Blog

Unable to open GNOME settings on Arch Linux after GNOME upgrade

Often times I blog about topics because I want to make sure I have a record of an issue and how I resolved it. This is one of those times. As discussed last week, I recently made the switch from [...]

The Distrohopper, or There and Back Again

In a town in East Texas there lived a distrohopper... To catch you up, I'm a Linux user from the mid-1990s that was hot for Slackware had a brief affair with Gentoo on an iBook before settling into the ease [...]

How to !important inline styles in React

If you've ever used Bootstrap, you probably know that it's pretty aggressive in it's use of !important in it's styles. At CrowdSync we love Bootstrap, having ditched Foundation for it, but the overzealous approach to !important does get in our [...]

Using <style /> blocks in React

Every once in a while you are faced with a scenario where the best course of action is to slap a <style /> block in the middle of your code. For us, it was that time we wanted to set [...]

VPS Showdown: DIY Edition

My very first "Linode vs. DigitalOcean" post dates back to a simpler time back in February of 2013. Over the past 5 years of doing these posts, the benchmarks have evolved and subjectively "improved". Now I used to post the [...]

URL routing in PHP

The other day I was checking out what folks are querying to get to my site. Of course a ton of people get here looking for VPS comparison, but what surprised me was the volume of queries for "PHP routing" [...]

Get your own dotfiles

These are my dotfiles. There are many like them, but these are mine. A lot of folks do it. They publish their dotfiles because they want other people to enjoy them. Free as in Freedom and all of that [...]

DigitalOcean flexible droplets compared

Switching it up this month. DigitalOcean recently released flexible plans at 15$ per droplet and I thought it would be fun to dig a bit deeper into them instead of just doing a side by side comparison of the different [...]

Eggs by the ounce

Eggs. I could eat them for every meal. They are inexpensive, nutritious and versatile. Most days, I eat two eggs for breakfast. Extra large eggs. This past week I had my normal breakfast fare of about a quarter cup of [...]

How to tell if your shell is a subshell of Vim

If you're like me, you use Vim. If you're like me, you use :sh[ell]. If you're like me, you forget that you used :sh and open Vim again. I've been getting better about it, but every once in a while [...]