I run a Tailscale network so that remote computers can access local services. I also have a Linux box at home on that network that advertises itself as an exit node and recently noticed that it wasn't working.

I had some time recently to sit down and work out what…

With the release of Junie, the AI coding agent by JetBrains, PhpStorm has entered the realm of agentic IDEs. Now, the PhpStorm IDE doesn’t just provide classical developer productivity tools and AI assistance features, but can also do massive amounts of work for PHP developers autonomously.

Unlike other coding…

I'm a member of a number of groups that publish a magazine, either paper-based or PDF. I prefer the PDF version, so download from the website and then move to the relevant directory.

Recently, I realised that I could use Hazel to do this for me.

To take one example,…

How to make emojis in PHP

You might want to use emojis both in your online comments and your PHP code. The later, mostly to hander the former, although PHP handles emojis gracefully. That are the methods to make emojis in PHP?

Straight in the code

PHP supports code savec…

On a server that I help to maintain, it has postfix installed for emailing results of cron jobs and other status updates. This was set up to relay through SendGrid as they had a 100 email per month plan and we send out significantly fewer than that.

Unfortunately, SendGrid are…

The PHP ecosystem is driven by passionate developers building tools that power everything from content management systems right the way through to testing libraries and database layers. Behind each project is a dedicated team working to modernize code, improve performance, and move the ecosystem forward.

The fact that many of…

I've had a few cases recently when I wanted to know the number of words that I had written. To do this, I've copied the text to BBEdit which displays the word count in its status bar, but this is a bit of a faff.

I finally sat down and…

Welcome to the May edition of PHP Annotated!

It’s been a minute since the last edition. Turns out time flies when you’re deep in foundation work, and the occasional existential debugging session. But we are back.

Here’s everything you might’ve missed in the PHP world, we dug through the noise…

On one of my servers here, I run a local Perforce P4 server for my son. He's a game developer and as they use P4 at work, he wanted to learn it in a sandbox and to have somewhere familiar to put his own work.

Installation onto Ubuntu was easy…

Earlier this year, Lorna spent some time updating rst2pdf's website to use Sphinx. The nice thing about Sphinx is that it uses restructuredText, the same as rst2pdf does, so we now stay in the same ecosystem.

While, we could have continued using Jekyll, it makes much more…