Author: Rick Curran

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Checking out Digital Ocean VPS (or Why UK hosting doesn’t suck compare to the US anymore)

I’ve used many different hosting companies over the 20+ years I’ve been working on the web (and blogged about the poor state of hosting in the UK compared to the US going back quite a few years!), recently I have looked to consolidate a few personal project sites onto a VPS of their own so I thought I’d check out Digital Ocean and see how they stack up to other services I’ve used.

So far my experience has been really good, quick to spin up server instances, or droplets in Digital Ocean’s terminology. Even better is that since middle of January they have at least doubled the specifications that you get for your money. I opted for the $20 a month droplet which gets me 4GB ram and 80GB of disk space and 2 vcpus (previously 2GB ram and 40GB disk space). So overall that is pretty great value for money.

I’m currently working through the process of migrating all my personal sites (including this blog), a bit time consuming but good to get all of my site projects (such as Twitterative.com, isittimetogetupyet.com) and various other bits and pieces.

If you’re interesting in checking out Digital Ocean for hosting they actually offer a referral scheme so if you sign up via this link: https://m.do.co/c/5d661dba3f12 you’ll get $10 credit, so go check it out if you want a few dollars credit to check out out and see if it suits your needs.

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How to fix “unable to boot device because it cannot be located on disk” in Xcode 9

I have recently been doing some development using the Xcode 9.2 Beta, but when it came to pushing the app to iTunes Connect I made the switch to the final release version of Xcode 9.2. In the process I ran various clean up tools to remove the beta version and related files etc.

However, after downloading and installing the release version of Xcode 9.2 and trying to test using the Simulator I encountered the error:

unable to boot device because it cannot be located on disk

This error also included a link to a location within simulator files which obviously is no longer there due to the clean up process I had used. I tried a few options but eventually found a series of commands that clean this up and fixed the problem for me. Make sure to quite Xcode and the Simulator app first and then run these commands in Terminal:

sudo killall -9 com.apple.CoreSimulator.CoreSimulatorService
rm -rf ~/Library/Developer/CoreSimulator
rm -rf ~/Library/Developer/XCPGDevices

Hopefully after running them and starting Xcode the Simulator devices should all be functional again. Please note that if you have done any custom devices within your Simulator device list then these will have been deleted and the list reset to the default list of devices.

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Dynamically setting an image as the header image on a WordPress theme

I’m working on an interesting project using a Raspberry Pi Zero W computer with the Pi Camera module. Basically the idea is to take scheduled periodic photos via the Pi Zero and camera and then upload them to a WordPress site and then set the latest photo as the Header Image.

There was one thing that took me a little while to figure out and that was how to set the desired image as the header image in WordPress, I struggled to find anything whilst Googling so I thought I’d quickly write up a post about it.

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Dreamweaver CC Public Beta

Adobe have just opened up a public beta of a revamped version of Dreamweaver offering a lot of improvements and useful features for modern web development.

Dreamweaver’s had it’s share of flack over the years and not all unwarranted, but this new beta looks to shed some of the baggage of its 19 year history with a refreshed user interface and a new code editor based on the Brackets codebase. For someone like me who spends most of the time in code view (and who has split their time between Brackets and Dreamweaver for the last year or so) there’s some nice new features in there that make it a more compelling environment for code-first users.

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Cutting the TV cord

I’ve been a Sky customer for several years now and I’ve enjoyed the service overall, but as my (and many other’s) viewing habits have changed I have watched less and less live TV broadcasts so the value of Sky’s TV package to me has declined. I can’t remember the last time I watched anything that wasn’t either recorded via Sky+ or just viewed on demand from either Sky Movies / Sky on Demand, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video or Youtube.

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Descent: Underground

I used to love playing the original Descent games back in the 1990’s so I was pretty stoked to see this Kickstarter project for a prequel game.

If you’ve never played Descent then it’s basically you in a spaceship flying around inside some mines inside a planet / asteroid, it can get quite disorientating as you can rotate in all directions but it was a great multi-player shoot-each-other LAN game :)

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Check Dropbox CLI / dropbox.py status via cron / bash script

I’ve been using the command line (CLI) version of Dropbox on my Centos 6.5 server as an offsite backup and it has been working well, the recent 1TB storage upgrade makes this a decent backup option.

One problem I’ve been having is that sometimes the Dropbox process seems to die, I tried several different scripts to keep track of the status of dropbox via the dropbox.py python scripts but I eventually found this bash script to work. I’ve set it as an hourly cron job in /etc/cron.hourly and it’s working well so far.

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