Category: General
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Building A New AMD Powered Workstation
If there’s one hobby that I have that I don’t get to spend much time on, it’s building/upgrading PCs. A few years ago I upgraded my 10-year-old workstation/gaming PC, to something a bit more modern. At the time I was working with a fairly limited budget, and so I had to make some concessions around…
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Submitting a patch to WordPress core, using Git
I initially encountered version control in my 4th year of programming, when the lead developer of the company I worked at had implemented Subversion as a code backup solution on our local testing server. As we were all required to use Windows at the time, we mostly just installed TortioseSVN, so my command line Subversion…
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Upgrading the Psyrig
About 8 years ago I built my first “proper” gaming computer, which for various reasons I nicknamed Psyrig. It wasn’t the first gaming computer that I owned, but it was the first time I carefully selected all the components, including the case, and put it together myself from the ground up. It was built to…
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Introducing Boss Box – a WordPress ready development environment
A modern, easy to configure, WordPress ready Vagrant box, perfect for local development. As a developer, one of the most important pieces of technology I use daily is my chosen virtual server stack. Depending on your operating system of choice, there are a few solid options out there, but since discovering Vagrant I've always preferred…
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Setting up a local development environment with Scotch Box
Very recently I had the misfortune of being forced to uninstall Ubuntu from my laptop and go back to Windows. I won’t get into the reasons behind this, but the one thing I miss in the Windows environment is my LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) stack and bash command line. Most web site hosts around the world use…