TIS-100 is Alive
A colleague at work told me about a game he had been playing on Steam called TIS-100 which he had been particularly enjoying and using as a basis for competing…
Author Archives: stephen
Some Useful PHP Command Line Options
When you use a tool day in, day out, you take a lot of things for granted. Sometimes there are some really useful things available but because you don’t look,…
Guzzling HaveIBeenPwned with PHP
System and account breaches are happening all the time but fortunately there are services such as HaveIBeenPwned that scoop up the data that is released and provide a mechanism for people…
Which PHP Functions Should you Learn?
Most people know that PHP has a lot of functions but how many do you think there are? I spent a little while trying to work this out and after some judicious Googling,…
Using Editor Config to Help Maintain PSRs in PHP
There are two PHP-FIG PSRs (PHP Standards Recommendations) named PSR-1 and PSR-2 which make suggestions as to how you should present your PHP code. I won’t be going into why you should…
Udemy Votes
I recently bought a course from Udemy which marks a milestone for me. My regular blog reader will know that I am partial to Pluralsight, but single, individual courses? Nope….
Don’t be a Faker – Use fzaninotto/faker
I recently wanted to create a CSV file of user data: names, ids, some geospatial data etc, that kind of thing. That’s not a huge deal when the size of data…
Checking for Vulnerabilities with Composer
Composer is a brilliant tool and coupled with the thousands and thousands of packages you can install with it, it reduces how much work we have to do to develop…
Running (and Stopping) a Web Server with Symfony on Windows
Once you have your web application created in Symfony, it isn’t long before you learn you can run a server from the command line – that’s right, no need to install…
OneDrive Plus OneDrive Equals Lots of Space
Since Microsoft reduced the size of their free plan on OneDrive, I have felt a bit of pain. I had a Windows Phone (yes, there was at least one person!)…
Unzipping Multiple Zip Files to Folders in Linux
This is a quick tip for you if you find yourself in a situation in which you want to unzip a large number of zip files but do so into their…
Impaled by a PHP Open Tag
I was recently moving a WordPress blog and ran into a problem where a series of errors were appearing on screen in the target location. Back on the original site,…
Batch Converting Images From TIF to JPG with ImageMagick
This is a super quick tip about how to convert images quickly with ImageMagick. You might come across some web references telling you how to do this, but there are…
Adding a Mailchimp Plugin to WordPress
You often here people talking about their websites and the need to add a mailing list. There are lots of benefits – reaching interested parties better because people actually read…
Installing a Google Analytics Dashboard in WordPress
I’ve had Google Analytics running on my site now for some time but to be honest, I haven’t been too good at keeping an eye on it. Part of the…