Category: Technology

  • Docbook — failed to load external entity

    How I fixed the ‘failed to load external entity “http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.5/docbookx.dtd”‘ error — install ‘docbook-xml’ ?!?

  • BlueSkys ahead?

    Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard of the latest “Twitter Alternative” BlueSky Social, and it’s AT Protocol — I’ve set off to understand what the latest social media hype was about.

  • php-ast on PHP 8.2 (Windows)

    php-ast by nikic exposes the abstract syntax tree generated by PHP 7 and 8 — nikic currently only provides pre-built Windows DLLs up to PHP v8.1, and building it yourself can be a minor hassle.

  • A quick(ish) fix for expired GPG repo keys

    Fixing expired GPG repo keys in one line (normally)….

  • Fixing a faulty Roomba charger

    Our Roomba (a old 533 pet series) stopped charging after a particularly nasty lightning storm and blackout – some initial testing, and guess work, narrowed the problem down to the charger and thankfully not the Roomba itself.

  • Hosted on the Cloud(flare)

    I’m a bit of a Cloudflare fangirl. All my sites, personal and business, have sat behind Cloudflare for a long time. I tend to convert any new clients or employers to using them for DNS at the very least.

  • Synapse 3 doesn’t open on Windows 10

    So I recently brought a Razer Cynosa Lite, a low-ish end computer keyboard, as a bit of a stopgap to fill the void before I find the time to hand wire a nice QMK-compatible.. Razer keyboards come with a bit of software called Synapse 3 – on plugging the keyboard in, the software installs. Everything…

  • Issues with Google Pixel 3 XL’s WiFi and Bluetooth

    I’d recently been having some issues with my Google Pixel 3XL – I’ve had the phone a while, so it’s fairly common for some little issues to crop up nearing the end of a contract (just as the warranty expires of course..) This however was a bit of a shitty one. The bluetooth and WiFi…

  • Using PHP 8 with Laragon

    Laragon is local WAMP development server (and a much better one than XAMMP..) – I use it for most of my development work. Recently I’ve moved a couple of my ongoing projects over to PHP 8, and was caught out slightly by some unexpected behaviour. Laragon makes it pretty easy to add a new PHP/Apache…

  • How to rotate the WaveShare WS170120 HDMI/USB touchscreen on a Raspberry Pi 4

    We’re developing a new product at work, and used a WaveShare WS170120 7″ HDMI/USB touchscreen and a Raspberry Pi 4 during the control prototyping. The 7″ touchscreen had to be rotated by 90 degrees, and working out how to do this wasn’t that straightforward, so I thought I’d publish it just in case it helps…