A coworker asked recently about how people use VMs locally for dev work, so I figured I’d take a few minutes to write up a bit about what I do. There are many use cases for local virtual machines in software development and testing. They’re self-contained, meaning you can make a mess of them without impacting your day-to-day computing environment. They can run different distributions, kernels, and even entirely different operating systems from the one you use regularly.

Have you ever wondered what a security probe of a computer sounded like? I’d guess probably not, because on the face of it that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But there was a time when I could very clearly discern the sound of a computer being scanned. It sounded like a small mechanical heart beat: Click-click… click-click… click-click… Prior to 2010, I had a computer under my desk with what at the time were not unheard-of properties: Its storage was based on a stack of spinning metal platters (a now-antiquated device known as a “hard drive”), and it had a publicly routable IPv4 address with an unfiltered connection to the Internet.

The Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle has been putting on a winter light display for years. In the past it’s been known as Wild Lights, but this year they rebranded it as Wildlanterns and gave it a major refresh. If you’re near Seattle and able to check it out, I highly recommend going. I went the other night with my family and took a number of pictures, which you can see in the photo album.