I don’t use many GNOME Extensions. Nothing against them, but less extensions means less crap to break when the latest GNOME release drops. For the most part, I opt for extensions that well maintained and not prone to breaking between major releases. Things were peachy for a while, but recently
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New year, new VPS Showdown! While I don’t usually make big changes to these posts month to month, I do try to refresh them every year or so. This year’s improvements include commas (on the larger numbers) and charts! I’ve also made the decision to drop the High Frequency plan
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Last week I discussed counting files in the current directory. It was a quick and dirty way to get the number of files in a directory with some pretty strong assumptions about the type of files / directories that your current directory contained. Sure, it was a short sighted in
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As the year comes to a close, I like to look back and see how many blog posts I have written for the year. My blog is powered by Jekyll and I like to keep my posts organized by year, in directories. With all of my posts in one place,
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For the most part, I do the majority of my debugging with Node.js / JavaScript’s console.log(). It’s quick and dirty but it gets me what I’m looking for. The exception being when I am working with larger objects, specifically any object that is nested three or more levels deep. Here’s
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With this month’s post being the final one of the year, I thought it was best to get back to a comparison that included all of the providers that I cover. The last few months have not included Lightsail or UpCloud since they didn’t offer the types of plans I
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It can happen for a number of reasons. You’re connected to a server via SSH and things just stop responding. It’s hung, stuck, frozen, locked up, unresponsive or many just not be paying attention to the keys you’re so desperately pounding on your keyboard. It’s happens regularly, but not regularly
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I’m no stranger to the nuances of testing against different version of PHP and PHPUnit, but my previous issues were related to the environment itself. Recently I ran into an issue with different syntax between versions of PHPUnit, specifically assertRegExp() being deprecated, which was throwing an error. Not only was
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This isn’t some sort of parental humble brag about how my kid is a better reader than yours. This is a post about one of the weirder search phrases that has been leading people to my site. The search phrase in question is: Julian read 58 pages of a book
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Spotify’s been giving some grief as of late when trying to upgrade it on my Arch Linux System. Actually, who am I kidding, I’ve actually been having a handful of issues with GNOME since the last major upgrade. More on that once I figure out how to fix some of
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It’s that time of the year again, new version of Ubuntu has been released! Sadly (and expectedly) both UpCloud and Amazon are slow to add the latest and greatest (albeit, not LTS) version of Ubuntu to their Linux distro offering. With that, this month I’ll be omitting both providers as
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New Ubuntu and Node.js versions released recently. While neither is a long-term service (LTS) release, they still represent the best that both parties have to offer. Even though Ubuntu 20.10 is here, it’s still shipping with an older version of Node.js, v12.x to be exact. If you’re like me, you
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While it may seem counter intuitive to have a test that doesn’t have any assertions, PHPUnit’s unique method of sharing data between tests can put you in a situation where you have a test that just doesn’t need to actually test anything, and simply returns some data. In those scenarios,
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I’ve been back on Chrome (by way of Chromium) since earlier this year and recently, I started to experience some extreme slowness when attempting to type in the address bar. This slowness was enough for me to file this post in the “productivity” category, as it was enough for me
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Switching things up a bit for Spooktober (doot doot) by running some benchmarks on the CPU-centric plans. Unfortunately, Lightsail and UpCloud are lacking this sort of offering, so they are omitted this month. It’s also worth noting that even though all of the plans are touting a dedicate CPU, it’s
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Redis is one of my favorite data stores. The multitude of data types makes it flexible enough to serve as a simple caching layer (replacing Memcached) or as a full-blown RDBMS replacement if you’re willing to jump through a few hoops. Because Redis is an in-memory data store, it’s limited
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I had high hopes for the UHC Motion program. Earning some cash just by doing what I was already doing, being active. The problem for me was in terms of how much data they wanted access to. Even though the program is based solely on your number of steps you
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I’ve been a bad Arch Linux user recently. Even though I speak highly about being able to run the most cutting edge software, I’ve been slacking and didn’t run an update for a while. This was primarily because I didn’t really feel like having to figure out any problems that
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Bringing things back around to the price point that I had started with many moons ago, the $20 plan. While the lower priced systems are sufficient enough for a lot of use cases, moving up to a meatier server instance can provide instant performance gains, give you better priority on
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Generally speaking, when I need to work with an array or dictionary type of variable, I tend to reach for something other than Bash / shell scripting. This primarily stems from the fact that Bash didn’t support arrays until version 4.x and when I first learned about them, macOS (then
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One of the biggest offenses that I’ve seen over my entire software engineering career is a total disregard for code comments. I don’t subscribe to the idea that code should be self documenting. I do believe that human are inherently forgetful and code left undocumented is code that will bite
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Even though the command-line is like my second home, I still fall short in terms of being able to some basic things. This is primarily because they just don’t come up that often so when I do figure out how to do it, I just don’t retain what I’ve learned.
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As the world has been shifting away from using terms like master and slave in technology, I was left wondering what the heck I was going to do about my git aliases that relied explicitly on the word master. git itself makes it really easy to swap the default branch
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Starting to feel like I’m taking a virtual vacation as I test out different data centers each month. This month we step into Europe to explore Frankfurt. Next month may end up taking us to Australia, but head’s up, not every provider has a data center there. Usual setup this
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Generally speaking, I don’t use dots (periods, full stops, whatever else they may be called) in the URI for a website. That was, until I made the . an allowable character for user names on one of my projects. Allowing the character was a big deal at all with Express.js
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