Next evolution of site

It was time to take a fresh look at this blog, the template I used had too many connections to third party components that were capable of tracking you and me. I didn’t like it so I switched to a cleaner setup, edited all the third party content out of it. Hosting the fonts locally and this is the current result, but still not 100% happy with the looks so there might be some tweaks coming along.

Signal exposes Instagram ad targeting?

You got to love Signal and the people behind it. After first exposing Cellebrite as a company which steals software and produces crappy software themselves. This time they exposed the amount of data that companies can use in the Facebook universe to target you via their advertisement platform. They ran advertisements that shows you which data they have on you. It shows a detailed amount and Signal was quickly shutdown by Instagram when they found out the ads they were running.

No more iPhone mini?

My first iPhone was a 4s and I loved them ever since. Got a 6 and then an 8, the next upgrade was difficult. I loved the form factor and size of the 4, 5 and 6. The 8 had become slightly larger but was thinner. Newer iPhones only seemed to get bigger and bigger which was hard to accept. Luckily the SE stayed small so if my iPhone should fail I could get that one.

20 years of Mac OSX

Twenty years ago the first official release of Mac OSX became available: News article. I still remember my own personal switch to OSX. Till then I was still using Windows for day to day computing and Linux and Solaris for tinkering. OSX brought the best of those two worlds together for me, easy day to day computing with usable software in a nice GUI and all the Unix I could handle.

Goodbye DIYMacServer

It was inevitable, the domain and blog that is hosted weren’t used or updated since 2013. It was only there as a statue or remembrance of all the work and effort thrown in by myself an others who helped. Every year when I got an email from my domain registrar to fully use it made me reach out to Brian Stucky of Macminicolo.net. He was a supporter of the site and for a long time he hosted one of my Mac Mini’s in his datacenter.

Using Vagrant next steps

We’ll I’ve succeeded in getting a functional box up and running for my Laravel project. First tested it on a local VM using Virtualbox, Vagrant and a bunch of shell scripts which I compiled from a lot of other similar efforts found on the internet. It stil lrequired a lot of trial and effort to get it where it is now. A functioning box which will run my project. It will deploy the code from a git repository and will use a previous database backup to initiate the database.

Using Vagrant to deploy Laravel box

I’ve building a personal project in Laravel for maintaining my bookmarks. I’ve been toying with this for some time and I’m now ready enough to deploy it to VPS somewhere. This so I can open it up for beta testing by others then me myself. But how to deploy in a repeatable fashion that is easy. I could use ready made setups, like Envoyer, but they all cost money to keep them running and for a simple hobby project I find this overkill.