February 12, 2016

Back to Windows

I recently put Windows 10 onto my little Acer. It was a practical decision. I enjoyed Ubuntu but had a real problem with the impact on battery performance. After 40 to 50 minutes the battery would generally be depleted. So, I downloaded a Windows 8 ISO from Microsoft and began the installation. It took a loooooong time (it’s not a very performant laptop). Eventually I got Windows 8 installed, upgraded to Windows 10, sorted out activation issue with Acer and Microsoft.

November 4, 2015

Outlook Kung-Fu

While in the process of doing some HTML emails recently I had some issues with Outlook. Stinky, sneaky Outlook. I learned a few little techniques though that are worth sharing. Only show this on Outlook First and foremost, only show the content between the conditionals on Outlook. &amp;lt;!--\[if gte mso 9\]&amp;gt;&lt;/pre&gt; &lt;div class="only on outlook"&gt;&lt;/div&gt; &amp;lt;!\[endif\]--&amp;gt; Don’t show this on Outlook (v1) Anything with the style mso-hide: all will be hidden on Outlook.

September 15, 2015

Migrate Wordpress Database

I recently found the WP-CLI library and have been investigating ways I can integrate it into my workflow. I should note here that we use shared hosting extensively. Ideally the preferred solution would be to use a true migration tool. This is not always possible with shared hosting. To use the tool the following commands would be issued: migrate_wordpress.sh dev production This command would pull the latest version of the wordpress database from the production server.

August 8, 2015

Quick Tip: Photoshop save slices without creating images folder

One of the minor annoyances that I run into from time to time is saving slices from a PSD. Once I have my slices defined and selected a folder Photoshop will save all my images in the folder I specified. However it will also create an images folder and place the images this folder. This means I that after saving the files they must be moved out of this folder.

December 10, 2014

ssh as part of my workflow

Have you ever been in the situation where the discovery of a technology or technique has rendered previous workflow comically inept and wasteful. One such example would be the discovery of the “edit multiple frames” button in Adobe Flash Professional. I had spent so much time moving from frame to frame to edit a tween. Then to discover that I could choose the entire animation as one and edit. Joy and sorrow in the one same wave of realisation.

December 2, 2014

Early PC top 5

While doing my recent top 5 Amiga games, I got to thinking about the early PC games that I also enjoyed. I got into PC gaming in the late 90s and early noughties. Please note, these are merely the games that I particularly enjoyed: X-Wing: Alliance Included in this is the entire X-Wing series, but I started with Alliance. Needs a joystick, but the inclusion of the requirement to manage your ship’s energy (lasers/shields/engines) adds another dimension.

November 1, 2014

Amiga Top Five

I was thinking recently about the amount of time I spent playing games when I was younger. I don’t have as much appetite any longer for playing games. The only game I play now is Team Fortress 2, and even that very irregularly. The only game that would probably take me back into the market is Half Life 3… So, to archive my gaming childhood, I decided to put together the accompanying list.

October 15, 2014

Vagrant and Puppet setup

This summer during my holidays in Romania I looked into Vagrant. I had some time during the due to the heat, undertaking my own siesta without the sleep. My path to to Vagrant was slightly oblique, as I had been looking to test out Puppet. I had been using VirtualBox virtual machines as an integral part of my development and testing process for some time. The promise of making this an automated and scripted process for my development environment appealed to me.

January 15, 2014

New Rig

As a sort of follow up to the article here I decided to continue to attempt to scratch my Linux itch. Reasoning that maybe virtual machines aren’t a fair reflection of a system’s capabilities I went and bought a little netbook. I went for a little Acer Aspire in the January sales. This is a relatively cheap model, but it was the Christmas break so I had a little bit of time to kill.

November 13, 2013

Grunt setup

This article might be helpful to anybody who satisfies the following criteria: Wants to run Grunt On a Mac Running Linux through VirtualBox Using a shared folder for the directory you want to install packages If this describes your situation, you probably have run into errors installing the local version of Grunt through npm The reason for these errors might be that your Shared Folder doesn’t actually support symlinks. This was a change in v1.