Jonathan Bossenger

Uses

I’ve been building PCs since high school, even though back then they were made up of whatever I could find in bargain bins or second-hand. Computers are the tools I use to earn a living, support my family and pay for my hobbies, two of which also involve computers. This page lists what my current setups are.

Laptop – 14-inch MacBook Pro (Apple M1 chip)

Since I joined Automattic, my new daily driver is a company-sponsored 14-inch MacBook Pro, with the new Apple M1 chip. This laptop is a beast, and while I still don’t like macOS, the new Apple hardware is impressive.

  • Apple M1 Pro chip with 10-core CPU & 16 core GPU
  • 32GB unified memory
  • 1TB SSD

Office Workstation

Custom-built as a new workstation in Dec 2020. I don’t use this as my daily driver anymore, but I still have it hooked up in my office if I ever need to access Ubuntu, Windows, or for gaming. During the course of 2022 I doubled the RAM to 32GB and in Jan 2023 I upgraded the graphics to an RTX 3060.

  • AMD Ryzen 5 3600 CPU
  • Asus TUF GAMING B550M-PLUS (WIFI) Motherboard
  • 32GB 16GB Corsair VENGEANCE LPX DDR 4 RAM
  • Palit GeForce RTX 3060 12GB Graphics Card Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1660 Ti OC 6GB
  • Samsung 970 EVO Plus 500GB NVMe SSD
  • 2 x WD Blue 1TB 3.5″ SATA Storage Drives
  • Cooler Master MWE GOLD 650W ATX PSU
  • Cooler Master Masterbox K500L ATX case

Home PC

Ex office workstation, this was a 2018 “workstation” upgrade for my previous PC, which I’d custom-built in 2010. Now that I have the MacBook Pro, I’m probably going to turn this into a media center for the home, to replace the old Lenovo I have for that purpose. I had originally planned to turn this into a media centre, but it doubles as an Ubuntu workstation when I need one at home, and for home gaming. In Jan 2023 I migrated the GTX 1660 Ti graphics card to this PC when I upgraded the office workstation.

  • AMD Ryzen 5 2600x CPU
  • MSI x470 Gaming Plus Motherboard
  • 16GB G.Skill Ripjaws DDR4 RAM
  • Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1660 Ti OC 6GB Zotac Geforce GTX 1060 3GB Graphics Card
  • 128 GB m.2 SSD – Ubuntu
  • 128 GB Transcend 2.5″ SSD – Windows
  • WD Blue 1TB 3.5″ SATA Storage Drive
  • Samsung 1TB 3.5″ SATA Storage Drive

Latest Posts

  • Developing with CakePHP: Creating a simple admin control panel

    If you are like me, you prefer to have a specific url mapped to your applications control panel/backend etc. This is usually something along the lines of www.url.com/admin or www.url.com/cms. Normally during the CakePHP “bake” process, the system will ask you what you want your admin route to be (default “admin”). Once this has been […]

  • Create an array containing the days of the week

    You could simply code: but thats the “noob” way, a real coder creates a function… Update: 13/05/2018 Sigh What was wrong with me back then, this would have been so much better. Keep it simple, stupid!

  • PHP.js

    This is something I came across a while ago, but it has really come in handy. It is a project that attempts to make many php functions available in javascript. As most php developers will at some point have to write some javascript, it is a very handy library. You can find it over at […]

  • MySQL: filtering results from a list of id's

    A short while ago I posted about testing if a variable exists in a list and I spoke about the MySQL “IN” keyword. I realised this week that not everyone knows about the MySQL “IN” keyword, so I’ve decided to explain this very handy SQL keyword. Lets say you have a user table with the […]

  • Life of a developer

    It has been a while since I have posted here, mainly due to the time consuming period that is the festive season and also because I am discovering that I am getting fairly annoyed by Drupal as a blog tool and am trying out the new WordPress as an alternative. For now I have a […]

  • Last day of the month

    Here’s one line of code to get the last day of a month: $last_day = date(‘t’, mktime(0, 0, 1, $month_variable, 1, $year_variable)); How much more difficult do you want it to be ???

  • Delving deeper into the PHP lake…testing if a variable exists in a list

    As a PHP developer of almost four years now, I often still come across little problems in coding that make me do the good ol Google search to find the answer. (someday I will have memorised the entire PHP manual, but today is not that day ;-). Anyway today I was asked about how to […]

  • Simple PHP increment function

    Whenever I have to output a numbered list of data I usually run the following code to achieve the required result. but I have discovered a lovely little function that does all this for me. now I simply call and it automatically outputs the next numeric. Great! Simple and easy to use…..that’s the way to […]

  • My first published article.

    Something of a first for me. I recently started playing around with the CakePHP framework again. I have had some (little) experience with it in the past and with the launch of two CakePHP books I decided it was high time I learned how to use this awesome framework properly. A few days later I […]