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The NatWest Card Reader, part deux (I didn’t change banks)

My last post on the subject (a fraction over 10 years ago!) garnered a lot of comments for what was essentially just a rant, and it turned out to be somewhat unfounded and sensationalistic.

I’m still with NatWest, their online banking is still very good and their app is the best, and I’ve rarely had to use the card reader and not been able to find one.

What has surprised me is that NatWest still haven’t improved the crazy wastefulness of the packaging.
There are still many layers of unnecessary cardboard and plastic, though the bubble wrap is gone.
Interestingly, the new card reader isn’t branded.

 

I lost my old card reader a while ago, and have been using a Barclays one instead, since they’re functionally the same. I prefer the weight and layout of the Barclays one, but it recently decided that its battery was low and stopped me from using it, making itself useless, instead of warning me.

So, I’m still with NatWest as my primary bank, and will probably stay with them for at least another 10 years.

Unless my tiny BitCoin investment rockets beyond its current £60 value that is…

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Going Mac – Part 1

Part of documenting my transition to web dev on Mac is to record what needs to be set up  & configured. Should things ever go awry, this post could be a shortcut to getting back to a work-ready state.

 

Apps etc installed

The following needed to be installed manually.

The following were installed via the commands in the next section.

 

Other tasks

Show hidden files. Apparently this needs the command line!

 

Commands run

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

brew update
brew upgrade

brew tap homebrew/dupes 
brew tap homebrew/versions 
brew tap homebrew/homebrew-php 
brew tap caskroom/fonts 
brew tap caskroom/cask 
brew install node
npm install --global gulp-cli 

brew unlink php70
brew install php71

brew install git-flow-avh
brew cask install font-fira-code
brew cask install iterm2
brew cask install gimp

sudo xcodebuild -license

 

Other changes

 

References

https://developerjack.com/blog/2016/08/26/Installing-PHP71-with-homebrew/

 

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Going Mac – Part 0

I’ll soon be starting a new job,  still in web development (as I have been for disturbingly more than a decade), though this time it’ll be in-house and for a huge company.

I’ve been persuaded to go over to what I’ve long considered the dark side; Apple.

I still don’t believe I’ll ever pay for Apple products with my own money, but it’s becoming clear that Windows really isn’t keeping up with the ease of development on MacOS, and my future employer will be the one stumping up the cash so what’s to lose?

This is to be the 0th in a series of posts on my conversion, or will that be “enlightenment”? 0th not 1st because I’ve not started yet – I’m just beginning to look at what tools I’ll likely be using.

Where I spend most of my work days at the moment is in the excellent JetBrains PHPStorm and I’m very pleased to see that I will be able to stick with it. The other software I use is the also excellent FileZilla and the frankly pretty ropey SourceTree. I will likely ditch both and finally get round to instead using the built-in functionality of PHPStorm, and, of course, modern deployment methods.

I’m a fan of the command line, but it’s always been in *nix (mostly Debian on web servers and Raspberry Pis), so I’m hoping that the move to Apple will mean I can actually do all the modern web dev things instead of spending so much time persuading Windows to let me.

So far, I’ve used all the contemporary techniques (proper MVC development, proper git usage like branching and pull-requests, npm, gulp, Sass), but never all in one project, and I’m really looking forward to it.

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WordPress config snippet for dynamic domains

Quite why this isn’t how WordPress works by default, I’ll probably never know.

$domain = 'http' . (false ? 's' : '') . '://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'];
define( 'WP_SITEURL', $domain );
define( 'WP_HOME', $domain );

If anything, this snippet is for my own reference.

Prevents redirects on development / staging sites without changing the wp-config.php

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Google Sheets Formula – show an age from a DOB

I couldn’t find a decent formula to show an age from a Date Of Birth, so I wrote this:

=CONCAT(FLOOR((TODAY() - B2)/365),CONCAT("y ",CONCAT(FLOOR((((TODAY() - B2)/365) - FLOOR(((TODAY() - B2)/365))) * 12), "m")))

Shows an age in years and months; e.g. “10y 6m”.