In my previous post, I talked about how after Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, I was giving more attention to Mastodon. Since then, I killed my twitter account, launched my own Mastodon instance, launched three new Mastodon bots (including a new one that goes live this morning), and converted Joe Travels to only post to Mastodon. The new bot is called Good Morning, Milwaukee! and I created it to test the limits of my ability to create a Mastodon bot. It gets sunset info, sunrise info, the weather, the news, and a live photo. For the news article, it randomly...
Where you can find me online
Last week, Elon Musk bought twitter. As soon as the deal was complete, he fired the chief executive, chief financial officer, and head of legal policy, trust, and safety. That last one was what worries me the most. I have been mirroring my tweets over on mastodon for a while now. I’m planning on staying on twitter for the moment but mastodon is a good escape hatch if things get really bad.
How to center all of the things in all the other things without CSS Grid or Flexbox
In this week’s blog post, I want to cover how to center divs inside of other divs horitontally, vertically, and both horizontally and vertically. You can do this with CSS Grid or Flexbox but I want to go over how to do it with standard CSS.
What is a CSS Reset?
The goal of a CSS reset is to reduce inconsistencies with things like line height, font sizes, and margins. Every browser defaults to different sizes and spacing and if you set a common baseline, you end up with a better end-product. A basic example would look like: body, div, h1,h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p,ul { margin: 0; padding: 0; } Andy Bell and Josh W. Comeau have pretty good, pre-packaged CSS resets but the OG might be the one by Eric A. Meyer. There is an argument that a CSS reset violates DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) but a good...
Notes on my trip to India and Nepal
At the end of December 2019, I was getting an itch to travel some more. I started browsing TourRadar and found a tour that hits both India and Nepal. In my 2020 Timecapsule post, I even talked about having found the tour but not booked it, yet. I was supposed to travel in April of 2020 but of course, COVID-19 ended up happening. When I read the “we don’t cover pandemics or civil wars” part of the two seperate travel insurance policies, I figured that I was out of luck but the company that I used offered offered a travel...
Hide My Ass VPN sucks for app testing
This past July, I found myself looking for a way to test a web application from behind “the great firewall of China” (aka Golden Shield). The problem is that I can’t test that something works in China if I’m not in China. My first thought was to use Nord VPN to connect to a VPN server in China but the closest that Nord offers is Hong Kong. I did a little light investigating and found that Hide My Ass VPN claims to have 4 servers in Beijing. After paying $59.88 for an account, I was ready to start testing. Unfortunatly,...
I got a flipper this summer and it is really neat!
Earlier this year while at CypherCon, I saw people using the Flipper Zero and immediately thought “Wow, that’s neat!”. Unfortunately, I missed their kickstarter and at the time I didn’t know when it would be available. On June 8th, they put out something on Twitter saying that they had a limited number of units available purely for sale inside of the US. I bit and ordered both a flipper and a WiFi dev board. The flipper arrived in July and while it can’t do as much as I thought it could do (out the gate), it is really neat! In...
Learning Laravel: Protected Routes and Authentication
Previously in this series, we have looked at how to install laravel, how laravel works, and how to deploy a laravel app. In today’s post, we are going to look at how you would protect a route so that the user would need to login in order to view a webpage.
Heroku eliminated free plans. Now, what?
Last week, Heroku announced that they were killing off their free teir. I have been using it off and on ever since a creating an OWASP Juice Shop instance on it at That Conference, a few years ago. Recently, I used it for my How to deploy a Laravel app example and an example on Laravel Socialite that I don’t seem to be able to get into a presentable shape. So, what’s next? You could keep using Heroku and just pay for it. Render still has a free tier and there are a lot ways it is better than Heroku. ...
Styling a webform with CSS Grid
Looking back, the recent Bootstrap vs Bulma post left me wondering why you really need either. Two years ago, I did a post on what CSS Grid is and I figured that you can consider this to be an continuation of that.