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I 3D-printed an IBM LinuxONE!

Several months ago I 3D printed an IBM z15 pencil holder. I used a design that had been floating around, so it wasn’t perfect, but it was a nice little model. I ended up following up with a design team inside of IBM and got a more perfect version that they were OK with me […]

I got my amateur radio license!

I have a memory of sitting at our family computer happily chatting away with some friends on IRC, when my father came in and started to talk about ham radio and how you could talk to people from all over the world! “Dad, I’m chatting with someone in Sweden RIGHT NOW.” As a teenager, it […]

Tired, Star Wars 5k, sours, and my SPARC

Our new au pair is here! I’m beginning this post with that because welcoming a new person into our family is a big deal, and the help she’s already provided in just her first few weeks here has been an incredible relief. On May 5th I was chasing Adam at the playground and managed to […]

I 3D-printed an IBM z15 model!

Back in April as I was catching up with work following my maternity leave, I discovered the existence of some internal IBM 3D printer files for IBM z15 pencil holders. I was immediately intrigued, and quickly found a 3D printer company that would print one for me. As a quick aside, I learned about 3D […]

The Big Iron Hippo

It’s been about a year since I last wrote about an Ubuntu release on IBM Z (colloquially known as “mainframes” and nicknamed “Big Iron”). In my first year at IBM my focus really was Linux on Z, along with other open source software like KVM and how that provides support for common tools via libvirt […]

Four months of virtual events

It’s been over four months since I attended my last in-person conference, and last week marks the last conference I had on my schedule, but which was cancelled. In these four months I’ve seriously attended probably a dozen online meetups, seriously participated in four virtual conferences, and gave four talks. As a whole, I am […]

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS… on Big Iron!

Today we saw the release of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS! Alongside the fanfare of a new server and desktop release for AMD64, and my own beloved Xubuntu, this new version walks in the path of 16.04 and 18.04 to be the third LTS to support the s390x mainframe architecture for IBM Z. If you have been […]

Ubuntu and the new IBM LinuxONE III LT2

Back in September I wrote about Ubuntu on the new LinuxONE III. For the release of this new mainframe, there were balloons, and cake, and we had a great time celebrating. With Shelter in Place orders spreading throughout the US, we don’t have cake this time, but we do have a new hardware release! The […]

SCALE 18x

On March 4th the world looked a lot different than it does today. I had a work trip to Singapore canceled due to COVID-19 concerns about travel to Asia, and the first US domestic cases had started popping up. A few conferences were starting to cancel, go virtual, or postpone, but it wasn’t the landslide […]

Highlights of LCA 2020 in Gold Coast

I already wrote about the tourist stuff I did while in Brisbane and Gold Coast, but the actual reason for my trip to Australia was to present at Linux.conf.au (LCA). One of the things that is particularly remarkable about LCA is the length of the conference. Most conferences I go to top out at three […]