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Philip Newborough

> Web Developer

Web developer and tech enthusiast. When I'm not coding, I can be found performing Grumpa duties, reading Warhammer 40,000 fiction, listening to tech podcasts or riding my bike.

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Debian 13 (Trixie) server set-up

Debian 13 (Trixie) server set-up

A practical, production-ready guide to setting up a Debian 13 web server using Apache, PHP-FPM, and MariaDB. Covers installation, performance tuning, security basics, and modern best practices.

debian apache mariadb php
My MacBook Pro M5

My MacBook Pro M5

Fast, silent, and actually usable on your lap. I traded my ThinkPad for a MacBook Pro two months ago, and honestly? I should have done it sooner. Here is my honest take on the transition.

apple hardware
Flatspace Commander

Flatspace Commander

A love letter to the kid sitting on the floor in front of a CRT TV. Flatspace Commander is a minimalist, 1-bit space sim that brings back the tension of 80s wireframe trading with a modern, mobile twist.

games pwa webdev
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Philip Newborough 1d ago

Watched 2:22 A Ghost Story at the Theatre Royal Nottingham. Really enjoyed it and the music was proper good.

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Philip Newborough 1d ago

Feeding the quack quacks with Mummy and Nanna.

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Philip Newborough 4d ago

Trying to decide if I want Diablo II: Resurrected - Infernal Edition for my Steam Deck.

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Philip Newborough 7d ago

Just short of 2 months using my M5 MacBook Pro - everything just works, it's properly quick and the battery life is just amazing. I honestly think it might be the best computer I've ever used. Now, if it could just run Linux 🤣

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Philip Newborough 12 Apr 2026

Trip out to RSPB Bempton Cliffs for a spot of bird watching. Impressive views and the volunteer staff were friendly and knowledgeable. Bit windy.

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Philip Newborough 09 Apr 2026

COMMANDER'S LOG — SECURITY INSPECTION — CLEARED
SD 3200.098

Station Authority boarded at LAVE and conducted a full search of the cargo hold. Inspection team found nothing of interest. All 1t of flagged cargo remained undetected.

Free to proceed. No fine issued. Credits unaffected.

https://flatspace-commander.philipnewborough.co.uk

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Philip Newborough 02 Apr 2026

Looking at Mythic Beasts Raspberry Pi hosting options. Nice to see an honest sales pitch: "This is a service aimed at hobbyists, and shouldn't be used for nuclear power station command and control systems." I'm definitely a hobbyist and I'm keen to give it a try. I'm thinking I might rent one for a bit and see how it performs.

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Philip Newborough 28 Mar 2026

Testing a HTML canvas app on my Pixel 9 and Becky's iPhone 17. The iPhone feels much faster, probably because it is. I love my Pixel, but I'm feeling a little envious. It'll pass, maybe.

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Philip Newborough 27 Mar 2026

Working on a PWA and trying to figure out why the PWA's cache was not updating. Wrote a bunch of tools to debug it. The tools insisted that it was updating. Turns out the Service Worker was successfully fetching... cached files from the server. Caching the cache. My head hurts.

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Philip Newborough 24 Mar 2026

I've been watching a good amount of Hey Duggee lately. The Frog Song is my favourite. Some people say the Stick Song is better, it is not.

Anthropic secretly installs spyware when you install Claude Desktop — That Privacy Guy!
thatprivacyguy.com

I was working on a personal project, debugging a Native Messaging helper I had written for it. In the process I needed to check what Brave Browser had registered on my laptop. What I found was a file I had never put there. It was not mine. I had not installed it. I had not authorised it. I had not even been told about it.

It was from Anthropic.

ai anthropic claude
An app can be a home-cooked meal
robinsloan.com

Have you heard about this new app called BoopSnoop? It launched in the first week of January 2020, and almost immediately, it was downloaded by four people in three different time zones. In the years since, it has remained steady at four daily active users, with zero churn: a resounding success, exceeding every one of its creator’s expectations.

software blogs
Tiny Tool Town 🏘️
tinytooltown.com

A place for stupid-delightful tools made with love. Free, fun & open source. Made for an audience of one.

tools directory
Why is Mastodon the best social medium in 2026?
mastodon.social

Why is Mastodon the best social medium in 2026? Picture 1: If I share a post with some objectively good news, it gets 97 boosts and 140 likes. Picture 2: If I share the same post on Threads, it gets zero interactions — zero! — because it contains a link to the competing social medium YouTube, and on Threads, Mark Zuckerberg has decided that the algorithm should not promote such content. Threads is where the rich decide what we can talk about. On Mastodon, we decide.

mastodon socialmedia threads
The Courage to Stop - Jeffrey Zeldman Presents
zeldman.com

Brevity was always a discipline. Now it’s a statement. When everything around you is excessive by default, choosing fewer words takes courage. It says: I thought about this. I edited. I respected your time more than I needed to show my work.

ai
Compress the kill cycle with Red Hat Device Edge
web.archive.org

Red Hat® Device Edge embeds captured, analyzed, and federated data sets in a manner that positions the warfighter to use artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to increase the accuracy of airborne targeting and mission-guidance systems.

Red Hat tried and failed to bury this document.

ai redhat
Introducing EmDash — the spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security
blog.cloudflare.com

The cost of building software has drastically decreased. We recently rebuilt Next.js in one week using AI coding agents. But for the past two months our agents have been working on an even more ambitious project: rebuilding the WordPress open source project from the ground up.

wordpress
WordPress Manifesto - 15 Years In, Here's What's Actually Broken - Marcin Dudek
marcindudek.dev

I've been doing WordPress for 15 years. I love it and I'm tired of it at the same time. Not tired in the "I'm moving to Webflow" way. Tired of the lies - the small ones and the big ones. The "free CMS", the "open source community", the "40% of the web" brag. All of it. Here's what's actually going on.

wordpress