Age of Empires II slow frame rates
One of my favourite games is Age of Empires II, which was re-released on Steam a few years ago with an expansion pack and changes to make it work on…
Managing tax on self-employment income
One of the biggest changes when you become self-employed is the fact that your tax isn't deducted at source; instead you have to file a tax return each year and…
Automating WordPress updates with wp-cli
For some time it's been possible to automatically update the core of WordPress, ensuring that you get the latest security and bug fixes promptly. However, this functionality hasn't been extended…
Freelancing mistakes to avoid
Over the course of the past few years as a freelancer I've made, and learned from, a number of mistakes. I cover these in my Life as a coin-operated monkey…
Work/life balance lessons
Over the course of 2018 I made a number of tweaks to how I work in order to try and obtain a better work/life balance. Most of them have been…
Security support for PHP 5 ends this year
If you have an application or hosting solution which was set up several years ago, there's a reasonable chance that you are still running PHP 5. Security support for 5.6,…
Opening winmail.dat files from Outlook attachments
Occasionally I receive emails from people which have a single attachment named winmail.dat. After a bit of searching online, it turns out that Microsoft Outlook, depending on how it is…
Git commits made directly to branch
Sometimes in Git I'll need to synchronise a long-lived feature branch with master to reduce the likelihood of merge conflicts at a later date. One of the problems with doing…
Advice from a computer science graduate
In the coming weeks there will be an influx of new students starting their computer science degrees. I was in that situation 15 years ago when I started at the…
Ubuntu security podcast
The Ubuntu security team have recently started the Ubuntu Security Podcast. Released every week and lasting around 10 minutes, the podcast features a round-up of the Ubuntu security news. It's…