Everyone is talking about the launch of the iPhone 15 as an important update, which is well overdue, as it will include that USB-C connector and ditch that old Lightning connector. Lightning isn't capable of much by comparison and it's also very easy to break compared with Type C.
That said, there is one reason Apple has avoided it for now - and that's because they are greedy and want profit from us. They make more when your Lightning cable breaks. They make more when you need a new type of Lightning cable that connects to your MacBook Pro via USB-C.
There is a lot of speculation that the iPhone 15 launch will be the one that introduces USB-C to the iPhone. This is great and all, but there's something that needs to be thought through at the same time - the other devices. If Apple goes and ditches Lightning on the iPhone, what about AirPods, AirPods Pro, and AirPods Max? A lot of people are going to be annoyed with using dongles with their devices so they'll continue to use Apple's proprietary Lightning connector. For me, it's just frustrating that I will still have Lightning-based devices to charge when I update my iPhone which means when I go away I will still need to have two chargers with me.
Over the last few days, I have been working on and off with my new project, The Teacher Organiser. The main focus of the recent development has been on the planning side of things. This was the primary goal for a few reasons, but perhaps the most obvious answer is that it was already made.
The planner itself, as well as the timetable, are built upon my own planner and timetable hosted on my own website. This meant that bringing it across was going to be a fairly easy task since I had actually made my own version incredibly portable. But the version of the planner on The Teacher Organiser needs to be very diverse and flexible, so it needed a few changes. As a result, the version on The Teacher Organiser has much more than the one on my website.
It's still not perfect, but it's now fully usable. And users can now sign up as well!
Seriously, forget the old version of 'The Teaching Organiser', the new version is miles better!
The new version of The Teaching Organiser no longer focuses solely on reporting and is now set up for timetable creation. The new version is so fast, smooth and works well (the old version did too actually).
Version 2 is designed with a much more dynamic, app-like look. Several features are going to be built into the new version. For now, I'll provide a little taster of what it's new timetable engine (which is built using the same code as the one I built a year ago for myself):
Meta's Twitter competitor, Threads, goes live in just over five minutes! I'm really looking forward to seeing what this brings! Go to threads.net to see it when it goes live!
After buying my HP EliteBook in December of 2022, I vowed never to buy another desktop computer. Now I can say that this is how I intend to be in the future. My desktop was a large machine, and whilst I loved all the space, the fact I had 10 drive spaces in it and lots of airflow, I don't see any need for any of that any more.
Most of the time my gaming is light enough that my integrated graphics are sufficient for running the games I play, but for those times when I need a better GPU, I've got a nice eGPU.
My next laptop will be the Framework laptop I nearly bought when I bought the EliteBook.
Unfortunately, I've decided against moving to a dedicated server just now.
After a little discussion with the rest of the team at Jambour Digital, we all decided it would be better to postpone the move for another few months.
However, by having a dedicated server setup, I realised how easily I could write a script to set up the new server, so that's exactly what I did. The script automates the whole process, to the point where it loads all of the SQL into the databases, sets up the needed applications and starts HTTPd.
To setup the new VPS, all I needed to do was run the script.
Moving away from the dedicated server is a sad moment for me, as I was so close to getting it perfect, but the fact that the connection is unreliable (due to not being a business broadband connection) I could not continue to use it.
It was one year ago I was offered the amazing job I am in. Tuesday 24th of May 2022 was the day I got the job I always wanted to do!
I have spent a lot of my personal free time building a company which has achieved a lot, brings in a bit of revenue for myself and provides an excellent service for its clients. Still, I have decided that I cannot sustain the level of commitment I have provided over the last few years as the Executive Officer of the company.
Over the last few years, despite not actually being the person in charge of customer relations it has been me that has had to carry out most of the meetings and much more. In a small company with only three members, it may seem silly to delegate tasks like this but if we don't do this I have realised I end up doing everything which means that I cannot focus on teaching which is my primary career (and I work a lot whilst I am at home on my teaching content).
In July at our annual meeting I will step down as the Executive Officer and hand most of the work I do over to Mike who is currently in charge of Marketing. I will maintain the role of Technical Officer in order to continue utilising my server management and development skills to keep the company's infrastructure stable.
Whilst the title of this post is somewhat humourous, the topic of this post is far from that.
Recently several prominent YouTube channels such as Paul Hibbert and Linus Tech Tips have experienced account shutdowns and experiencing hacking of their channels.
Both channels experienced similar situations with the theft of a cookie being all that was needed to get into the website. And it makes sense too. In the past, I have used session IDs to switch between computers whilst keeping my session the same. So really all that is needed to get into a website without needing to authenticate is that cookie. Ultimately this is why I don't allow websites to do this on my server. However, it does still leave security issues with other websites.
What actually happens in these attacks is basically the user logs into the website as normal, and a cookie is transferred to the user's computer. The cookie is sent back to the web server each time the client requests something, identifying who they are. This session is stored on the server with the ID as defined in the cookie and contains information about who they are - it's fairly simple. But if a hacker obtains this ID, they can put it into their own browsers and they too can pretend to be logged in as the user.
As I have a control tablet at the entrance to my house (and plan to add one to my bedroom) my smart home needs to be constantly improved to make it functional and useful.
One of the latest things that I have managed to do is add information about bin collection to my tablet (not the easiest thing to do since my council doesn't use JSON data for this so instead I needed to use XPath to read the HTML of the page and find the data manually, translate it to JSON and read it using my Home Assistant installation). Currently, all that happens with this is it displays a warning at the top of the tablet as to what bins (if any) are to be put out that day.
Anyway, the following is a bunch of screenshots from my improved smart home.
