Featured
Do you want autocompletion and syntax highlighting without a full-blown IDE? You can get all that with just Neovim and Zellij. This is how I develop Symfony applications.
James North
Jul 6, 2025
Featured
With the release of GNOME 46 in March 2024, GNOME Remote Desktop became the first software to support headless remote access on Wayland. Here’s how I set up my server for remote access.
James North
Jun 25, 2024
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It involved a fair amount of research to figure out how to setup and use virt-manager, virt-viewer, and even understanding what QEMU/KVM/libvirt are and what they do. This is as much a reference for me as I hope it to be helpful for others looking to use these technologies.
James North
Sep 26, 2021
It doesn't matter whether you're using Windows, macOS, Linux, FreeBSD, or Haiku, so long as you have a modern browser like Firefox, Chrome, or Safari installed. You can create a professional .m4b audiobook file right in your browser. It's really easy, too.
James North
May 31, 2026
I will say this as simply and tersely as possible: I do not want to read prose you’ve sucked the life out of by plugging it into ChatGPT! I would seriously prefer reading something you came up with entirely by yourself, spelling errors and grammatical errors et al. It would actually be less painful.
James North
Feb 3, 2026
Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (henceforth referred to as “TSAONGAF”) is…an unusual book. Especially if you’ve read a few self-help books like I have. It rebels against the norms of the western self-help industry and focuses on seeing things as they are rather than as we would wish them to be. TSAONGAF is not like the other girls. You won’t find empty platitudes and “affirmations” in this book. This isn’t a book that will tell you that everyone is special. Instead, Manson will tell you that we’re all very similar and mundane, and we all want basically the same things out of life. It won’t tell you to trust your gut; it’ll tell you to actively think about what you’re doing and why. This book won’t sugar-coat things, and it won’t dress its prose up in pretty language. Actually, it will fling curses at you and talk about how f*cked up everything is. TSAONGAF is a well-researched book with a lot of great storytelling and its advice is backed by science and studies. It’s also the best non-fiction book I’ve read in quite a while.
James North
Jan 15, 2026
It’s October 14th, 2025, and Windows 10 is officially end-of-life. What are your options?
James North
Oct 10, 2025
The best CSS and Javascript unminifier is your browser.
James North
Aug 11, 2025
40 articles
It doesn't matter whether you're using Windows, macOS, Linux, FreeBSD, or Haiku, so long as you have a modern browser like Firefox, Chrome, or Safari installed. You can create a professional .m4b audiobook file right in your browser. It's really easy, too.
James North
May 31, 2026
I will say this as simply and tersely as possible: I do not want to read prose you’ve sucked the life out of by plugging it into ChatGPT! I would seriously prefer reading something you came up with entirely by yourself, spelling errors and grammatical errors et al. It would actually be less painful.
James North
Feb 3, 2026
Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (henceforth referred to as “TSAONGAF”) is…an unusual book. Especially if you’ve read a few self-help books like I have. It rebels against the norms of the western self-help industry and focuses on seeing things as they are rather than as we would wish them to be. TSAONGAF is not like the other girls. You won’t find empty platitudes and “affirmations” in this book. This isn’t a book that will tell you that everyone is special. Instead, Manson will tell you that we’re all very similar and mundane, and we all want basically the same things out of life. It won’t tell you to trust your gut; it’ll tell you to actively think about what you’re doing and why. This book won’t sugar-coat things, and it won’t dress its prose up in pretty language. Actually, it will fling curses at you and talk about how f*cked up everything is. TSAONGAF is a well-researched book with a lot of great storytelling and its advice is backed by science and studies. It’s also the best non-fiction book I’ve read in quite a while.
James North
Jan 15, 2026
It’s October 14th, 2025, and Windows 10 is officially end-of-life. What are your options?
James North
Oct 10, 2025
The best CSS and Javascript unminifier is your browser.
James North
Aug 11, 2025
I explain Symfony’s CSRF protection in detail (particularly the stateless strategy) in this article, because this was a real pain to figure out myself, and I *really* wanted to know how it worked because I browse the web with Javascript disabled by default.
James North
Jul 31, 2025
The final season of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer is something of a controversial one. A lot of fans also dislike Season 6 even though it’s my favourite overall. But with Season 7, I feel there really is something wrong with it. That doesn’t mean it does nothing right. In fact, it does so much right. From the set-pieces to the litany of callbacks to much, much earlier episodes, there’s plenty of fanservice to go around. So, what went wrong? Well…it’s rather hard to define. There are only a few things that are outright bad, but what stings the most is wasted potential. It’s good, but it’s not a great season of Buffy.
James North
Jul 23, 2025
This anime was broadcast at the tail end of 2006. It’s an old show that aired just before anime became really popular in the west—at this time, Crunchyroll was still a pirate site and fansubbing was a cottage industry. This show wasn’t a heavy hitter like Death Note, Code Geass, Haruhi Suzumiya, or Black Lagoon, which all came out in the same year. It wasn’t a sleeper hit like Higurashi or Ergo Proxy, either. This year was filled to the brim with amazing shows, so it’s no surprise this gem was overshadowed by such fierce competition. It belongs to the same class of odd, charming shows released in 2006 as Simoun and Kemonozume. But unlike those shows, Asatte no Houkou isn’t wildly experimental or outlandish in its presentation. Its premise—an adult becoming a child and a child becoming an adult—is as strange as it gets.
James North
Jul 21, 2025
My thoughts on AI, the “new” tech that made its way to the mainstream in 2022 with ChatGPT, are…complicated. You've probably heard some or most of these opinions before, but these are mine.
James North
Jul 19, 2025
Featured
Do you want autocompletion and syntax highlighting without a full-blown IDE? You can get all that with just Neovim and Zellij. This is how I develop Symfony applications.
James North
Jul 6, 2025
Your system tables are completely corrupt and mysqld won’t even start. Rebooting the server and even trying to start up with innodb_force_recovery doesn’t work. When you check /var/lib/mysql/mysql.err, it tells you the situation is so bad you should consider restoring from backup. You can recreate your system tables by "reinstalling" MySQL to get the service back up and running.
James North
May 28, 2025
Google is a search engine that helps you find the stuff you’re looking for—or at least, that was what it used to be. For years now, Google has been in the business of steering you toward particular webpages for the sake of profit. Unfortunately, what is profitable for Google is not necessarily something that lines up with what you want out of a search. Really, Google is pushing profitable information at you and making it harder for you to pull out useful information. I'm not really a fan of this approach. For Google, good results are way down on the priority list. It makes Google a bad product, in my opinion. So I don't use it.
James North
Jan 22, 2025
I had the strange pleasure of seeing Lord of War for a second time last night. At one point, this was my favourite film. It’s been almost a decade since I first saw it, and while it is no longer my favourite film and hasn’t been for some time, I really appreciate one aspect of it that had completely slipped by me the first time. Lord of War is many things, but it is not subtle. This movie is really only about one thing, and they beat you over the head with it again and again. But they do it in such a way that you, like the teenager I was when I first saw the film, may not even realise what it is.
James North
Dec 1, 2024
Switcheroo, while mainly intended for converting images from one format to another, is great for bulk-compressing photos! This program made my life easier today.
James North
Nov 14, 2024
Featured
With the release of GNOME 46 in March 2024, GNOME Remote Desktop became the first software to support headless remote access on Wayland. Here’s how I set up my server for remote access.
James North
Jun 25, 2024
I like GNOME, but KDE Plasma is a a far better option if you have multiple monitors. There are a few reasons for this. Namely, non-blurry scaling for XWayland applications and ALT+TAB working as expected.
James North
Jun 3, 2024
If you want to know the default application used for opening a particular filetype, first get the filetype with xdg-mime: xdg-mime query filetype file.html Now that we know the name, we can set it as the default application for text/html files: xdg-mime default firefox.desktop text/html
James North
May 28, 2024
Just some thoughts about Mr. Nobody, and the choices we make.
James North
May 7, 2024
Linux works great for a lot of things…but not everything. There is plenty you can do on Linux. There are programs for almost everything you can think of, and plenty you haven’t thought of. The issue is, these programs may not have a specific feature you want or you simply need a very particular program that is not available on Linux. The reality is… Not Everything Works on Linux.
James North
Mar 16, 2024
GIMP gets $5,444.84 AUD per month, or $65,338.08 AUD per year, split between ZeMarmot and Øyvind Kolås.
James North
Mar 7, 2024