Adding your own resources to Scratch

April 16, 2025 | Comment

Scratch comes with a built-in library of resources that you can use in projects but they only go so far. Fortunately, it is possible to add your own backgrounds, sprites and sounds to your projects.

In this short guide we are going to be looking at how to search for and find resources such as images and sounds you or your child can use in your Scratch projects. 

You can do this with Google but we are going to be using DuckDuckGo.

What is DuckDuckGo?

DuckDuckGo is a simple and private search engine that helps you find information on … Read the rest

Evernote Rules

April 1, 2025 | Comment

I have been an avid user of Evernote since July 2008 and have amassed over 53,000 notes. Over those 16 years, I have seen many changes to both Evernote the company and the client itself. The recent purchase by Bending Spoons had the potential to make or break the company but has, in my opinion, been overwhelmingly positive for Evernote (despite what the naysayers on Reddit say!).

Introducing Evernote Rules

One feature I have wanted Evernote to have is some form of automation that manipulates notes based on rules – very similar to the rules available in Outlook. After … Read the rest

What Should I Watch Next?

March 1, 2025 | Comment

Back last December I wrote about a project that I had written called What Should I Play Next? where it would randomly choose something from my record collection to play. This month’s project, part of my 👨‍💻12 Apps in 12 Months challenge, is the visual equivalent.

The Plex API

When I want to watch a film I am sometimes constrained by the amount of time I have and usually have some feeling of the genre I want so I wanted something that catered for that plus could also exclude things that I had watched before.

While I do subscribe to … Read the rest

Using php2Bluesky without Composer post v2.0.14

February 23, 2025 | Comment

In January I wrote about Using php2Bluesky without Composer for those that wanted to take this approach. Since then I have updated the code so that it conforms to PSR-4 for loading with Composer. This in turn has a knock-on effect for those loading manually. The rest of this article explains how loading now needs to take place.

Multiple Files

Prior to v2.0.14 all the code was contained within a single file called functions.php. The naming reflected the history of the library which was originally developed to be included as part of a larger project. When I spun it out … Read the rest

Simple WordPress Post Stats

February 1, 2025 | 2 comments

Every year, over on my personal blog, I write a round-up post covering what I have done during the year. This includes books read, films watched steps taken etc. What it has never covered are my creative endeavours which would be my developments over at Github and my blog posts.

Where are the WordPress Stats?

I sort of assumed that there would be stacks of stats in the WordPress dashboard but no if you want that you have to install Jetpack and get the nagging messages asking you to upgrade. These stats are very similar to what you … Read the rest

👨‍💻12 Apps in 12 Months

January 28, 2025 | Comment

It seems to be en vouge at the moment to challenge yourself to develop an application a month and do so in public. These apps tend to be AI driven, very slick, with their own landing pages etc. I wanted to stretch myself this year and increase the cadence of my development and so a 12 Apps in 12 Months challenge sounded like a good idea.

But not like that!

While a challenge seemed like a good idea, I didn’t want to be producing apps just for the sake of it. I felt that for it to be worthwhile, I … Read the rest

Using php2Bluesky without Composer

January 26, 2025 | 1 comment

I have been asked how to use my php2Bluesky library without having to install it using Composer. Given that this is a common request I thought that I would document it here.

Pros and Cons of Composer

Before we get into the specifics of using php2Bluesky without Composer let’s take a quick look at the pros and cons of using Composer. Feel free to skip this bit and go straight to how to use php2Bluesky without Composer!

Using Composer to install a package has several advantages over manually downloading the code and requiring it. Composer automates dependency management, … Read the rest

Preparing and Adding a new Project to git

January 15, 2025 | Comment

I always struggle when I am ready to push my first commit to a new repository and always end up with errors, so I thought I would document the process here as an aide memoir for me and, hopefully, others will find it useful too.

Prerequisites

These instructions are for when you have already got a folder of code that you want to commit for the first time to git. The first thing to do is to create and setup your .gitignore file. This tells git which files to exclude when uploading. Things to include here are config files with … Read the rest

Introducing v2 of php2Bluesky

January 6, 2025 | Comment

There was an issue raised recently on my php2Bluesky library pointing out that the dimensions of images weren’t being passed and so they weren’t being displayed on Bluesky correctly. On investigation, I found this to be correct, but because of the way the code was currently implemented, I couldn’t fix it. The library needed to have control of the upload of images in order to get the dimensions and currently that wasn’t the case.

Breaking Changes Incoming

The history of php2Bluesky is that it started as a series of functions in a larger side project I was working on. I … Read the rest

jolpica2ergast F1 Database Updater

January 2, 2025 | 1 comment

In addition to this blog and my personal blog I also maintain a Williams Racing fan site at https://williamsdb.com. In fact, this is my longest running site having first gone live on 6th May 1996. As you can imagine this has gone through a number of itterations over the years and the latest makes extensive use of a results database called Ergast.

And then it was gone

About a year ago the maintainer of Ergast announced that he was going to discontinue updating it at the end of 2024. To be honest, I don’t blame him as it … Read the rest