have used Arch for about ten years without any major breakage, but sometimes you do have to do some manual tinkering if a package stops working. So it's stable enough for me, but maybe not for others. Since it is a rolling release, packages are generally being updated quite rapidly.

I think that any modern rolling release distro would fit the bill though.

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What is the worst IT setup you have seen at a company?

I have worked as a lead developer for a major print shop with about 100 employees. The entire order workflow for all branches was shoehorned into one order management system that was initially hacked together for one or two users. It was built on a then already ancient OpenERP system and it had a PHP and smarty frontend for the actual order management. All was hosted on one old debian box which was a VM on a Windows server.

At some point in time, MT decided to slap a web shop onto this system, which was part of the main code base. User data were saved into the same database with plain text passwords. That was convenient for the support people: if somebody forgot their password, you could call support and they would read you your password over the phone.

Another thing that made my hair raise in fear, was that for every single order, any working file was retained indefinitely, even in the light of the then-looming GDPR laws. This amounted of terabytes of data, much of it very private.

I worked at the main branch. When a person walked in, there was a desktop computer at the counter. No password protection, an order management screen open by default. People could just walk in and start viewing orders at will. I am not sure whether they did, but we did push MT to at least have manadatory password protection on their PCs.

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*Permanently Deleted*

A P1 sensor. I have recently entered the rabbit hole of home automation. One of the things I care about, is to be as private as possible, so I went for Home Assistant.

A P1 sensor is a small thingumabob that you plug into your electricity meter and it measures electricity and natural gas use. It comes with its own webserver and it integrates seamlessly into my HA energy dashboard. I did not have to subscribe to any cloud service and as far as I can tell, it does not phone home.

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What's the worst thing you've ever smelled?

Many moons ago, I worked in a building that was next to a truck garage. On a hot summer day, a truck limped in full of animal entrails. One of its axles broke and the contents of the truck spilled all over the place, just in front of our entrance. In the sun. It was only cleaned up after several hours and the smell lingered in our office building for literal months, as the air circulation in this building was almost non-existent.

The smell itself was comparable to a very strong blood smell with a metallic, copper-like undertone.