Category: General

• Tuesday Twitch Streams

  

  I’ve been toying with the idea of doing weekly development live streams for some time now. Fortunately, my work on the WordPress training team regularly requires me to do some R&D work on new topics, which are the perfect subjects for live streams. So if you want to watch me fumble my way through WordPress […]

• Turning a shortcode into a block

  

  I’ve had a couple of folks either reach out to me or ask on Twitter if it’s easy to convert a shortcode into a block. The irony is that during my trial at Automattic, that’s exactly what I created, a tutorial on taking an existing shortcode plugin and adding it as a block. I am […]

• 45

  I turn 45 today, in a world where right-wing politics is tearing down individual rights, unjust wars are being allowed to kill innocents, and tech, in general, is just one big scam after another. I’m finding it hard to be positive about all this, but the one thing that keeps me going is the fact […]

• I’ll Remember the Days Before I Knew Everything

  

  The first time I heard about the Automattic creed was on a plane flight from Cape Town to Johannesburg, sitting next to Hugh Lashbrooke, as we flew to attend the first WordCamp in Johannesburg in 2016. I’d met the Johannesburg organizing team at that year’s Cape Town WordCamp, where we were all speakers, and I […]

• Route 44

  

  If you live close to Cape Town, in the Western Cape Province of South Africa, you’ve probably heard of the R44. It’s the road that runs from Gordons Bay, along the coast past places like Betty’s Bay, Pringle Bay, and Kleinmond, and connects back to the R43 at Arabella Country Estate. On the other side […]

• Migrating My Cloud Virtual Servers to SpinupWP

  

  I’ve never been a fan of managed WordPress hosting. Don’t get me wrong; I appreciate what managed WordPress hosts do, and they are definitely doing amazing work, but it’s just not for me. As a developer and server admin hobbyist, I prefer to own my own VPS (virtual private servers). I started using Rackspace Cloud […]

• Kicking 2021 into High Gear with an Electronic Standing Desk

  

  I’ve been interested in using a standing desk for about 3 years now. Soon after I moved into my own office space, one of the first things I did was purchase a decent ergonomic chair, and then a standing desk. Not wanting to buy an expensive adjustable desk I wasn’t sure I would actually fully […]

• Personal Goals for 2021

  

  I’ve never really been the type of person who writes “year in review” posts. Mostly this is because I don’t have any ventures that would be interesting to report yearly results on. What I have done in the past was to set some personal goals for the coming year, which I managed to do for […]

• Disable the Touch pad on an Ubuntu Laptop When an External Mouse Is Connected.

  

  Featured image by John Petalcurin from Pexels One of my pet peeves when working on a laptop is the position of the touch pad, relevant to my right hand position. Probably due to my large hands, and the way I rest my palms when typing, the part of my palm that’s at the bottom of […]

• OBS Studio 26.1.0 for Linux – Now with Virtual Camera Support.

  

  Some time ago I discovered OBS Studio as a solution for recording internal screencasts for tutorials and workshop videos. As a Linux user, I was pleased to find that it was both open-source, and therefore available for Linux. It lags a bit when it comes to releasing new features vs the Windows version, but it’s […]