Skip to main content

My Setup - updated

Reading through my old posts, I found it ironic that one of them was about how I was back to using Macs again for work. Ironic because after eight years of using a mac, I switched back to Windows about a year ago.

The reason was that my old mac laptop was getting long in the tooth, and I absolutely hated the new macbooks with their janky keyboard and stupid touchbar. Apparently the keyboard has gotten better since then... but I still feel that the macs are just too expensive for what you get.

So I switched to Windows, thinking I'd dual-boot with Linux to give me an appropriate development environment. I still spend most of my time at the command line or in vim anyways. But I decided to try out WSL in Windows just to see what it was all about. What a pleasant surprise!

I ended up getting a nice 13" gaming laptop that packs quite a punch in a lightweight package. Windows 10 is decent enough. It still has a lot of those annoying Windows quirks, but I can live with that.

For the last year or so I've been operating in Windows, running a LAMP stack under WSL with very few hiccups. I wonder what the next eight years will bring?

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Using FIle FIlters in FileZilla

Here's a handy tip for situations when you want to download a large number of files - but only of a certain type. For example, perhaps you want to download all the PHP files from a largish website, scattered through many subdirectories. Perhaps you're making a backup and don't want any image files, etc. FileZilla (still the best FTP in my opinion) has a handy feature called filename filters - located under the Edit menu. Here you can set various filters that filter out files based on their filename. Took me a minute to figure that out - you're saying show only PHP files, rather you're saying filter out files that do not have ".php" as their suffix. For some reason, that seems a little backwards to me, but whatever. It works quite well. You can also check whether the filter applies only to files, only to directories - or both. In this example, you'd want to check only files, as otherwise you won't see any directories unless they happen to end in...
1 comment
Read more

Great google article

Over on Maximum PC - there were a few things I didn't know you could do with the various Google apps. One is uploading files to google docs - any file. Which ties in well with my previous post about storing passwords - I uploaded a copy of my password safe file to google docs as a backup. Can't hurt, right? Also, I wasn't aware that you could set up forms in google docs that act as surveys, and then store the results in a google docs spreadsheet. This is a little alarming, as a decent amount of my work involves coding up custom surveys similar to this...
1 comment
Read more

Cleaning content from OpenOffice using Perl

Open office is great software for a number of things - I use it as my office software instead of paying a premium for Microsoft office. But one thing it's not so hot at is converting documents to clean HTML. And one of the main things I use it for is adding content to sites that clients send me in word files or excel spreadsheets. Of course, you can always cut and paste, but that loses a lot of formatting. For example, if the content uses a lot of italics, bold text, etc. it can be a huge pain to go back and put all that back in. Another common situation is a client sending some sort of tablular data in a spreadsheet - for example a list of events. It's the kind of data that can change a lot, and it also needs to be in a table with some decent formatting to be usable. Doing it manually is a lot of grunt work. But grunt work is what computers excel at, and I'm not very good at. So I've developed a number of perl scripts to help streamline this kind of job. I'll go ...
3 comments
Read more