Adventures of a Technomancer

Overcoming 5MB of localStorage with LZW compression

In one part of my recent projects I was asked to build a web based interface for a student learning platform. The client had specified that the app was intended for use in regional Australia, where the internet is mostly slow or

Extracting .png files from a .bin sprite sheet

Here's a little script I wrote to extract a whole lot of .png files from a compiled sprite sheet. The python script reads the .bin file as binary, finds the starting header of a .png file (89504E47) and the footer (49454E44AE426082)

Printing @ 0.2mm & 100 microns

I bought a 0.2mm Micro Swiss nozzle for my 3D printer after the provided 0.4mm wasn't achieving the resolution I required for my up and coming keycap printing job, and I was having a painful time getting prints to come out

The Begärlig terrarium

In early October I was approached by a teacher and friend to help create a simple low-cost terrarium for high-school students taking biology 101 or what might eventually become biotech 101. The idea behind the request was to teach students about photosynthesis

The peculiar case of the malfunctioning keyboard

Have you ever thought to yourself ... > Gee, I wish I could focus more on my work and not get distracted by all these Slack and e-mail notifications and done something about it? By any chance did you install heyfocus [https://heyfocus.com/]? Because if

Adventures in WordPress Vol. 6 - Summary

Here we are, after a few changes to the hardware, software and network it's time to see if all the hard work has paid off. In summary the things I changed where; * Decreased apache mpm servers * Installed fail2ban *

Adventures in WordPress Vol. 5 - CDN

One of the last things to tackle for the moment is setting up and managing a CDN or Content Delivery Network. Before picking a CDN provider I needed to get an estimate on how much traffic the site was using. Luckily there's

Adventures in WordPress Vol. 4 - Hardware and Software

With the foundation (or 'Bedrock') of this upgrade complete it's time to see what some upgrades will do. The plan of attack is to change MySQL to MariaDB, upgrade PHP from 5.6 to 7.0 and upgrade the DO Droplet to something with

Adventures in WordPress Vol. 3 - Converting WordPress to Bedrock

> Bedrock is a modern WordPress stack that gets you started with the best development tools, practices, and project structure. This post will be a little light on descriptions as it's fairly straightforward to move an existing WordPress project into a Bedrock

CDPATH with zsh

Here's some awesome knowledge passed along from @bradleyfalzon [https://twitter.com/bradleyfalzon]. If you add CDPATH to ~/.zshrc you can tab complete into those directories without typing the full path. Very handy if you happen to run several vagrant instances or a verbose directory structure to mimic

Adventures in WordPress Vol. 2 - Analysis & Clean up

Nicole of Bitten By the Travel Bug [http://bittenbythetravelbug.com/] has reported some issues with her WordPress install but is unsure as to what is breaking. The only message she sees is; Error establishing a database connection So into the terminal I dive, ssh-ing into

Adventures in WordPress Vol. 1 - An Introduction

A good friend of mine, Nicole, runs a travel blog called Bitten By the Travel Bug [http://bittenbythetravelbug.com/] recently came to me with some WordPress troubles. Her WordPress install that deals with just under half a million hits per month is having a