A basic drum kit created for my grandson and favourite baby human, Oliver.
I work on a large number of code projects and I wanted a quick way to open any of my projects in Visual Studio Code, my preferred code editor. I figured the quickest way to do this under GNOME would be to create a .desktop file for each project directory.
A blog post detailing how to set-up WatchGuard VPN with IKEv2 under both Debian and Fedora Linux. This guide works for me under Debian 12 (bookworm) and Fedora 40/41, but your mileage may vary depending on how your VPN service is configured.
I've been running Debian on my servers for years. It's dependable. I guess my server set-up is pretty common, consisting of Apache, PHP and MariaDB, but I figure it is still worth sharing details of how I provision my servers.
Creating a good Debian desktop experience is not too difficult, thanks to the excellent work of the Debian developers, but I thought it might be interesting to share how I set-up my Debian systems.
A post describing my first experience of upgrading a Fedora installation. TLDR: The upgrade went smoothly and Fedora continues to impress me.
Details about how I've manage my todo list, past and present. Starting out with a single text file, before developing my own basic todo list application.
I recently added a dark mode to my website. This post details how I achieved this by copying the existing light scheme's CSS and inverting the colour values.
I thought it would be trivial to add a custom search engine to Firefox. To be fair, it is fairly trivial, but not quite as easy as navigating to the correct Firefox settings page and adding a new entry. Instead, I found the process to be somewhat hidden and less obvious.
A blog post detailing an issue where a Puppeteer screenshot script, triggered through a PHP application using CodeIgniter, stopped working due to Chromium not starting under the Apache www-data user on Debian.
I've been reading a lot of good things about the Vivaldi web browser of late, so I thought I would give it a try. These are my notes on what I did to personalise Vivaldi.
Over the last couple of years, my monitor count has gone from 3 to 2 to 1. I used to enjoy having lots of applications spread across multiple screens in front of me, now enjoy just having the application on screen that I'm actively using. I'm not entirely sure why this happened, maybe it's because I'm getting older, or maybe it's due to the improved performance of touchpad gestures in GNOME, or a combination of both. Whatever the reason, I'm currently enjoying using a single monitor.
I have started using oat milk in my coffee.
Trying vertical tabs in Firefox. Life is wild.
Just finished reading Deathworlder - An Astra Militarum Novel by Victoria Hayward. It was a good read and I particularly enjoyed how the Tyranids were portrayed - it never occurred to me that they would be vocally silent, which is quite terrifying.
I don't watch a lot of animated series, but I thoroughly enjoyed Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man on Disney+.
Cute Walt Disney comment/quote found in the Disney+ HTML.
Spent the last two weeks travelling around the bottom of Florida with Becky. We saw lots of wildlife including alligators, manatees, turtles, pelicans and tarpons. We drove the Florida Keys road and visited the Everglades national park. We also attended the Homestead rodeo, which was epic. We did some touristy stuff in and around Miami, including a day at South Beach, a boat trip around PortMiami and a ride in the Miami observation wheel. It was a lovely holiday. I also turned 50.
I have started adding vanilla to my coffee.
Started watching American Primeval on Netflix. It's brutal and gritty, I love it.
Just finished reading Longshot - An Astra Militarum Novel by Rob Young. The Imperial Guard are one of my favourite Warhammer 40k factions and I enjoyed reading this a lot. I've got Deathworlder lined-up for my next read.
Why is everything binary? - YouTube 
HTML Whitespace is Broken - Devel without a Cause Recently, I was working on a project which required a deeper understanding of how whitespace works in HTML. I was never a fan of HTML's whitespace behavior before as I've been burned by it a few times. But as I dug into it more deeply, I found myself discovering complex design issues that I wanted to explore in a blog post. This is partially to write down my knowledge in this space for future reference and partially to vent about how unnecessarily complicated it all is.
Announcing 150M developers and a new free tier for GitHub Copilot in VS Code - The GitHub Blog Now automatically integrated into VS Code, all of you have access to 2,000 code completions and 50 chat messages per month, simply by signing in with your personal GitHub account.
The Frustration Loop The premise is simple. When spam is detected, instead of blocking the blog, fake system error or failure in the most frustrating way possible. Waste their time and make them give up.
I can now run a GPT-4 class model on my laptop Meta’s new Llama 3.3 70B is a genuinely GPT-4 class Large Language Model that runs on my laptop.
Code shufflin’ 
Lose the Very The best way to remove "very" from your vocabulary
The 88x31 GIF Collection A collection of 27,720 classic 88x31 buttons from the 1990s, 2000s, and today in GIF format.
Adactio: Journal—Going Offline is online …for free I wrote a book about service workers. It’s called Going Offline. It was first published by A Book Apart in 2018. Now it’s available to read for free online.
Home - Distributed Denial of Secrets We're a 501(c)(3) non-profit in the US that archives and publishes hacked and leaked documents in the public interest.
I like tag all content on my site. See below for my ever-growing list of tags.
My name is Philip Newborough and I’m a full stack web developer living and working in Lincoln, England. This website (philipnewborough.co.uk) serves as my personal homepage. When I’m not working with tech, I love to ride bicycles with my wife and friends.