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


  • Divi Page Builder Cache

    The latest versions of the Divi Page Builder includes very smart caching. This can sometimes lead to problems where users find they can’t add or delete rows or modules or use custom modules. Disclaimer: I’ve only really experienced this issue when developing module customisations. So this may not work for your specific Page Builder caching…

  • 5 SEO Mistakes to Avoid

    SEO

    A little background… Recently I was in the interesting position where plugin I had always used started giving me some hassles. For basic SEO functionality my go to install is the Yoast SEO plugin as it gives me the basic features I need and comes highly rated on WordPress.org. For my first client of the year I…

  • Getting ready for 2016

    Digital Resolutions. 2016 sees a new direction for me. For the first time since I started programming in 2004, I will be 100% self employed. This doesn’t mean that I have always been employed by a boss for the last 12 years. There were some attempts at working for myself in the past, but each time…

  • Digital Marketing Workshop

    As an entrepreneur, small business owner or freelancer, one of the most important skills you need to have, after being amazing at what you do, is digital marketing. The biggest learning curve I had as a developer was when I launched my Jiu Jitsu school. I soon learned that ‘If you build it, they don’t…

  • Word Camp Cape Town 2015

    So this year I was fortunate enough to attend my first Word Camp. I’ve been meddling (at best) with WordPress for the better part of the last decade, I’ve set up a few blogs and sites and even completed some custom development using WordPress as the base but I’ve never been someone who was ‘focused’…

  • Stopping unresponsive programs in Ubuntu

    This is a simple problem, with a simple solution. Which I will forget. Hence the post. The following command will list all running applications on a Linux system. The first two columns are the user running the application, and the applications program id or “pid”. Example output However, it would be ideal to search for…

  • Tis the season…..

    Its that time of year again, where we look forward to family gathering, presents and stuffing our faces with copious amounts of food. In the meantime, we have the PHP Advent Calendar, to count down the days to Christmas and learn some new PHP goodies for the new year.

  • 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…