Mountain Of Code

Brendt recently issued a challenge to the PHP community: The goal of this challenge is to parse 100 million rows of data with PHP, as efficiently as possible.

I always set Firefox to 'always ask you where to save files'.

I have a number of ESP32-based projects which are battery+solar-powered.

Ever wanted to 'see' WiFi?

I've designed a number of 3D models since I got a 3D printer and discovered OpenSCAD.

After the success of my last batch of cider, I wanted to make some more.

When using complex shapes in OpenSCAD I find it's easiest to draw/find an image of the shape I want and then use surface() to convert the image to a 3D shape.

If you ever implement 6-digit style MFA don't use multiple inputs.

Most non-trivial PHP projects will use Composer to pull in dependencies.

I'm working on a project where I need to generate transparent images of OpenSCAD models.

I built my main PC back in... rummages through years of order history... 2014!

The CSS media query prefers-reduced-motion has been around for years, it indicates to a website that the user would rather not see animations.

PHP 8.4 added support for property asymmetric visibility.

I noticed while writing this post that this blog is 10 years old, it's been quiet for much of that time, but that quiet spell ended this year.

Have you ever wondered how the 'randomart' you see when creating an SSH key is generated?

LLMs are statistical models, so what happens when you ask for something random?

Bloom filters are very cool.

Today I wanted to get into a Pimoroni Enviro board (I love these) to reconfigure it.

Quite a while ago I discovered that the Dorset & Wiltshire fire and rescue website had a feed of the latest incidents.

This article came across my feeds recently, it talks about Laravel's Conditionable trait which in their words: The Conditionable trait enables you to conditionally execute operations on an object using a fluent interface.

Composer is the goto way of installing third party code into PHP projects.

It's apple season, also known as cider season.

I use Obsidian most days for all sorts of different things from project tracking to data collection to general note-taking.

I've been using ForRunners to track my runs for a little while, it did everything I needed and was beautifully simple.

Laravel's pluck method recently got closure support in PR #56188.

I've used Kagi assistant for a while and love it; however, there is one small thing which I found myself missing: the ability to see the total cost of a conversation, and I wasn't alone.

Typically, when you click and drag in a terminal, it selects all the characters between the start position and the end wrapping over each line.

People should never need to be concerned with date formats; they shouldn't even be aware that a date has been 'formatted'.

I often scan through Hackernews to see what the latest is and hacking and security posts will often get my attention.

In all the file browsers I've used across various flavours of Ubuntu there has been a 'Recent files' tab, it's useful to quickly get at a file I just downloaded or saved from another application.

I run Firefox nightly on both my desktop and my phone, I like to live on the edge.

I've been writing PHP for over 15 years at this point, and not once have I ever had a need to use the logical xor operator, until now!

...across 4 days, totalling 24 km, 139 minutes and burning over 2000 kcal.

We have a porch at the back of our house, it's glass on three sides and predominately faces south, we use it as a mini greenhouse.

I built a new PC after the COVID pandemic when I started working from home some days.

I've been using AI at home and at work pretty much daily since Mar 2025, I've consumed over 16M tokens to date.

I have a pH probe in my aquarium, ever since it was installed it's shown a drop of about 0.3 when the lights came on and jumped back again when they went off.

Accuracy is a measure of how much detail there is, precision is a measure of how close to the truth something is.

I recently got fed up with running out of RAM on my dev machine, it had 16GB, but that doesn't seem to go very far any more.

I have an idea for a project, it's a visual simulation of sorts.

Did you know it's possible to flush the cache of public DNS providers?

Sometimes I want a quick and simple way to know how long a block of code took to run.

Recently I was adding placeholder properties to a number of form fields across a site built using Filament PHP and thought that there must be a better way than copy-pasting everywhere.

Over the last couple of years I have come to use the /tmp directory on a daily basis.

I love automation!

Nose $fn=80; angle=60; //deg sparDiameter=4; nodeHeight=sparDiameter; module spars() { translate([0,0,0]) rotate([90,0,0]) cylinder(d=sparDiameter,h=100); rotate([0,0,angle]) translate([2,-4,0]) rotate([90,0,0]) cylinder(d=sparDiameter,h=100);

I really like HTML custom elements AKA web components and don't use them enough.

I came across this article about content negotiation in Laravel today.

This is part of a series of posts which gives a surface level explanation of a topic.