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What problem are we trying to solve here?

Views is a Drupal tool for organising blocks of information that repeat: it’s great for rows in a table, items in a list, and panels in a grid. But our project needed something that didn’t neatly fit any of these models, and in a sense was a bit of all three. So, rather than try to bend the defaults to our will and wrangle with the inevitable compromises, the obvious thing to do was create our own option.

I struggled to find a straightforward tutorial on this, so this is how I went about it.

Recently, I was setting up a Debian server on an old laptop with the sole purpose of running Draytek's VigorConnect software to monitor and manage the network on my campus (which uses Draytek switches and wireless access points). There are plenty of cloud-based management AP controller options, but I wanted a local, self-hosted option because our internet has been patchy in the past, and because I don't want any monthly license fees.

There’s a bug in the latest version of Ubuntu, whereby the XFCE4 lock screen repeatedly crashes. It’s already been fixed upstream in version 4.18.0, but as yet a fix has yet to be backported to Ubuntu. The fix is fairly simple, so I applied it to the current Ubuntu package and rebuilt it. Below are notes on how to do that.

First, edit your apt sources list to enable source download. Make sure that /etc/apt/sources.list includes the following line, uncommented (leave the other lines unchanged):

For laptops that are usually plugged into mains power, it’s a good idea to either remove the battery (if it’s removable), or limit the maximum charge. This extends the battery life, as keeping a battery fully charged all the time is not good for it. Many Windows laptops come with power saving tools to configure this, but the means of doing so are not very standardised and I haven’t seen any graphical Linux tools to manage it.

I recently switched to using an LG Gram laptop. Current Linux kernels have a bug with this series of laptops, which cause the CPU load to spike when a USB-C device is attached, which includes the power supply. The CPU load spike in turn overheats the CPU, maxes out the fan, and reduces battery life. Apparently a fix is expected from the mainline kernel soon, but in the meantime, I needed a way of mitigating it.

At the moment I'm working on a project where I need to use Windows, but don't have access to the Windows subsystem for Linux. In order to get access to Linux command line tools, I've installed Cygwin. For some reason Cygwin frequently breaks after a system reboot. Clicking on the Cygwin terminal launcher from the start menu, or from within Windows Explorer, briefly flickers as the Cygwin terminal starts and then immediately closes. There are lots of posts about similar issues on online forums, which generally involve some complex reinstallation of Cygwin, or updating the launch shortcuts.

On one of the mail servers I maintain, we use the Dovecot Xapian FTS plugin (via apt package dovecot-fts-xapian) to provide full text search for our IMAP users. To keep the indexes up to date, we have a simple cron job:

In modern web development, JavaScript and CSS resources are frequently updated as development progresses. Also, if the versions of JavaScript and CSS resources that a client uses are out of sync, the display will break.

When domain registrations for the .uk TLD* were introduced in 2014, many in the technical community dismissed it as a cynical cash grab by Nominet. Since then, they seem to have been proven right, as evidenced in media coverage by The Register among others. However, several years ago I registered a .uk domain to use for personal emails, as much for the novelty as anything.

Today I noticed that my usual code editors had stopped displaying code in monospace. Here is a quick fix to get that working again.

Monospace fonts are a huge help when editing code, as they make it much simpler to follow the vertical alignment of code at a glance. This is useful for whitespace-agnostic languages such as JavaScript, PHP, C++ etc, and essential for whitespace-dependent languages such as Python.