Out with the old, in with the new — Switching from built-in software to one awesome piece of engineering: Local (by Flywheel)

A multitude of recent developments have aided me to make a choice. Some of them are

  • Apple going for thinner, lighter instead of stronger performance, and
  • Microsoft integrating Bash into Windows 10 with WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux)

While the new Macbook Pro is quite a feet of engineering, it is hardly Pro”. Surely intel graphics are enough for typing letters and calculating spreadsheets, it’s not Pro. A 16GB memory limit (which with the compression tech used is like 24GB for any other OS) is great for battery life, but it’s not “Pro”. The keyboard is ultra thin and has good tactile feedback, but the keys need a firm press, and travel almost nothing. Great for thinning the device, but again, not “Pro”. For the same amount of money you can buy a portable powerhouse like the Asus ROG G752vy (seen in my post about this). This one has other issues, but at least it has got awesome graphics (nVidia 980), max 64 GB RAM and a “normal” laptop keyboard.

(Yeah, I know, I KNOW, I don’t need ‘awesome graphics’ for web development, but I like to game also, and to be honest; my favorite IDE – phpStorm – DOES prefer a sturdy GPU. Don’t know why, but it runs so much better on a discrete GPU than it does on intel Graphics)

Reasons to stay with macOS are rapidly diminishing, and reasons to start using Windows again are gaining support. Since the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, Windows offers Bash and all goodness that comes with Ubuntu linux, right at your fingertips. Well, not ALL goodness, but most of it.

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Sending mail from PHP with Mountain Lion

Mountain Lion killed – or rather: disabled – sendmail by default. Big deal? well, if you need to send mail from PHP in your local development environment, you’ll need to perform these few steps to get it working again.

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Digitally sign and optionally encrypt your e-mail – also on your iPhone/iPad!

About ten years ago I was very into PGP-ing my mail. This was when I was in my Windows stage using The Bat! mail client. This stage luckily passed about 6 years ago, you can read about it here, in case you’re interested. After switching to Mac I went searching for an alternative and found a PGPmail plugin for Apple Mail, but I also found a better, Mail-native, way to sign and optionally encrypt e-mail using nothing more that Apple Mail and an S/MIME certificate. This is not very difficult and certainly not new, but for all intents and purposes, I will list the steps to take to generate, install and distribute your certificate. Furthermore, since the iOS 6, S/MIME is supported on your iPhone and iPad (and possibly iPod Touch, I cannot tell, I don’t own one), and I’ll tell you how to install the certificates on those devices as well.

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