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.
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.
I believe that it's really important to support and use Firefox. Not only do I think that Mozilla understand/support user's privacy more than Google, but I also think it's important for the health of the web that more than one option exists when it comes to rendering engines. Also, it's a really good web browser.
I've recently decided to simplify my life by moving away from using multiple computers to using a single laptop. What are the main advantages and disadvantages of using a single computer?
As a web developer, I like to build and rebuild websites. My own website is no different.
bootstrap codeigniter debian fediverse jquery markdown mastodon php
Creating your own Bash aliases is a relatively easy process. That said, I recently switched my desktop linux distribution from Debian to Fedora and there are subtle differences.
In Linux, Cron is a daemon/service that executes shell commands periodically on a given schedule. Cron is driven by a crontab, a configuration file that holds details of what commands are to be run along with a timetable of when to run them. Knowing how to use Cron is key to mastering automation with Linux.
I mostly try to write non-opinionated posts about web development and Linux - reminders about how to complete tasks and get stuff done etc.
For short-form posts, see my status page.
A list of blogs by others that I read, aka a blogroll.
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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.