I had a requirement to export all my WordPress blog posts into a nicely formatted PDF file and so I looked at plugins that were available to do the job, of which there are a few. I tried some and none worked for me giving no output at all so I decided I would roll my own. Here’s how you can use that code to download your posts to PDF too. You can see an example of the output at the bottom of the post.
To do this required two things: accessing my posts via the WordPress API and … Read the rest
TL;DR the Day One local database is not encrypted.
After my last post on querying the Day One database, I was asked the question: what happens if you have your journals encrypted?
Before we get into that, let’s look at the Day One encryption options. You can turn on encryption on a journal-by-journal basis and it is on by default. This must have changed at some point as my original journal is not encrypted and newer ones are. Despite being able to choose which journals are encrypted and which aren’t selectively there is only one encryption key meaning that … Read the rest
In December 2022 LastPass announced to their users that they had been subject to a data breach. This led me to consider moving to another password manager which I did, settling on 1Password.
I transferred over 1,700 passwords and I calculated that changing an average of three a day was going to take me a year and a half to change them all. Well, it has been somewhat quicker than that as I have finished! In doing so I have reduced the number from 1,700 to 677.
I thought that it might be useful to know what I did … Read the rest
WARNING! Make a copy of your database before trying any of this!
I have been using the Day One journaling app to keep a daily personal diary for many years now. I have been recording my mundane thoughts there for over seven years and have transcribed five paper diaries too giving me a total of 14 year held there.
That’s currently 4,267 entries and counting of which I know very little about other than the text itself. I wanted more detail than Day One offered and had ideas of how I could mine my entries in … Read the rest
When doing any development on my laptop I use the very useful MAMP to give me an xAMP (Apache, MySQL & PHP) environment.
I recently upgraded and found that the free version offers two versions of PHP: 7.4.33 and 8.2.0 which would be fine but my production server is still on 8.1 and so I needed to match that. I could have upgraded to MAMP Pro but £90 just to switch to PHP 8.1 seemed a bit much, although, I do appreciate that by doing so I would be supporting the developers.
Having dominated the browser world and making developers lives a misery with Internet Explorer Microsoft are now adapting to a new world order by adopting a competitors browser.
There was a time when Internet Explorer (from now on referred to as IE) ruled the world when it came to browsing the web. Then along came Chrome (and to a lesser extent Firefox) and there was a mass exodus from IE. IE now only accounts for just over 6% of traffic while Chrome has 47%.
With Windows 10 Microsoft introduced Edge as it’s browser going forward but … Read the rest
I’ve had my MacBook Air for over five years now and by and large it is still performing pretty well. Certainly better after that time than any Windows machines I’ve had in the past would have done.
Just recently, though, I’d been having a performance problem which led me to do a root and branch check of my machine (turned out it was the Sophos Home Virus scanner). As part of this I stumbled upon the fact that Alfred can do text expansion and this left me to wonder whether it was worth having two programs sat in the background … Read the rest
Everyone knows that looking good in your social media profile pictures is important and nowhere more so than on LinkedIn. But how do you know what is the best picture to use? Well that is where online service photofeeler comes in.
Photofeeler attempts to take some of the guesswork out of selecting the optimum picture by crowdsourcing views on pictures you upload aggregating the responses to give you a score.
You start by uploading a picture that you are interested in and select a category that this would be used with, so business or social. This is then available to … Read the rest
It really pains me to say this but I am worried about the longevity of Evernote, a tool that I have been using for many, many years. So long in fact that I now have well over 30,000 notes stored in it.
Evernote co-founder Phil Libin always said that his aim was to create a “100-year startup” meaning that it’s “a company that’s around in 100 years, which means Evernote’s product needs to be durable.” Right now I cannot see them achieving that aim. Of course that aim could have been ditched when Libin left in 2016.
Why have … Read the rest
I have been starting on a side project with my son this week where I am developing a small web app for him. He has left home a while ago so we needed to find a way to collaborate on the project without too much effort and without interfering with our day jobs. So, for example, we went through the requirements while travelling on a train up to London.
When it comes to testing and bug tracking we again needed something quick and simple. In the past I have used both The Bug Genie for work and Trello for smaller … Read the rest