One of my fiscal year goals at work is to update our starter app. When I first started I was tasked with updating the existing app from Laravel 5.1 to 5.5. That was almost four years ago. At the time I was still pretty new to Laravel and hadn't known about some of the other dependencies out there that would make my job easier, dependencies such as Orchid, Backpack, Laravel permissions, Voyager, etc. Please note that this is not a how-to guide and therefore I'm not going to go through the process of installing and setup of each project.

Prerequisites

• Git
• lando
  • System Requirements
  • Releases

If you're on a Mac you can install Lando via Brew. However, it's recommended that you download the PKG file from the project's github Releases page.

How to fix an out of sync composer.lock file when using Drupal + Lando

A guide that walks a person through rescuing a system from an unrepairable boot partition.

Sometimes, for whatever reason, you may want to remove the encryption from a device. Perhaps you didn't think a device needed to be encrypted initially.

When setting up a RAID array I have always opted for either RAID 5 for arrays with less than five drives or RAID 6 when there are more than five. It wasn't until recently that I noticed how much of a penalty there is for running a RAID 6, six IOPs while the penalty for RAID 5 is four IOPs. When a drive has failed in one of my RAID 6 arrays, I never saw the rebuild speed get above 75MiB/s even though the failed drive was capable of 150MiB/s. For smaller arrays, that may not be such a big deal. When it's a 16TiB array it will take about two and a half days to rebuild.

Recently, I've been having some issues with dd-wrt on my Linksys wrt-1200ac router. I'm not certain if there is a bug with the firmware or if there is something wrong with the router itself. After flashing the router, it would work great anywhere between a day to a week before not being able to access the internet or becomes unresponsive. The only way that I was able to fix it was by doing a factory restore, which means I had to reconfigure my router. The first time wasn't so bad, but it got old pretty quick.

In cloning my PS3 and PS4 hard drives using the dd command, and using the status=progress I was only able to see how much has been transferred, how long the command has been running, and the speed. The only thing that was missing was a estimate of how long it would take to complete. Additionally, a progress bar would have been nice. While waiting for the process to complete I looked for a tool that would provide what I was missing. The only tool that I found that is still maintained is pv (Pipe Viewer).

Back in 2008, I purchased a Sony PS3 along with my 40" Samsung TV. I was lucky to get a model that is able to play PSX and PS2 games so I definitely want to hold on to this for as long as I can. Unfortunately, the 80GB hard drive has become rather limited and would like to free myself of that constraint. Over the years I have accumulated various computer parts and one of them was a 256GB OCZ Agility 4 SSD, so I decided to put it to use.

What is Duplicity?

Duplicity is a command line tool used for incremental backups to local or remote storage, which supports Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud, Dropbox, Google Docs, rsync, ssh, FTP, FTPS, and webdav.

Prerequisites

• gpg
• swaks
• duplicity
• duply (optional)

Generating GPG Keys

Although duplicity uses GPG by default, this can be skipped by adding the --no-encryption option to the command.