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.
About 20 years ago I wrote a poem and scratched out a doodle to accompany it. I'm no poet and I'm almost entirely sure that it is the only poem I have ever written. That said, I'm actually quite proud of my effort and given what is currently happening in Ukraine and the Middle East, I thought I would share it in the form of an interactive digital poem.
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.
A post where I try to clarify my current stance on LLM/AI. I share my concerns about data privacy, energy usage and Big Tech influence.
Some thoughts about Mozilla's decision to build AI features into the Firefox web browser.
Last week I switched the operating system on my daily driver (Lenovo ThinkPad T14s) from Debian 12 to Fedora 40. In this post I write a little about why I switched and how the switch went.
Just discovered that Vivaldi provides custom icons for iOS. That's a really nice touch!
Passwords suck, but I built a password generator that'll create passwords like "7Salads&aQuailnamedSteve." and "84Butterbeans&anEelcalledRicky!" philipnewborough.co.uk/demos/passwo...
Fedora 41 upgrade 😚👌
The new default terminal application in Fedora is pretty. I love that it has the Dracula theme included in its theme options.
I purchased my current laptop a year ago. It’s a Lenovo ThinkPad T14s and it’s been nearly perfect for my needs. I got the model with 16GB of RAM, I should have opted for the 32GB model. My next laptop will have 32GB or more.
Looking forward to upgrading my daily driver to Fedora 41. I’ve been running 41 on a test system for the last month and it’s been solid.
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. philipnewborough.co.uk/demos/canvas...
I've been playing around with converting a website's database from MariaDB to SQLite. SQLite is consistently 100 - 200ms faster when performing search queries on a table with ~100,000 rows using DataTables and PHP. There doesn't appear to be any noticeable speed difference querying individual rows. Also, I'm not sure if I'm being a bit heavy handed with it, but I've managed to corrupt the SQLite db numerous times, which is concerning.
Roughly 2 weeks ago, I changed my GNOME desktop to use Dark Style so that I could test some prefers-color-scheme CSS styles. I've not changed it back since.
Converting a website's back-end to use SQLite, it's currently using MariaDB. I'm interested to see if there will be any performance improvements. The largest table has ~250k rows, so it's not big data, but it's also not insignificant.
A modern FitText alternative.
The #1 Password Strength Tool. Trusted and used by millions.
Pwned Passwords are hundreds of millions of real world passwords previously exposed in data breaches. This exposure makes them unsuitable for ongoing use as they're at much greater risk of being used to take over other accounts.
Another CSS reset, this one is loosely based on Josh W Comeau's CSS reset.
In this article, we are not going to make complex stuff with CSS gradients. Instead, we’re keeping things simple and I am going to walk through all of the incredible things we can do with just one gradient.
The user-base size that consumer-facing startups need to meet expectations is just unfathomable because their average revenue per user rounds to zero. Arc is wildly successful but it needs to be just outstandingly successful to succeed. Right now it’s very popular in tech circles, but consumer software tech startups need to be popular like Amazon or Walmart.
Webfonts were great when most computers only had a handful of good fonts pre-installed. Thanks to font creation and buying by Apple, Microsoft, Google, and other folks, most computers have good—no, great—fonts installed, and they're a great option if you want to not load a separate font.
Container-oriented Terminal
This is the new default Terminal in Fedora Workstation.
The name was musicbox.fun. I got it for a side-project, an interactive online music box that I had built and hosted at musicboxfun.com. The new name was shorter and more quirky. I felt lucky to have grabbed it.
Unfortunately, musicbox.fun had a history. Before I bought it, the domain was used to host pirated music.
TL;DR: I would like to turn GNOME OS, GNOME’s home-grown distro for testing and development of the GNOME Desktop, into a daily-drivable general purpose OS.
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.