Blog

First impressions of the new Apple TV

I've been a fan of the Apple TV for quite a while now. I was a bit late to the game as I only picked up a third generation unit in 2013. The unit that I am replacing today has [...]

Forcing yourself to use shell aliases

Fact: Shell aliases save you time. Fact: Saving time increases your productivity. Fact: Everybody wants to be more productive. Fact: Retraining muscle memory can be a pain in the ass. I have been fighting that last fact for a while [...]

Consolidating PHPAve.com

Just wanted to give everybody the head's up that I am consolidating PHPAve.com into this blog. I still plan to blog about PHP from time to time but I no longer see the need in maintaining it as a separate [...]

Shark Tank killed the magic

Shark Tank, you fucked up, you fucked up bad. I was watching the latest episode of Shark Tank (Season 7, Episode 5) with my daughter when I had to abruptly stop the show and make up an excuse as to [...]

Check if a string contains a character with PHP

Checking if a string contains a character could be accomplished easily with a regular expression or you can use the built-in PHP functions. To check if a string contains a character of a specific case you can use strpos. $haystack [...]

Transitioning from Google Wallet to Android Pay

I feel like I'm in the minority among my peers. I use Google Wallet and Android Pay pretty religiously. I choose to shop at establishments that allow me to use this technology as often as possible. I ask my peers [...]

Generate random hex color with PHP

There's many ways to skin a cat, or generate a color. You could randomize a number between 0 and 16777215 then convert it to hex: $rand_color = '#' . dechex(mt_rant(0, 16777215)); Or you could do what I like to do [...]

Run a block of PHP code a certain percentage of the time

Sometimes, you may want to run code all of the time. Other times, you may want to run code some of the time. This is how garbage collection in PHP works. Based on your configuration for gc_probability and gc_divisor, garbage [...]

CSS :not issue in Safari on iOS9

Seems that every time that Apple releases a new version of iOS I encounter some weird rendering issue. This time around with iOS9 I encountered an issue where the full / desktop version of the site looked like it still [...]

My experience with the Mandela effect

Remember that time I was bit by a dog? I sure as hell do. It was a choatic ordeal where I was living in fear of potentially contracting rabies as we waited to see if the dog that bit me [...]