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The light on the robotic lawn mower blinks orange. Not because the battery is flat, not because a perimeter wire snapped. Because a server the owner has never laid eyes on was switched off somewhere…

There is a backstory few people remember anymore. In the eighties, the former Bundespost ran a service called Bildschirmtext — BTX. A closed system, proprietary pages, proprietary tariffs, proprietary…

The most revealing metric for local AI is not printed boldly on the box. It is called memory bandwidth, it is measured in gigabytes per second, and it decides whether a model runs smoothly on your…

There is a sentence that gets spoken more often than any other this decade, and it sounds like insight but is really capitulation: Well, in the end everything is transparent anyway. What it refers to…

Name a platform, and I’ll name its device management. Windows? Microsoft Intune — and before it, SCCM, now called MECM, which nobody pronounces with confidence. macOS? Jamf — so taken for…

I remember an evening, long before Git shaped my work. A configuration directory. Dozens of files, each with a suffix meant to reveal when it was last touched: sysctl.conf.bak, sysctl.conf.old,…

“Computers matter.” Say it today and you provoke scarcely any dissent — and scarcely any notice. Too self-evident, too obvious. Yet what we mean by it is no longer what one would first…

It was a Friday evening, shortly before quitting time. A log analysis stuck for hours — hundreds of lines, a pattern obvious yet elusive. I pasted the output into an AI tool and asked a question.…

It usually stands in the hallway. Or in the cellar. A flat, warm-running device with blinking LEDs that the provider brought along when the contract was signed. You plug it in, join the Wi-Fi, forget…

There are numbers you don’t comprehend — you only marvel at them. The Android smartphone in your pocket runs on Linux. The server delivering this webpage runs on Linux. Your bank’s cash…

There is a moment that arrives in nearly every sizable project sooner or later. Someone — usually a lawyer or a nervous procurement officer — asks: “What licence should this actually carry?"…

There is a moment everyone knows who has ever tried to keep using an older smartphone. The device works. The screen is intact, the battery holds, the hardware would be entirely sufficient for what you…

I have worked in this industry long enough to recognise how the end of an epoch feels. It does not begin with a bang. It begins with a sensation. An inkling that what you have done for years is not…

There is an image that repeats. Someone sits in a café. Four people at the next table, all mid-twenties. Nobody speaks. Everybody types. Four displays, four apps, four streams of messages flowing into…

There is a scene that has played out thousands of times this year. Someone owns a computer. Not old, perhaps three or four years. Decent CPU, enough RAM, an SSD, a perfectly usable machine. And then…

There is a moment every administrator knows, after enough years in the job. Friday evening. A server has to be rebuilt — yesterday. You remember most of the settings. The most important paths. The…

It usually begins with a simple question: Can I do this myself? A photo album. A file share. A team wiki. Something you are currently using — from a provider who offers it conveniently, free or cheap,…

There is a moment so ordinary that we do not notice it at all. You plug a network cable into a wall socket. The socket comes from a German manufacturer, the cable from Taiwan, the switch beneath it…

There is software you discover. And there is software you never let go of. Immich belongs to the second category. An open source photo and video service that does what Google Photos or Apple iCloud do…

There is a conversation I have over and over again. Someone asks whether we also work with “real software” — meaning proprietary products from major vendors. The question always carries…

Vendor lock-in rarely begins with a conscious decision. Usually it begins with a nice offer. Free trial. Easy migration. Everything from one source. And two years later you discover: switching would…