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…
Category: Ubuntu
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…
Setting Up a Matrix Server on Ubuntu 20.04 – Part 2
In part 1 of this tutorial, I dived into my reasons for setting up a Matrix Synapse homeserver, and how to set up the basics of the server and it’s required software. In part 2, I’m going to register myself an admin account, log into the server using the online chat client, to verify it’s…
Setting Up a Matrix Server on Ubuntu 20.04 – Part 1
For about the past six months or so, I’ve been interested in the open, decentralized communications standard called Matrix. In May of this year, it was announced on TechCrunch that Automattic had invested $4.6 million into the company behind the Matrix standard. The company in question, New Vector (now rebranded as Element) also develop an…
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…
ASUS Zenbook 15 UX533FD review – an Ubuntu friendly developer laptop
I’ve always been a fan of Dell laptops. While often a little more pricey than their counterparts, their laptops are usually well built, typically run Ubuntu without any hassles, and Dell have great after sales service. My last two laptops where Dell. I’d been eyeing the Dell XPS 15 for about a year, and I…
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…
An experiment in dark vs light themes
It all started, effectively 2 years ago, with this tweet. I’m not sure when I started following Brent on Twitter, but he posts interesting stuff about Laravel and PHP, and I’ve learned a bunch from his blog. Sometime last year he tweeted this and as I dug deeper into the conversation, I realised something. I…
Things I’ve been working on lately – part 1
Managesite scripts Over the course of the past 4 years I’ve experimented with a bunch of different local development environments for my freelance client work. I started with Scotch Box, transitioned to Boss Box, and finally back to bare bones LAMP, mostly because I develop on Ubuntu and I find Apache2 to be an easier…
Additions and upgrades
It’s been just over two years since I moved into my current office space, and just over a year since I last wrote about it. As my two major hobbies outside of my work as a developer are jiu-jitsu (which not many folks can relate to), and computer hardware and peripheral upgrades (which most can…