Now that she’s older, my cat has recently been accumulating a number of medications she needs to take, and it is getting hard to keep track of them. Some of them are essential, and need to be taken at a specified time; some are good to have, and can be taken at any time. Some […]

I have recently been pondering a way to keep track of purchases for my bicycles. Some of these are components for the bikes themselves (e.g. a new wheel after one was stolen), and some are attachments (bike lights, clothing). My use case is to get a view of: What my total cost of ownership is […]

Introduction I’ve noticed several things with Docker registries: The APIs to interrogate them are either cumbersome, unfinished, or usually only partially implemented Free private registries are rarely found on the web, probably because of the cost of storage and data transfer GitLab are one of the few providers that offer free registry access, but today […]

I see there is a ready-made [WordPress Docker image](https://store.docker.com/images/wordpress) available, and I’m sure it is very good. However, I like my version, since it pulls in the latest versions of the required plugins and themes, and deletes themes and plugins that are not in use. It’d be great to set up a simple JS app […]

I recently donated some money to a small web-based charity, which accepts Paypal payments and electronic bank transfers. Whilst I have no fears that the charity misspends any donations, I realised after giving that I had no idea how the money had been spent. This particular organisation is run by over-worked volunteers, and whilst I […]

Introduction My experience of VirtualBox on Linux is mostly excellent, but there are a few areas in which host data would be good to bring into guests, for the purposes of updating informational widgets. For example, I’d like to see CPU activity and CPU core temperature in a guest VM, so I don’t need to […]

Some years ago I started work on a JavaScript implementation of a bad writing filter for Stack Overflow. I have some code for that sitting around, and one day I may even publish it! I find myself wanting to play around with the Stack Exchange API, partly as an excuse to learn Laravel, but sadly […]

One of the features missing from Stack Overflow is to receive a notification when a post that you’ve edited is subsequently edited again. This is useful where a post owner decides they disagree with an edit, and they wish to assert that their chatty tone, misspellings and extended downvote complaints really do belong (the community […]

As all social media users know, occasional time spent checking your various web accounts can add up during the day, and not all of it is productive. I use Twitter and Stack Overflow, primarily to help new developers, but the nature of these sites is that a new software library or interesting news story appears […]

I’m presently working on a project that handles the import of HTML from external sources, much of which will be fed through HTMLPurifier to ensure the HTML I render for the user is valid and safe. However, while pondering ways I can make this safe, I wondered how to find out quickly if some malicious […]

I’m currently working with the Ordnance Survey Code-Point Open data, which contains the 1.7M UK postcodes and their geo-coordinates. To import it into MySQL, I convert the Easting and Northing units into latitude and longitude, TRUNCATE the database table, and INSERT them in. This is rather slow, so I’m trying to speed it up by […]

I’ve a simple idea for a PHP information tool, very useful for beginners. If someone is asking about their PHP configuration on their system, they can just issue a command like this: > wget https://phpinfosite.com/installer.php | php in the same manner as Composer (and adjusted suitably for Windows). This will then give them a PHP […]

One of the things I’m cautious about is logging onto my own blog, and other self-hosted sites that require authentication, over public wifi. Unless I use server certificates, my WordPress and other passwords are in danger of being captured via a promiscuously-configured wifi adapter on the same subnet. Whilst I really ought to get a […]

I’ve been reading up on build processes for PHP recently, and comparing them with the good and bad deployment approaches I’ve been asked to use in the past. To do it properly, there are two approaches designed for a speedy changeover: Build the app in a new location and then change the docroot symlink to […]

Using HTTPS in the browser is a good security measure against data and session theft, especially on publicly available networks, such as internet cafes. A number of browser plugins now offer the ability to auto-switch to an encrypted connection, such as NoScript and SSL Everywhere. I thought a good counterpart to these would be a […]