Blog

Cleaning up Facebook - Part 1 Around 10 years ago, Facebook was everything. No matter your interests, you could find like minded people on Facebook to share your passion with. But that communication came at a price: your personal data.…

Last year, I wrote My Stack - 2017 Edition , and now it's time for a follow-up. A year is a long time, and my day-to-day stack has changed quite a bit since then. OS I'm still an Antergos user, and have no sign of changing.…

Hacktoberfest is a great initiative created by DigitalOcean and GitHub to get more developers contributing to open-source projects. After opening a set number of pull requests to open-source projects, they're rewarded with branded swag. As someone who does a lot of development in their free time, it's not hard for me to find some open source projects, and contribute where possible.…

In terms of security, WordPress, and PHP in general for that matter, have become a bit of a joke. If you want a site to be secure, people tend to steer clear of WordPress and PHP. That being said, nothing stands even close to WordPress with regards to plugin support, community size, and documentation.…

VPNs are a way of accessing application which sit on a separate network using an encrypted tunnel. Contrary to popular belief, they are not designed to be used for anonymising your internet habits. Whilst VPNs are designed to enable a client to access the servers network, it's possible to use them to provide a server to access to its client's network.…

I've been using KeePassXC since not long after it's initial split from KeePassX in late 2016. I've bounced around many password managers, but KeePassXC looked to fill all the boxes: It's actively maintained, unfortunately unlike KeePassX It's open source, and easy to contribute to, as I have It's got all the features I need, like TOTP and Browser Integration Cross platform (not KeePassXC specific) 2.…

Bluetooth audio is great! I've had a pair of Bluetooth headphones, Sony MDR-XB950 BT, for around a year now, and the ability to listen to music without cables is amazing. But, I can only use the Bluetooth parts of this with my phone, because on Linux, it just sounds terrible.…

My university has a development sever, which it uses to host our coursework without the need to setup a development environment locally. It also enables lecturers to mark our work in a controlled environment, without needing to spin up an environment, and run untrusted code on their machines, a security hole I'm more than likely to take advantage of!…

As a software engineer and perfectionist, I have my machines setup in a very specific way, so I can do my job properly and have everything just the way I like it. Thanks to my dotfiles, I have everything syncing up between machines, meaning the tools I use are setup correctly, the same, everywhere.…

As anyone who's used an application written with the QT UI framework will know, they don't always look the best, and certainly don't fit in with the rest of your desktops theme in the way GTK does. Certain themes support styling both GTK and QT applications, however most don't.…

I've had a website for around 4 years now, starting with a python CGI-based site hosted at 1&1, and evolving into it's current form, powered by Hugo. Although I'm a web developer, I'm very far from a designer. I really can't design anything!…

I'm one of those Arch users who apparently doesn't use arch properly: I install updates daily, including packages from the AUR. This has the great benefit of giving me the most up-to-date packages available from upstream. However the downside of meaning I have the latest packages from upstream, meaning if something breaks, even temporarily, it breaks for me.…

As it's Cyber Security Month, now's the perfect time to work on improving the security on my websites, projects, and servers. But, upgrading them for now isn't good enough for me, I wanted to add a way of scanning projects automatically, to check for any new issues.…

Throughout my life, I've had many different email providers, starting with Hotmail almost 10 years ago. Recently, I've been focusing more on ways I can secure my emails. No, I may not have anything to hide, but that doesn't matter!…

Recently, at DabApps, we've been migrating our mobile app workflow over to using react-native rather than Ionic, mainly because of its near native performance. For the first few projects, there were only a couple of us that knew how to use React Native effectively, and work around the qwerks it has.…

Running steam on linux is great, besides the triple-a game support obviously. But running it on an iGPU has recently been causing me problems, mainly under Arch. Stacktrace: jake@***:~$ steam ~/.local/share/Steam/steam.sh: line 154: VERSION_ID: unbound variable ~/.local/share/Steam/steam.sh: line 154: VERSION_ID: unbound variable Running Steam on antergos 64-bit ~/.…