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.

Daily driver – 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

Personal 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

Gaming – Asus ROG Ally

In 2023 I sold my home gaming PC and replaced it with the ROG Ally. I rarely did anything with the home PC anymore, besides gaming, and I much prefer gaming wherever I want to on the ROG Ally.

  • AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme Processor
  • AMD Radeon Graphics
  • 7-inch 1080p screen
  • 16GB LPDDR5 RAM
  • 512GB NVMe SSD

Latest Posts


  • Mozilla Add-ons you can't live without.

    As a PHP developer there are a hoard of Mozilla Firefox add-ons that will not only make your life easier, but will make you a better developer. These are the list of add-ons that are installed by default in my Firefox Browser. Firebug – absolutely the best way to debug javascript (and therefore also ajax)…

  • Easy CakePHP in Ubuntu

    I’ve always setup a new CakePHP project by extracting the current stable build into a project directory and editing the core.php and database.php files manually. I usually then change to the /cake/console directory of the project and run php cake.php bake (having already installed the php-cli) to bake my code. I know there are other…

  • PHP Advent 2009

    I had no idea something like this existed but what a great idea. 24 days of worth of PHP articles to keep the Christmas Blues away. Today’s article is something very close to my heart and discusses the topic of Comprehensible Code. Go, read, expand your minds….

  • Ambit Recruitment website goes live

    Personal experience will always advise our actions. So, the objective is to ensure positive experiences are repeated as often as possible, to encourage further positive outcomes. That’s the simple premise on which Ambit Recruitment operates the business of fitting the right people into the right positions. The Ambit Recruitment website is a bit of a…

  • South African HTML image map

    I recently had to create an image map of South Africa, displaying each of the provinces with links to content for each province. As it took me most of the day to complete I thought it might be handy for someone else too. So in true open source fashion here it is for you to…

  • Migrating from Drupal to WordPress

    Well, it finally happened. After months of frustration with Drupal as a blog tool, I gave up and decided it was time to move over to WordPress. I’m sure as a CMS system Drupal can be quite wonderful, but for running and managing a simple blog site, I have yet to come across a better…

  • Riding on Rails

    I’ve decided to spend less of my free time on blogging and more on learning new things. I had planned to change this site to run on WordPress, but have decided instead to learn Ruby on Rails. From what I can see it is (in many ways) similar to CakePHP (which I love) but with…

  • 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!