Upgrading from Fedora 41 to Fedora 42
If someone were to ask me which Linux distro has provided the best desktop experience, I wouldn't hesitate to answer: Fedora Workstation 41. So of course I upgraded to Fedora 42.
Philip Newborough - Web Developer and Linux Enthusiast
Pinned Demo: Canvas Animation: Particle Emitter #2
Another JavaScript particle emitter animation. The particles in this animation have a more organic feel to them with random changes to their direction of movement.
Blog
How to install PHP extension for Microsoft SQL Server under Fedora
I found myself needing to connect to a Microsoft SQL Server via a PHP application running under Fedora. Finding concise details about installing the necessary drivers and extensions was not easy, so here is a blog post detailing how I did it.
GNOME menu entries for Visual Studio Code projects
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.
How to set-up WatchGuard VPN with IKEv2 under Debian and Fedora
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.
My Debian 12 (bookworm) server set-up
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.
My Debian 12 (bookworm) desktop set-up
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.
Upgrading from Fedora 40 to Fedora 41
A post describing my first experience of upgrading a Fedora installation. TLDR: The upgrade went smoothly and Fedora continues to impress me.
How I do todos
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.
Creating a Bootstrap dark CSS colour scheme by inverting the colour values of an existing light colour scheme
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.
How to add a custom search engine to Firefox
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.
Status
Typing this on a £60 Xiaomi Redmi A3 device that I purchased from Argos. It’s not going to replace my current phone (iPhone 11) but I was interested to see how a cheap Android device performs and what it provides for the money. Long story short, it’s actually a usable device, which is a pleasant surprise. £60 to play around with Android, before deciding to drop iOS and purchase a premium device is an acceptable cost to me. Also, £60!
One of my least favourite tasks is wrestling with HTML email templates. I recently spent some time working on what I thought was a nice and attractive email template. It worked really well with the email clients and devices I tested it on, then it got delivered to Classic Outlook on Windows 10/11 and BOOM! Everything fell apart. Apparently, Classic Outlook is going to be around until 2029. I think I'll just stick to using plain text email templates until then.
Daily driver (Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 3) upgraded to Fedora 42. No issues to speak of. I love that I can do a release upgrade and then just get on with my day. Perfect.
Upgraded my secondary machine to Fedora 42. The upgrade was quick and error free. Will do my daily driver next, after I run a few backup routines.
I did not upgrade to Fedora 42 on release day. Maybe tomorrow?
Fedora 42 is due for release tomorrow and I’m tempted to upgrade, but 41 is currently rock solid for me, so I’ll probably wait a while before upgrading. Or maybe not.
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.
Bookmarks
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Genymobile/scrcpy: Display and control your Android device pronounced "screen copy"
This application mirrors Android devices (video and audio) connected via USB or TCP/IP and allows control using the computer's keyboard and mouse. It does not require root access or an app installed on the device. It works on Linux, Windows, and macOS.Had a play with this today and it worked really nicely.
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I installed Linux (so should you) - YouTube Seems like some sort of cultural moment in time. Also, slightly amusing to see a high profile YouTuber experience a tech awakening.
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Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Benchmarks On Ubuntu Linux vs. AMD vs. Intel - Phoronix -
Why is everything binary? - YouTube
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Code shufflin’ -
Lose the Very The best way to remove "very" from your vocabulary
Folksonomy
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