I like FontAwesome (I'm a backer), but I'm so over subscription services, there's only so much many times I want to pay for the same icon collection, you know? I'm also annoyed that they withdraw access to the subsetter app once your subscription expires. That's miserable, given that subsetting the icons is mandatory to control file size, as the full icon library is too large to use.

IcoMoon has a free online tool that lets you convert icon collections into a custom font. You upload your icon SVGs, select the ones you want to use, and export them back out as a font, which is trivial to incorporate into your project. The files are much smaller, and do not require any Javascript. I will probably remove the FontAwesome script from Tuskfish and re-implement the icons as a font. This will also allow other icon sets to be integrated, as you aren't limited to the FontAwesome set.

I upgraded to the Forerunner 965 from a 945. After using the 965 for a couple of weeks I would say there are two significant improvements, neither of which is a 'must have':

1. The new AMOLED display of the 965 is a lot better. It is very bright and clear compared to the previous MIP displays found on previous generation watches, including the 945. It also has  a much higher resolution (454x454 pixels vs 240x240). On dynamic apps like the compass it really does look great.
2. Touchscreen functionality. You can swipe to navigate through screens and select items, and on maps you can pan around and zoom with your fingers, which makes the limited screen far more useable for navigation. On previous gen watches like the 945 you have to use buttons for everything, which is slow and clumsy at least as far as maps go.

So: Is it worth the upgrade? If you use the mapping applications a lot then I would say yes. Being able to pan with your finger is a game changer.  Otherwise, the functionality is very similar to the 945. There are a few more apps but nothing that you are likely to miss.

If you have a Microsoft 365 Family subscription, you probably got an email notifiying you of a 30% price increase. This is bullshit and you don't have to pay it. The truth is, you are being silently upgraded to a higher subscription tier with the same name. The new tier includes Copilot AI integration, and that's what you are being charged for on the sly. To avoid the price increase, you can opt out of Copilot integration. Instructions inside.

TLDR: Quick charging technologies can cause problems. The headphones charge reliably over 5 volt connections, but may cease charging if there is an option to negotiate higher voltage charging as found on many recent chargers. Try using an ordinary USB cable without Power Delivery (PD) capabilities, or a charger that won't output more than 5 volts, and charging may be yours again. Also applies to power banks.

Optional support for ImageMagick V6 is now available. This gives much better quality thumbnails than PHP's native GD2 library, but at the cost of some manual configuration. You need to:

• Have ImageMagic installed on your webserver (most hosting companies provide this).
• Access to PHP's exec() function must be enabled (it is often disabled by default through the disable_functions setting in php.ini).
• Swap in an alternative ResizeImage.php trait file (provided).
• Configure the file path to an sRGB.icc colour profile on your server (you can download one if necessary).
• Clear the image cache (html/cache), which will cause thumbnails to be rebuilt.

You can adjust the level of compression and sharpening in the trait file method createThumbnailWithExec().

Recommended. I've had a Zoom F3 for a while now, but I've only recently taken it on a field trip. I bought it to record wildlife and environmental ambiences (a hobby), but most of the time I'm recording meetings (work), and pack a Zoom H6 (not the new "essentials" version).

The H6 has a few shortcomings, mainly its size and very average quality preamps. But it is an enormously flexible device and has an intuitive interface with hardware knobs for each microphone input. The X-Y stereo capsule it ships with is great for meetings, if you just want an ok recording to check your facts later.

But this time, I needed something light, so I took the F3 instead, and it worked out far better than I expected. Apart from the obvious advantage (size), the F3 has a few improvements over the H6.

Update: The new Tascam FR-AV2 is the new best portable field recorder, but significantly more expensive.

Ever wondered by many professional YouTubers shoot video at 24 frames per second? You have probably heard it explained away as "the most cinematic" frame rate. You probably also heard that people can't see frame rates beyond about 30 fps. Well, that's wrong (ask a gamer if they notice the difference between 60 and 144 fps).

The real reason why 24 fps is so common is purely historical: It is basically the minimum frame rate that allows a moving image without annoying flickering. Video used to be shot on physical film, so keeping the frame rate as low as possible saved on costs. Apparently it also helped with sound synchronisation.

Neither of these are valid constraints in the modern era. Sticking to 24 fps just makes panning shots look terrible due to judder, especially on a big screen. You are better off going for 50 or 60 fps depending on your region, which will deliver a far more fluid image, so long as you keep your shutter speed at one over double the frame rate.

The default upload file size limit in NGINX is 1 MB, so if you are using it as a reverse proxy for your Tuskfish CMS site, you may need to increase it. You can do this globally for the server itself, or you can do it on a site-by-site basis.

Recommended. I just installed the new Arctic Liquid Freezer III 280 on my AMD 5950x. It is a beast of a cooler. In an OCCT stability test with all 16 cores engaged at 100% workload my CPU sustains 4.5 GHz with a maximum temperature of 63°C, and that's in a warm room (the aircon is broken). There are some reviews showing that it is less effective on Intel CPUs (no idea why) but for AM4/5 it's top tier.

But you are going to hate the AM4/5 installation process. Here's how to make it less painful.

TLDR I have been playing around with Rode Connect software, which came with the Streamer X, trying to EQ my voice. The software gives you choice of a basic or advanced processing modes. The problem with using the basic mode is that it activates all of the advanced controls in the background. You can't selectively turn options off or adjust them and you're stuck with the default values. This means, for example, that the noise gate is turned on in basic mode, which is something that I personally don't like because it is jarring when you do have a bit of environmental noise. So, if you need to turn anything off, use advanced mode.

My Ryzen 5950x became unstable and started throwing random reboots. No errors are reported, and Windows logs just shows a kernel power loss event. The distinguishing feature is that the reboots usually happen when the CPU is lightly loaded or idle, or a few seconds after leaving a heavy workload. The machine passes stress tests without an issue. The consensus seems to be that the CPU is undervolting a bit too far under light/idle workloads. So people are experimenting with many different BIOS settings to try and fix it.

TLDR: After trying every BIOS adjustment under the sun, installing a different OS, and rotating every component bar the motherboard with old spare parts, I was left with only one option: It had to be the motherboard. So I bought a new one, and yes, everything just works great now.

Not recommended. Overally, the tripod is very solid, relatively light (1.3 kg) and feels like it would be good for smiting The Enemies of Journalists. It has a few useful features, including a 3/8 inch mounting thread that retracts to expose a 1/4 inch thread, and three built in 1/4 inch mounting threads at the top of the legs. The tripod legs extend out into three locked positions, including one near-horizontal, allowing the camera to be placed at ground level even without a center column.

I found a couple of minor flaws: Two of three (unneccessary) screws for securing the head worked loose and dropped out on the first day of use, and the spirit level on the supplied head was hopelessly misaligned, ie. useless. Despite that, it's otherwise well-built and fairly decent value for money, but the lack of quality control is disappointing and basically meh. It's ok.

Want to connect an external microphone to your MacBook Air? You can.

The 3.5 mm headphone jack is actually a combo jack, which is capable of supporting microphone input as well. But for microphone input you must use a TRRS jack (the ones with two black rings, such as on a phone hands free kit). The jack ouputs a headphone-level signal that can also be used to drive powered speakers, but not passive speakers.

Presumably this is also true of MacBook Pro.

I started getting random crashes to black screen during gaming. It took a long time to isolate the problem, since the machine passed stress tests without issue, but after pulling my system apart, I finally noticed that the VGA light on the motherboard was lit after crashes. The fix was to update the GPU VBIOS, using an update tool from the manufacturer. It takes about 2 minutes and I haven’t had a problem since.

I don’t know if this is a problem with 6800XTs generally, or just with this specific model, but if you are having crashes and see the VGA tell-tale is lit, then check if an update is available for yours.

TLDR: Using certain words such as "login" on your form will get it automatically flagged as suspicious. If you have problems, remove any terms that could be misinterpreted as phishing. It's likely that other terms such as "password" would also create problems.

Here's a simple fix that works. Why don't they just fix it already? This has been driving me mental across multiple distros for ages on every box I have. There's just no excuse to leave an obvious irritation like this sitting around for years. But that's what you get on Linux.

I put together some scripts to set up a dockerised PHP-Apache2 environment. Dockerhub actually has official images for this, but the problem is that they don't include the GD2 image library, you have to compile it in yourself. So, my scripts do that. They also create a persistent volume via a bindmount on the host machine, so that you can freely remove or rebuild the webserver container without losing your website data. 

Tired of paying for a commercial VPN? I set up a private WireGuard VPN server, running in a Docker container on a cheap virtual machine I already have with Linode. No need to pay for additional infrastructure! It works straight out of the box, and is fast and simple to set up. This article closes a few gaps in the documentation that might slow you down. Set up time was about 10 minutes, including configuring client devices. It's a nice facility to have, and is so lightweight you can run it on existing infrastructure without paying anything more.

In a blog post annoying titled Heroku's Next Chapter, Heroku's General Manager has announced they will discontinue their free plans. On 28 November they will reduce free resources to zero and start deleting hobby-dev databases. Yep, they are going to bin your data with no warning other than an email, to "manage fraud and abuse". The good news is that you don't need them. Get your virtual machines from a cloud provider and containerise your apps with Docker instead. You'll never look back.

Not recommended. The marketing materials lean heavily on its ‘advanced security features’, but TLDR it doesn’t have any, unless you think VPN capability is something special. It’s just a small, portable wireless router that can accept a WIFI signal as its WAN input. So you can use it in a coffee shop and have a firewall between you and their network, but the firewall is just like any other home router firewall. You can forward ports and so on, but that’s about it, and it doesn’t provide any visibility into the traffic or what’s going on. Sadly, it does not support DFS channels (52-140) on fast 5GHz WIFI, so it is not compatible with any access point using them.