HeyJaredIT Horror Stories with Jack Smith
We delve into the bizarre and often cringe-worthy world of IT mishaps, glitches, and the horror stories that come with it.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 12
- Latest publication
- Sep 21, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 6, 2026
Latest episodes
When UNPK Broke – Diagnosing an IBM Mainframe Hardware Failure (opens the original)
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Texas, 1978. Robert was working at a cotton co-op running what may have been one of the world's earliest online auction systems. Farmers received punch cards representing their bales of cotton - occasionally complete with enough stray cotton fibres to jam the card readers - while buyers placed bids remotely using leased IBM 3270 terminals and acoustic coupler modems. After an upgrade, the mainframe refused to come back properly. An IPL produced a corrupted device address before dropping the mach
Pinball as IoT : When Arcade Machines Go Online (opens the original)
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A modern pinball machine isn't just flippers, bumpers, lights, and a very large box making expensive noises. It's a connected computer with software updates, online score tracking, player accounts, remote management, and an Internet connection. Evert Brochez from Torius joins Jack to explain how pinball evolved from electromechanical machines into something that looks suspiciously like an IoT device. But once you connect a pinball machine to the Internet, familiar IT questions start appearing. W
The Three Envelopes: Blame, Reorganize, Repeat (opens the original)
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The Three Envelopes: Blame, Reorganize, Repeat There is an old management joke about an outgoing manager leaving three numbered envelopes for their successor. When the first crisis arrives: blame your predecessor. The second: reorganize. And when the third arrives... prepare three envelopes. We look at why this joke has survived for decades, and why anyone who has worked in corporate IT will recognise far too much of it. From inherited problems and reorganisations to management changes that some
Jack's Rants - Why You Need to Reboot : Why Rebooting Your Computer Actually Fixes Problems (opens the original)
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Jack's Rants - Why You Need to Reboot : Why Rebooting Your Computer Actually Fixes Problems "Have you tried turning it off and on again ?" became an IT cliché for a reason. Rebooting clears accumulated state, resets resources, and fixes a surprising number of problems. From Unix uptime bragging rights to mainframe IPLs and Windows servers nobody is allowed to restart, every system has its own relationship with rebooting. Maybe what we really need is a reboot SLA. Want even more info ? Read our s
Testing Software Properly : Software Testing Done Right – Where, When and What Should You Test? (opens the original)
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Testing software sounds simple enough. But what exactly should you test, where should those tests happen, and how do you decide which parts of a complex system need the most attention? Jack talks with Mooly Beeri about software testing from a developer's perspective: identifying the right test points, understanding how different parts of a system interact, and building testing into the development process rather than treating it as something that happens at the end. A practical look at what it a
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