When doing any development on my laptop I use the very useful MAMP to give me an xAMP (Apache, MySQL & PHP) environment.
I recently upgraded and found that the free version offers two versions of PHP: 7.4.33 and 8.2.0 which would be fine but my production server is still on 8.1 and so I needed to match that. I could have upgraded to MAMP Pro but £90 just to switch to PHP 8.1 seemed a bit much, although, I do appreciate that by doing so I would be supporting the developers.
Having dominated the browser world and making developers lives a misery with Internet Explorer Microsoft are now adapting to a new world order by adopting a competitors browser.
There was a time when Internet Explorer (from now on referred to as IE) ruled the world when it came to browsing the web. Then along came Chrome (and to a lesser extent Firefox) and there was a mass exodus from IE. IE now only accounts for just over 6% of traffic while Chrome has 47%.
With Windows 10 Microsoft introduced Edge as it’s browser going forward but … Read the rest
I’ve had my MacBook Air for over five years now and by and large it is still performing pretty well. Certainly better after that time than any Windows machines I’ve had in the past would have done.
Just recently, though, I’d been having a performance problem which led me to do a root and branch check of my machine (turned out it was the Sophos Home Virus scanner). As part of this I stumbled upon the fact that Alfred can do text expansion and this left me to wonder whether it was worth having two programs sat in the background … Read the rest
Everyone knows that looking good in your social media profile pictures is important and nowhere more so than on LinkedIn. But how do you know what is the best picture to use? Well that is where online service photofeeler comes in.
Photofeeler attempts to take some of the guesswork out of selecting the optimum picture by crowdsourcing views on pictures you upload aggregating the responses to give you a score.
You start by uploading a picture that you are interested in and select a category that this would be used with, so business or social. This is then available to … Read the rest
It really pains me to say this but I am worried about the longevity of Evernote, a tool that I have been using for many, many years. So long in fact that I now have well over 30,000 notes stored in it.
Evernote co-founder Phil Libin always said that his aim was to create a “100-year startup” meaning that it’s “a company that’s around in 100 years, which means Evernote’s product needs to be durable.” Right now I cannot see them achieving that aim. Of course that aim could have been ditched when Libin left in 2016.
Why have … Read the rest
I have been starting on a side project with my son this week where I am developing a small web app for him. He has left home a while ago so we needed to find a way to collaborate on the project without too much effort and without interfering with our day jobs. So, for example, we went through the requirements while travelling on a train up to London.
When it comes to testing and bug tracking we again needed something quick and simple. In the past I have used both The Bug Genie for work and Trello for smaller … Read the rest
Like so many others I am a regular Excel user but having grown up on Windows finding equivalent keyboard shortcuts for the Mac can sometimes be a pain. Specifically how to manipulate cells.
So presented here as an aide memoir for me and hopefully it will prove useful to others:
Ctrl + u – edit a cell
Cmc + Alt + Enter – new line in cell
Enter – move to next cell below
Shift + Enter – move to next cell above< … Read the rest
I thought that the practice of forcing useless software onto users as part of an installation had died out but apparently not by the looks of this Java installer.
That this is being foisted upon us by Oracle, who clearly don’t need the little money they must be making from this, is a surprised as I thought this practice was restricted to smaller outfits but clearly not.
If you want to help stop this practice you can sign a petition at change.org here. … Read the rest
Despite all it’s foibles Evernote remains one of my most used apps and being able to link to it from elsewhere, such the task app I use, adds enormous benefit.
At one point you used to be able to generate links that when clicked would open up in the desktop app, these started evernote://. At some point these were lost and the link generator in the client only returned http:// links meaning that the request opened in the web site app. Problem with this is that it is slower and I usually have to authenticate again to get access.
I … Read the rest
Trying to unpack a zip file this afternoon I kept coming across the error message “Error 1 – Operation not permitted.”. When I have had this before I have just switched from the default Archive app to Keka or Stuffit Expander and all has been good but for some reason that wasn’t working on this zip file.
Then I cam across the following tip on Stack Exchange. Drop into a terminal session, change to the directory with the zip file and run this command:
jar xvf <zip file name>
It worked a treat. Give it a go next time … Read the rest