When setting up a local development environment, sometimes you want to actually send real email. If you’re using WordPress, you can install a plugin to run your mail through an SMTP server. But if you’re running anything through the command line or you want to use the built-in PHP mail() function for any reason, then it’s […]
Wildcard Subdomains For Local Development – 2017 Update
For years I’ve been using wildcard subdomains for local development rather than having to set up virtual hosts every time I want to spin up a new site. I was using a combination of nginx and dnsmasq to bring it all together. I’d use dnsmaq to make all calls to any subdomain on my development […]
How To Record Your Screen And Webcam At The Same Time On Ubuntu
There are plenty of screen recording options for Ubuntu. I use Simple Screen Recorder, but there are many others. But none of them have a built-in way of getting a little window that shows you (like from your webcam) in the video. Sometimes this is called the “picture in picture” effect. The good news is, […]
How To Record Phone Calls With Audacity on Ubuntu
I’ve seen several tutorials on how to record phone calls with Audacity, but they all seem to be for using Audacity on Windows or Mac. So, here’s how you do it on Ubuntu. I’m using Ubuntu 16.04. It’s not all that hard once you see how it works. The complicating factor is that you want […]
How To Launch Google Apps With Keyboard Shortcuts
One of the things I really like about using Chrome on Linux is the ability to turn any website into a Desktop-ish App. It’s technically still a web app, but it opens in its own window without a location bar or any of the other decorations you normally see in a web browser. So it looks […]
Texpander – Text Expander For Linux
I’ve been using Ubuntu for a long time and have been lamenting the sad state of autokey and it’s relationship with Firefox and Thunderbird. Autokey is also a little more than I even need. I just want a quick way to expand a text snippet into a longer chunk of text. For example, I want […]
Add Self-Signed SSL Cert To cURL
In an earlier post we talked about adding a self-signed SSL certificate to Google Chrome so that you can use SSL certificates on your local development machine. This solves the problem of browsing around on your local site, but it doesn’t solve the issue of making cURL calls. For example, if your site is running […]
Add Self-Signed SSL To Google Chrome on Ubuntu 16.04
There are plenty of times when you are working on a website that uses SSL and you need to work on that site locally in your own development environment. Usually you just set things up not to run on SSL locally because it’s generally less trouble than getting SSL working on your local web server. […]
Making Playlists for SanDisk Clip Sport in Linux
I got a SanDisk Clip Sport the other day and became exceedingly vexed by my inability to get an ordered playlist working. I’m using Ubuntu, and here’s the secret that finally got things going.
Moving Windows In Ubuntu
I’ve been using Ubuntu on my laptop for the past few weeks and have found a few handy tips for flinging windows around. Here are a few keyboard shortcuts as well as some custom little commands that use wmctrl to do some custom window sizes and locations.
