This is a follow up to my How to get a Google server free forever post. In the comments selim13 let me know that Oracle was offering a similar deal but even better! The servers have twice the RAM that Google offers and more Hard Disk space plus 2 CPU cores compared with 1 on Google Cloud. And you get 10 TB outgoing traffic per month compared with 1 GB on Google! As for the 10 Mbps bandwidth limit,…
I’m writing this primarily for my own reference — so I don’t forget how to do this for next time, but if you find it useful then that’s cool too. Here’s what we’ll do. We’re gonna set up an API that when you access it, it sends back the following JSON message: { "message" : "Hello World!" } Simple right? OK! Note: I’ll be running all this on my Google Cloud Compute instance. You can learn how to…
I first heard you could get a free Virtual Private Server instance on the Google Compute Engine from a random person on Twitter. Cheers to the random dude who suggested rather snarkily over twitter that I should simply use a Google Compute f1-micro instance to periodically ping my scripts etc no I won't be dignifying that suggestion with a reply but yes I will be using that free service thank you…
GitHub profiles are now live! New GitHub profile now live ✨ https://t.co/bb8I1khju6 pic.twitter.com/cRFW8AKASl — Joshua Byrd (@phocks) July 11, 2020 I first saw this feature being teased a little while back in this post and I was pretty excited, but I’ve been waiting a while for it to become an actual thing. Finally they’re here! hey, so we heard ya & are trying out a thing where you CAN…
“In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.” – Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, the Whale Dear reader, Its’s been a while, I know. Time lately has seemed to bend and stretch and slip away, like a Titanic diamond into ocean depths. We skipped a month, didn’t we? Maybe two. How are you? How’ve we…
You may have noticed I’ve been doing a kind of a newsletter these past few months. The first three I have cross-posted from TinyLetter to my blog and here at Medium . From now on I will be just consolidating this on SubStack . Please subscribe for email updates. See ya there!
Originally posted via TinyLetter “And right now he was feeling the weight of all those losses, and the weight of the years that were behind him, and the weight of the ones that were still ahead, however many there might be — three or four, twenty or thirty, maybe more.” — Tom Perrotta Welcome to lockdown Double-click the folder above for your soundtrack to the newsletter. We are in lockdown. The…
Originally posted via TinyLetter You can’t get the truth. You can’t. There’s a larger truth, though: that you can’t harness the forces of the cosmos, but you may find somebody else. You may find another human being. That may be kind of corny and all of that, but that’s what it is: Love is the only truth we can hope to know, as human beings. That’s what Mulder and Scully found after nine years .…
Originally posted via TinyLetter Nostalgia— it’s delicate, but potent . In Greek nostalgia literally means “the pain from an old wound.” It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It let’s us travel the way a child travels—around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved. Welcome Inspired by Colin…
Hooks let you do more things with function components. You can use state with the useState() hook. eg. const [count, setCount] = useState(0) . Now count equals 0 . Update count with setCount(1) . Now count equals 1 and the component will update. You can also trigger side effects with the useEffect() hook. eg. useEffect(() => console.log(count), [count]) . Now it will console log every time count…
Put async in front of a function. eg. async function test() {} or const test = async () => {} Now you can use await inside that function to pause and wait for values that take their time getting back to us. Here’s an async function: // Define our async function and let it use await async function test () { const response = await fetch ( " https://api.github.com/ " ); // Wait for the Promise const…
Me again. We’ve had a baby. Things have been hectic, but good. I’m still software developing over at ABC News . I’ve written a few beginner coding articles over at DEV.to . I thought I might repost them here too, over the next few days. If you haven’t already, please check out Quoke and give it a star on GitHub . Thanks a bunch, and see you soon. Josh
I did another chart .
Ghost 2.0 is here! I’ve always liked Ghost as a blogging platform. It’s open source. It runs on Node.js. I even momentarily moved this blog over to Ghost for a little while back in the day. The only problem is it’s relatively hard to set up hosting for it. You could always just pay the monthly fee , but it’s pretty expensive (as far as blog hosting goes). But there is a way to set up a Ghost blog…
The other day my mate James asked me why it was (strangely) impossible to find my old band The Strange Attractors anywhere on the Internet. Especially for someone as extremely online™ as I was. Good question Jimmy! There was no Spotify back then. My old band sort of just slipped out of existence, except in memory. So I’ve uploaded the album to YouTube for everyone. Enjoy! On this record is me,…
It’s a little embarassing… but I’ve been on twitter dot com for over 11 years now. I saw and retweeted this the other day and you know what? Maybe those onions are right. It’s high time for a break. I’ve taken breaks before. Once for close to a whole month. I’m not sure how long this one will go for. I wonder how many books I’ll read. The last ten years or something pic.twitter.com/FiFZxSoKxr…
Time for a change. A while ago Jekyll released “Gem-based themes”. Gem-based themes make it easy for theme developers to make updates available to anyone who has the theme gem. When there’s an update, theme developers push the update to RubyGems. The goal of gem-based themes is to allow you to get all the benefits of a robust, continually updated theme without having all the theme’s files getting…
I was wowed by this tool called Sonic Pi a little while ago. It’s open source . It lets you write music in what looks like Ruby code. But I haven’t had a chance to properly play around with it or learn how to actually make any proper music with it… until now! I just went through a few of the tutorials and everything seems to make sense. Anyway it’s pretty easy to get started: just download the app…
Almost a year ago I registered a domain name, mostly because it was on special for $3.29. I’ve been wanting to build another quotes website for a long time now ever since my old website got domain-jacked and I decided to just let it stagnate. i registered a domain for $3.29 watch this space https://t.co/ueClvoOQF6 — Hillary was right (@phocks) July 23, 2017 I’ve been dragging my feet on the…
A few weeks ago at work we started doing a thing called Chart of the Day where we make a chart and publish it each day. It has been challenging but fun and a chance to learn more about data-journalism. I wanted to share some of my attempts anyway: 45 million Aussie bees buzz off to new Canadian home Winter is here but are things heating up in Australian bedrooms? Bitcoin is down 50 per cent, and…
Perhaps another attempt at updating this blog. It’s been over a year since I started working full-time as a developer and the time seems to slip away sometimes. We moved house back to my old stomping grounds as a kid. Not too far away from Mum’s house, which will be good when the baby arrives. A bit over 5 weeks ago I fell off my electric push-bike and fractured by foot. I have been on crutches…
But it wasn’t because I learnt React I’m done “learning” React. At the same time I’ll probably never by “done” learning React. This will be the third and final chapter in what might have been a much longer series had I not just a few months ago accepted a position working full-time as a front-end developer. You can read the first and second article if you want some additional perspective. A…
How to learn React the slow way Yep I’m still learning React. My previous article OK fine I’ll learn React gives a quick intro to me getting started with the JavaScript library all the kids are raving about these days. This post will look at the basic building blocks of a React app. It may also try to make sense of why someone would actually use React in the first place… maybe. The official React…
Or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the frontend This will be an ongoing series. It will focus on my journey in forcing myself to learn this seemingly rather unintuitive JavaScript library called React. I’ve been threatening to learn it for a while. Every time however I keep getting to a point and then I ask myself: “Why the hell am I learning this I don’t even like building frontend user…
Maybe I should start writing this more like a proper personal journal. If I just write for myself and disregard the opinions of others then I’m sure to increase my output and flow. It’s not like anyone is actually reading this anyway. Yesterday was a public holiday for Anzac Day. Today is my first Wednesday not at work in a while. Late last year I made a resolution for change for the year to come.…
Taking another look at Anchor the internet audio podcast app thing whatever it is. I remember having the idea a long time ago what if there was a service like Twitter but for audio? Anyway I started even doing a little SoundCloud account where I would record little updates on my phone and upload them. I don’t think anyone really ever listened to my inanities though, but it was kind of fun anyway.…
Showcases are pretty dumb tbh. But I’ve decided to start making one anyway. It’s pretty much the same thing as my other site QuoteSwagga . It’s hosted on Tumblr and uses a custom hacked html template. Still working on it obviously and I want to try to get people to submit their own sites and have them come up as showcased websites. Anyway here it is: SiteSwagga if you wanna chech it out.
You’ve been able to download your full Twitter archive for a few years now. This is great if you want to search locally through all your tweets. But what if you want to share your archive with the world? Luckily Github Pages offers free hosting for static web pages. Here’s how to quickly set this up. For now I’ll be using the desktop version of GitHub but I might add in the commandline process at…
Last week I tweeted this after hitting send on an email to my cofounder explaining that it might be best if we call it a day. fail fast fail early fail often fail cheap fail gently fail hard fail easy fail fair fail better fail forward then... fail at failing — inglourious phocks (@phocks) November 20, 2016 It has long been a mantra in the tech community apparently and for some reason it…
Okay that may have been a little hasty, and I’m sorry. I was temped by by some kind of Ghost who may have possessed me or something. While Ghost as a blogging platform seemed quite good I think that I would rather just stick with this GitHub hosted flat file blog for now instead of messing around with hosting my own Node.js server locally and having to look after and monitor that. Here are the few…
It is well overdue that I retire yet another blog. At least for now anyway. I might revive it at a later date with a new layout or something. See you, Space Cowboy.
Has it really been this long? So it seems I’ve been busy this past year. What have I been doing? I got a job. I got two jobs. My old work now has me back there part-time. A relief on the back pocket, as I’d been drifting and freelancing for so long that I thought I would float away. Earlier this year I was working for a company down on the Gold Coast for a while, helping to build a mobile app. It…
On the 1st of December 2014 I decided it was time to have a break from social media. Way back in 2007 I happened to stumble upon a little website called Twitter. setting up my twitter account — ıllıllı joshua byrd (@phocks) May 2, 2007 Soon afterwards I joined Facebook , later Instagram came along, and of course Tumblr , and then about a million more online enterprises vying for my time.…
After an inexplicable and inexcusable absence last year (actually it was mostly because I was over in Europe travelling and whatever), I have decided to return to NaNoWriMo this year to see if I still had it in me. Last year was the first time since 2004 that I’ve actually not written a novel in November! It was a bit strange. Anyway it’s day 5 and I’ve still not given up. I seem to even be on…
Here’s what 2.3 hours (from 14:53 to 17:13) of my mouse movements looked like yesterday while working and browsing the web. Track your own mouse art over at IOGraphica , and turn your mouse movements into great works of modern art!
You can tell a lot about the person from the music they listen to. Put your music device on shuffle and write the first 20 songs that play without skipping. Tag 10 people afterwards. Tagged by hellskittencouture :) So here’s the customary I never do these things but, the other day I was tagged by this pretty kitty on tumblr , and I thought what the hell. Quite surprised by what emerged in the end,…
We are going on tour starting Thursday to promote the new album . Jezza asked me for two or three sentences about one of the tracks we recorded in Berlin for a track by track , and I think I went a bit overboard. When Velociraptor’s European tour at last came to an end, three Raptors stayed behind, thus creating Velociraptor’s “Euro Division” or “EuroRaptors” for short. They wandered far and wide…
I had avoided it so well and for so long, but a little while ago I decided it was about time I started properly learning about database programming, if I was going to do anything really serious on the web in times like these. PHP is usually my default language of choice first up (which stands for PHP Hypertext Preprocessor) . I started a tutorial with the old mysql_connect() commands, but then…
Many years ago, at @kattyzee ’s housewarming party in Melbourne, I met this random guy and on the balcony somehow we got talking about Minecraft, the game about breaking and placing blocks , and fighting zombies in the night, or something like that. Anyway he ended up giving me his user details so I could give it a go. I tried, I really did, but I could never really get into it at all. Now years…
I had my solid state drive for only a few months before it decided to die on me. Notoriously unreliable these things were, as I found, and I lost my entire Windows installation. And in my drawer my SSD stayed, like a m3ssiah in his tomb or whatever. receipt for this failed SSD is nowhere to be found; don't suppose they'd accept the return without it.. #lifefail — ıllıllı j¤§ȟɥå βÿȑď…
*browsing tumblr like OMG that picture is moving* I’ve tried it a few times. Making GIFs in Photoshop is pretty hard. You have to import and trim the video, then deal with the timeline and frames and everything. And to do those sweet cinemagraph things you need to mess about with masking layers and often times it all gets a bit too much, and you cry. Also I understand there are a few sites online…
“It is one thing to mortify curiosity, another to conquer it.” ― Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Curiouser and curiouser, so said Alice as she telescoped to nine feet tall. She ate her cake and you can too! Ever wanted to blog like a hacker but didn’t want to mess around installing complicated command line ruby apps and all that junk? Well, you’re in luck!…
I never give you my pillow I only send you my invitations —The Beatles Second post, keeping it very brief as I have to be up tomorrow at 5am. Today, helping out at my old workplace in Windsor. Tomorrow is their annual fundraising Art Market event, and I have agreed to open at dawn—for purely nostalgic reasons. Helping with the setup today, a few hours heavy lifting the likes I hadn’t seen in a…
“Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” ― L. Frank Baum It’s been a long time since I rock ‘n’ rolled an actual blog. Back before tweeting into the void became the rage, and all those mindless hours reblogging obscenities on tumblr, the internet was a simpler place. I chronically chronicled a full year in the infancy of Blogger; I ran bleeding edge subversions of WordPress…