Andy Heathershaw

Announced around a year ago, Microsoft today released their brand-new version of Edge – the default web browser since the Windows 10 release. The new Edge browser is based on Google’s Chromium project. Chromium is the “base” software that Google builds the Chrome browser on. Chrome easily has the biggest market share of all browsers. […]

It’s been over a year since the last update to Solid Tools for Developers – my suite of online tools for developers, system admins and network managers.

Yesterday I published my latest release which gives the suite a fresh makeover and a few improvements to the tools.

For my first blog post of 2020, I thought I’d share one of my challenges of being a parent to two boys and a 5-year old Labrador called Mickey: crossing the road.

It’s 3 years to the day since I made the first commit to what would become Blue Twilight – my open-source PHP photo gallery. Today I’m delighted to announce the availability of Blue Twilight Cloud. Blue Twilight Cloud allows you to run your own photo gallery as an alternative to sharing your photos on Instagram, […]

Google is the registry behind the new .dev TLD – the ultimate vanity domain for developers. The .dev extension has historically been used by developers fudging their host files to create realistic-looking development environments. Now, .dev is open in Early Access Preview to allow the world to register their .dev domains. It’s actually been open […]

My first post of 2019 is a tutorial that’s all about the cloud.

I’m going to show you how to use the RunCloud control panel to deploy a PHP application with a MySQL database on a cloud server from UpCloud.

My friends at UpCloud have also provided a promo-code to get ample free credit to try out their service. Check out the tutorial for the details.

It’s almost two years since I published the post on the Visual Studio IDE information message: “delegate invocation can be simplified.” It is now the second most visited article on my blog! While reviewing some error messages in a new MVC project, I recently learnt something equally as simple and eye-opening. This time, the suggestion […]

My new hosting provider (blog post on that coming soon!) has notified me of 2 maintenance windows next week: 16th October, 22:00 – 02:00 17th October, 00:00 – 00:30 The first window specifically targets the VPS platform, and will see my server powered down and migrated to new infrastructure. The second window will see an […]

The Ubuntu team will this week release Ubuntu Server 18.04.1, the first minor revision to 18.04 since its release on April 26th.

In this article, I’ll show you how to upgrade Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04 using the command-line. This can be used on all Ubuntu derivatives, but is mostly aimed at Server installs that do not have a graphical interface.

The new EU data protection legislation, GDPR, mandates that every reasonable effort and technology is used to protect personal data. It even goes as far as specifying encryption. The open-source database MariaDB (a drop-in, compatible replacement for MySQL) has supported “encryption at rest” since version 10.1. Use MariaDB encryption to satisify the GDPR recommendation of […]