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.
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.
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.
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.
I have a new physical Memento Mori for my work desk. If anyone asks about it, I'm going to say it's a reminder of the ultimate deadline.
Yet Another Zombie Survivors is a lot of fun on the Steam Deck!
Finished reading Siege of Vraks - A Death Korps Novel by Steve Lyons. It was a good read, but I think I enjoyed Krieg a little more. The story follows several characters through numerous battles in the multi-year siege of Vraks. There are strong Nazi "cult of death" vibes in this book.
Testing Fedora 43 on an Asus Zenbook 14 (UM3406KA_UM3406KA). Hardware wise, everything seems to be working just fine and the OLED screen is bloody gorgeous. It's been a long time since I've considered anything other than a ThinkPad, but this Zenbook (with more RAM) could be a contender.
Happy New Year!
Is there anything more horrifying than watching your 22 months old grandson mash banana into your OLED TV?
Finished reading Krieg - A Death Korps Novel by Steve Lyons. I went into this one not knowing much about the Krieg faction, so it was a fascinating read and I really enjoyed it. Also, with just a couple of storylines, it was an easy read but hard to put down. I'm looking forward to reading Siege of Vraks next.
Completed Doom (2016) on the Steam Deck. Actually, I had to switch to my PC to defeat the final boss as it glitched a couple of times on the Deck. This didn't spoil the experience though and I really enjoyed playing this. The game is mindless action, which I'm not opposed to. I may or may not play Doom Eternal next.
Not sure what I think about these new GNOME donation notifications š¤
Completed Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine and Space Marine 2 on the Steam Deck. Great games. The original ran much better then the sequel, but both were enjoyable.
A good discussion about the current state of Microsoft Windows.
If you're an activist, an academic, or anyone just trying to make this world a better place for humans to live out our lives, please take these fonts and use them for whatever you need. They're for you.
On Saturday, tech entrepreneur Siqi Chen released an open source plugin for Anthropicās Claude Code AI assistant that instructs the AI model to stop writing like an AI model. Called āHumanizer,ā the simple prompt plugin feeds Claude a list of 24 language and formatting patterns that Wikipedia editors have listed as chatbot giveaways.
This looks cool, but I'm not sure how practical it is. Also, the monitors look like they are shaking a fair bit from the vibrations.
Mozilla published a new State of Mozilla. Itās absolute slopaganda. A mess of trippy visuals and corpo-speak thatās been through the slop wringer too many times.
Bash scripting course and guide created by Dave Eddy of ysap.sh. Learn the Bash Shell and master beginner all the way up to advanced Bash scripting techniques.
A simple JavaScript package that generates snowflakes and corresponding CSS to make them fall on your webpage.
Love this Pop!_OS Cosmic wallpaper. It's based on a NASA image of microscopic phytoplankton.
This guide walks through how to set up Vivaldiās blocklists from the perspective of someone migrating from ābig browser + extensionā to āVivaldi + built-in blocking,ā with some extra notes for privacy-minded folks.
Itās time to admit, before God and the good readers of Ars Technica, that I have a problem. I love roguelikes. Reader, I canāt get enough of them. If thereās even a whisper of a hot new roguelike on Steam, Iām there. You may call them arcane, repetitive, or maddeningly difficult; I call them heaven.
I like tag all content on my site. See below for my ever-growing list of tags.
My name is Philip Newborough and Iām a full stack web developer living and working in Lincoln, England. This website (philipnewborough.co.uk) serves as my personal homepage. When Iām not working with tech, I love to ride bicycles with my wife and friends.