I'm Brad, and I'm nearing 20 years of experience with Linux. I've worked in just about every IT role there is before taking the leap into software development. Currently, I'm building desktop and web-based solutions with NodeJS and PHP hosted on Linux infrastructure. Visit my blog or find me on Twitter to see what I'm up to.
The PHP programming language includes various built-in variable types and allows you to create your own complex object classes. Third-party packages also come with their own object classes. So it’s useful to find out what type of variable a variable is, its value, and the type/value… Read More »PHP var_dump() Function [With Examples]
Package managers like apt are one of the big selling points of Linux operating systems and Ubuntu – a vast curated collection of software that can do just about anything, available with a few keypresses. A vetted and (usually) reliable source of great software to meet any task. However, when something… Read More »How To Fix Broken Packages in Ubuntu [Tutorial]
This tutorial covers setting up a full LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) web stack, including HTTP server, MySQL database, and PHP for app logic. This is commonly called a LAMP server – Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. Linux rules the web server world – the operating system powers the vast majority of web… Read More »Setting up a LAMP Stack on Ubuntu 20.04 (And Raspberry Pi)
The touch command in Linux updates the timestamps on a file or creates the file if it doesn’t exist. See some examples and use cases below. It sounds useless, but it’s actually useful. For example, if you want to create an empty file called my_file.txt, you can… Read More »touch Command in Linux and Bash [with Examples]
In Linux, *./ (dot slash) represents the relative path to the current working directory. This article lays out exactly what it means and how to use it. . (dot) and .. (double-dot) . (single dot) and .. (double dot) are special directory names in Linux (And other *nix operating systems).… Read More »What Does “./” (Dot Slash) Mean in Linux?
Here’s how to set up and use the Linux shell on Windows – using the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). This tutorial is intended for up-to-date versions of Windows 10 from 2020 onwards. I’m not going to cover how to use WSL on older versions of Windows 10 or… Read More »How to Install & Use Bash (Linux Shell) on Windows 10 [Tutorial]
The PHP strtotime() function takes a string containing text and converts it to a Unix Timestamp. Find out how to use this function in this guide. A Unix timestamp is a number representing the number of seconds since 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970. From it, you can… Read More »PHP strtotime() Function – Converting Text to Timestamp [With Examples]
This is part 2 of the Raspberry Pi and Python powered tank project. In this article, we attempt to display a live video stream and buttons to control the tank in a web UI. In the Last Episode In part 1, I gutted a toy… Read More »Raspberry Pi & Python Powered Tank – Part II
Being able to concatenate (join) two or more strings together is pretty useful – you may be combining user input for storage in a single database column or doing the reverse – combining data from multiple database columns into a single string for display or output.… Read More »Concatenating (Joining) Strings in JavaScript [3 Methods]
Here’s a guide on checking whether a string contains another string in the JavaScript programming language using the includes() method. includes() Syntax string.includes(search, start) Note that: string should be a string value or variable search should be the string you are checking for start is the index (position) you… Read More »Javascript String includes() Method – Check if a String Contains Another String