@pwaring@fosstodon.org avatar

pwaring

@pwaring@fosstodon.org

UK Whovian, railway & politics geek and event organiser. Freelance PHP developer and Linux system administrator. He/him/Paul

Most toots deleted after 3 months

Book reviews and updates: https://ramblingreaders.org/user/pwaring

#NoSearch #NoBot #NoArchive #NoIndex #NoBridge

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pwaring, to cooking
@pwaring@fosstodon.org avatar

Third attempt at making soup tonight was a definite improvement on previous week's. Still a little bit watery but less bland as I added some mixed herbs (and lower in salt and ultra processed ingredients, which is the goal). Also I knew the discounters were cheaper than supermarkets but Lidl is currently about 50-60% the price of Tesco and Asda.

#cooking #soup

pwaring, to random
@pwaring@fosstodon.org avatar

Just exchanged some of my hard earned cash / ill gotten gains* for some mRNA, as the UK expert panel on vaccines doesn't think young people are worth protecting. Personally even if it reduces by risk by 10% it's probably a reasonable trade off.

*delete as applicable based on your feelings about earning money by writing PHP and MySQL

Edent, to random
@Edent@mastodon.social avatar

What's the lowest amount you've paid for something using a credit card?

Went to the market the other day and paid for a £2 punnet of fruit using a credit card. Guy was running Square on his phone, showed me the screen, I tapped, done.

I remember when everyone was £10 minimum for card payments, even in large shops. Now sole-traders can take instant payment for low value amounts. Brilliant!

pwaring,
@pwaring@fosstodon.org avatar

@Edent 70p for a single stop train journey (many years ago). Recently, £1 for an iced bun at the local market.

There are still small businesses in my area that won't take cards though.

vdaron, to ShareYourMusic
@vdaron@mastodon.social avatar

Help Mastodon, I'm lost !

I'm looking for a alternative to Confluence to store my team documentation.

My short list today is
@dokuwiki
@xwikiorg
@ngpixel (Wiki.js) and
@MkDocs

What are you using ? What would you recommend ?

Boost would be appreciated. Thanks ! 🙂

pwaring,
@pwaring@fosstodon.org avatar

@vdaron I use Google Docs because it's easy to collaborate and I can keep a local copy (using rclone) in case Google ever deletes my account.

In the past I've used Mediawiki, which was a reasonable self-hosted option and had useful plugins, e.g. we could put it behind LDAP authentication.

bagder, to random
@bagder@mastodon.social avatar

Please consider donating a few minutes of your time and answer the #curl user survey 2024:

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/05/14/curl-user-survey-2024/

pwaring,
@pwaring@fosstodon.org avatar

@bagder I've doing it at the moment and have a minor piece of feedback - the headings were a bit confusing, e.g. What kind of person are you? makes it look like a question I need to answer specifically, rather than a heading for a group of questions, because it's styled and written exactly like all the other questions (albeit with no options).

pwaring, to Fonts
@pwaring@fosstodon.org avatar

Getting Greek characters to display properly in a PDF generated from Markdown with Pandoc has caused some frustration today - here's what eventually worked for me:

  1. Use xelatex instead of pdflatex:

pandoc --pdf-engine=xelatex

  1. Use Linux Liberatine O as the font in your Markdown metadata:

mainfont: "Linux Libertine O"

I'm a bit sad that I can't use Palatino, which I think is a nicer font, but Linux Libertine 'just worked' and is free (as in beer and speech).

pwaring,
@pwaring@fosstodon.org avatar

@penguin42 I don't think so - the problem isn't that the characters don't look right, but that xelatex (and pdflatex) won't even compile because they don't recognise Περικλῆς.

pwaring,
@pwaring@fosstodon.org avatar

@drj Thanks. I think I might need to do some work to get it looking right in LaTeX (some words are really off, like 'introduction') but the Greek rendering is nicer than Linux Libertine.

MutoidPodcast, to random
@MutoidPodcast@mstdn.social avatar

Our episode on the Blake's 7 story 'Gambit' is out now!

Find it at...

Libsyn: mutoidpodcast.libsyn.com

iTunes/Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/blakes-7-the-mutoid-podcast/id1588566065

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2KiVr8sxzfzZmpv7GzpHU2

Audible: https://www.audible.co.uk/podcast/Blakes-7-The-Mutoid-Podcast/B08JK1L53C?action_code=ASSGB149080119000H&share_location=pdp

...and elsewhere!

pwaring,
@pwaring@fosstodon.org avatar

@MutoidPodcast Looking forward to hearing what you think of my favourite episode!

danieldurrans, to random
@danieldurrans@mastodon.me.uk avatar

What domain registrar is the "go to" these days?

People who run their own registrar need not answer this question ;)

pwaring,
@pwaring@fosstodon.org avatar

@danieldurrans I use @beasts and have done for many years. Their prices are reasonable and they don't use any bait and switch tactics like hiking up the price at renewal.

pwaring, to random
@pwaring@fosstodon.org avatar

Very clever PayPal fraud / phishing attempt: Someone creates a payment request against your account (which anyone can do I think) and then cancels it. In the message they say that it's a fraudulent transaction and to call PayPal on a given phone number. Because the notification email comes from PayPal, it passes DKIM etc. and looks genuine.

pwaring, to random
@pwaring@fosstodon.org avatar

Nice bit of feedback this evening: was told that people appreciate me suggesting all lots of films for the club (I suspect it's not that I think of more suggestions, but that I write them down immediately and post them to the group so that we add them to the spreadsheet. I like keeping lists...)

pwaring, to php
@pwaring@fosstodon.org avatar

Currently working on a rewrite of an old application (PHP 5.6, was probably written in an even earlier version) by building a new one in PHP 8.3 and migrating all the data across.

I don't usually recommend rewrites but occasionally it's more cost-effective than trying to fix really old code.

Even though I work with legacy code every day, the changes in 8.3 (and libraries that require it) make life so much nicer.

(I currently work with versions from 5.4 to 8.3)

#PHP #LegacyCode

pwaring,
@pwaring@fosstodon.org avatar

@Crell Attributes and constructor promotion are the two which have reduced boilerplate or made it clearer or have better integration with my IDE.

I have jumped from 7.4 to 8.3 (most projects I work on are either 7.x or 'latest stable') so haven't experienced every individual point release. I'm mainly interested in 7.4->8.3 than 7.4->8.0 (generally when I bump an existing project I'm fixing issues rather than refactoring).

pwaring, to random
@pwaring@fosstodon.org avatar

Every time I see a large organisation with a major IT problem (e.g. botched migration or data breach) I go and look at the 'leadership team' page on their website, and 9 times out of 10 there's no IT expertise. Today's examples include a Chief Technical Officer with no technical experience and one of the largest universities in the UK where the IT Director isn't part of the Senior Leadership Team.

pwaring,
@pwaring@fosstodon.org avatar

Incidentally, if anyone does run an organisation that wants a non-executive director with IT expertise, my rates are very reasonable. 😉

opdavies, to random
@opdavies@mastodon.social avatar

TODO

https://www.oliverdavies.uk/archive/2024/05/06/interactive-staging

#dev #SoftwareDevelopment #git

pwaring,
@pwaring@fosstodon.org avatar

@opdavies I remember @lornajane showing me (as part of a talk I think) git add -p years ago and it totally changed my development life for the better.

rigo, to random
@rigo@mamot.fr avatar

I have a meeting on MS Teams. If I try to join with various browsers on linux, the connection is blocked. iPhone works. Tried Windows virtual machine and, surprise, it also works.

Has someone else with a linux Desktop experienced blocking by Microsoft? It looks very fishy.

pwaring,
@pwaring@fosstodon.org avatar

@rigo I wouldn't say I've been blocked, but it's very picky about how it works. I could only get it running with Chromium outside of Incognito mode - anything else (Chromium Incognito or Firefox private browsing) didn't work, possibly due to me blocking third party cookies.

Stubbs, to php
@Stubbs@mastodon.me.uk avatar

types, does the built in server count as a CGI/fastCGI SAPI ? Trying to debug an error that simple says "File not found" with no trace of which fileis missing & I wanted to eqasily enable config option with .user.ini etc ...

pwaring,
@pwaring@fosstodon.org avatar

@Stubbs The easiest way to check is to echo php_sapi_name() or PHP_SAPI, which will give you the right answer for your setup and PHP version.

pwaring, to random
@pwaring@fosstodon.org avatar

Tried to find some vegetable stock for soup at the supermarket. 1g salt per portion. Well, tinned soup is >2g so I guess that’s an improvement. Oh wait, a single stock cube is 4 portions and therefore 4g of salt?! It’s worse than the tinned version! (I checked every single option on the shelves, the lowest was 0.6g per portion).

pwaring,
@pwaring@fosstodon.org avatar

@heapy yeah I’ve found loads online but none were in stock at the big Asda near me (they also didn’t have any small bottles of milk so I think I will be trying Tesco or Lidl tomorrow…)

pwaring,
@pwaring@fosstodon.org avatar

So it looks like in my town at least, Tesco is vastly superior to Asda in terms of both the variety of items and their availability (they had low salt stock, single pints of milk, and their Jaffa cake packs contain 11 cakes instead of 10, though their shelf prices are misleading as the most prominent price is sometimes only for Clubcard holders).

pwaring, to UKpolitics
@pwaring@fosstodon.org avatar

Interesting result in Greater Manchester mayoral election: Andy Burnham (nominally Labour but really running in his own name) gets 63.4% and the remainder split fairly evenly between the remaining parties. Next closest was 10.4% (Conservative) and the Lib Dems came last on 4.3% (behind Con, Green, Reform and an independent).

pwaring,
@pwaring@fosstodon.org avatar

@kinnison That was basically my feeling, and given that we switched to FPTP you couldn’t even pick your favourite as your first choice and then Burnham as your second.

mrdalesmith, to UKpolitics
@mrdalesmith@toot.community avatar

To be fair, Boris Johnson has previous for apparently not understanding laws he introduced.

pwaring,
@pwaring@fosstodon.org avatar

@mrdalesmith @mindfog That was my immediate reaction too. Anything that keeps him in the news and perpetuates the 'lovable buffoon' image.

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