A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, there was a web developer who wanted a silly animation for his custom 404 error page.
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.
If anyone is in any doubt as to whether you need to compile any software from source in order to use desktop Linux, you really don't.
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.
I have a feeling that Star Wars: Skeleton Crew is the best show I will watch in 2025.
I've adjusted down my yearly cycling distance goal on Strava to 5,000km. I didn't manage to ride as much as I would have liked last year, not coming anywhere close to my goal of 10,000km, so I've changed it to a total that should be more achievable. It's only the 9th of Jan, but I'm currently 18km ahead of pace, which I'm pleased with considering the current freezing weather.
Longlegs is a very weird movie. It's dark and arty, which I enjoyed, but I'm not sure I'd be in any hurry to watch it again.
Happy New Year! I hope 2025 is good to us all.
Merry Christmas!
The GNOME extensions site/service has been sluggish to the point of unuseable for me lately. It's behaving like a site under heavy load, although I have no data to back that up.
Updated my gaming rig to Debian testing and installed the latest NVIDIA drivers. It's not the most powerful machine in the world, but it plays the odd game of Counter-Strike ok.
Just finished watching The Penguin. It was darker than I had expected, which is not a bad thing. Thoroughly enjoyed it.
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.
Adactio: Journal—Syndicating to Bluesky One day Bluesky will go away. It won’t matter much to me. My website will still be here.
State of HTML 2024 The 2024 edition of the annual survey about the latest trends in the HTML ecosystem.
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.