The brave (crazy?) boys have arrived at their campsite and feasted on spag bol to keep the carbs and proteins flowing. Continue reading “The night before…”

Off they go. Pascal’s just had his final meal before heading up north to register for Man vs Lakes tomorrow. Continue reading “Final prep for Man vs Lakes”

This years Challenge is a big one, and not one that I think I’m entirely prepared for. Martin, my companion on the Newcastle to London 24 hour bike ride nearly two years ago (and sadly discontinued now) blazed a trail across the lake district last year on Man vs. Lakes 2017, and I’m joining him (with Sim, Angus, Robin, Jason, Hedges) this year.

There are a few snags to the plan. Continue reading “Challenge 2018”

If you’ve been following along with this series of tutorials, you’ll have built a LEMP stack capable of handling multiple vhosts. That’s all very well – but if you expect your users to enter their username and password into the site then you’ll need to provide them with a little security. The only way to do that is with ssl, certificates for which used to be pricey or came with strings attached.

Let’s Encrypt is a certificate authority started by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, University of Michigan, Akamai Technologies and Cisco Systems to provide ssl certificates for free, and to simplify the process of securing your website into the bargain. They take donations though – and this is one project that you really should consider supporting. Continue reading “Docker Lab – Containerising your website, Part 4 (Let’s Encrypt)”

So you’ve set up containers for Nginx and for PHP – now you’d like to have a database. After all the work of the last two labs you’ll be glad to hear than adding MariaDB to the mix is very simple – we can get it up and running in minutes. Continue reading “Docker Lab – Containerising your website, Part 3 (MariaDB)”

In the previous instalment (Docker Lab – Containerising your website, Part 1), we installed Docker and Docker Compose, and set up an Nginx container. If all you need is to serve a few static pages there’s no need to read any further. But if you need your website to be dynamic, if you need PHP and, perhaps, a database, read on…

These instructions assume that you have followed the steps in part 1. Continue reading “Docker Lab – Containerising your website, Part 2 (PHP)”

For many years now, 45RPMSoftware has maintained its own webservers (hosted on virtual machines by Rackspace).  These webservers have been set up in the ‘traditional’ manner, with a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack.  They’ve worked well and so I’ve ignored them, which isn’t the right way to run a website and especially not one which hosts your business.For many years now, 45RPMSoftware has maintained its own webservers (hosted on virtual machines by Rackspace).  These webservers have been set up in the ‘traditional’ manner, with a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack.  They’ve worked well and so I’ve ignored them, which isn’t the right way to run a website and especially not one which hosts your business. Continue reading “Docker Lab – Containerising your website, Part 1 (Nginx)”

The latest version of MailRaider greatly improves its handling of base64 encoded or quoted printable strings – the previous version could get confused if, for example, it encountered ‘=?UTF-8?B?’ instead of ‘=?utf-8?b?’. The problem is that NSString only has componentsSeparatedByString – which isn’t much use if you don’t know what case to expect. Hmm. Continue reading “NSString – components separated by case insensitive string”

You may remember that, a little over a year ago, I wrote a clock for the micro:bit (read it again here if you need a reminder).  I pondered adding alarm functionality to it but, in the event, I didn’t get around to it. In keeping with that tradition, I now offer you a calculator for the micro:bit – this one has unimplemented improvements too!

I run a computer club for the kids at the local school where we teach them how to code – free from the constraints of the National Curriculum. It’s no secret that I don’t like Scratch, and I think that one of the reasons that the British Isles produced so many great coders is because they learned Basic on the ZX Spectrum and BBC computers from an early age. Continue reading “A Calculator For Your micro:bit”

Like many geeks I love old technology. I also like to push my technology to new heights and, if possible, make it usable in the modern world. Nearly all of my old computers are networked and, theoretically at least, able to browse the Internet. In practice though Gopher is the most usable standard nowadays since SSL tends to render most email servers and websites unusable. Even if it didn’t, Javascript has changed almost beyond recognition from its nascent days in mid nineties – and don’t even think of rendering HTML5! Continue reading “Retro Computer – Modern Internet”