The official website of Laravel has already a documentation on howto install it on a Linux OS, but it requires to trust the installer script. This would have been run directly on the local machine without prior checking the contents and what is really done. Of course I manually checked the install script and did not like what I found. The installed elements would not be tracked by the package manager, it would install another certificate authority list for the local installation. Things I consider non-maintainable or unsafe. So I wanted to go another (more clean?) way on a Raspberry Pi.

Whenever I log into a remote Linux based machine via SSH, I first start a GNU screen session. Any when I forget, I often regret it when I close the session window, as this also terminates the processes I usually want to continue in the background.

Pi-Hole is, in my opinion, a great tool for blocking ads, tracking and malware. But sometimes it seems to be blocking a bit too much. One case I identified were sites that would come up as small ads in my Google searches. I still wanted those links to work. My analysis showed that the needed target URL was nicely encoded in the advertisement URL. So I thought of nginx for a solution.

Using Linux on various machines, I wanted to have something that helped me to identify on which machine I am currently working. The usual bash prompt settings in PS1 indicate this, but I needed to read the text. I wanted something more intuitive. Searching for a solution I found that modern bash is capable of using unicode. So I found my solution.

I wanted to build FreeCAD on Windows to be able to do some local development. FreeCAD is already documented for this in the FreeCAD wiki. The steps are very clear, but I found some inconsistencies regarding paths and order of mentioned information. Maybe I have the option to change them in the wiki later. For now, I wanted a complete but very compact step-by-step file to go from “nothing” to “FreeCAD is built”.