Last weekend I headed over to Brussels on the Eurostar like hundreds of other open source enthusiasts, for the first in-person FOSDEM event since the global pandemic.

Pretty soon after setting up Ubuntu Studio on my laptop (which I plan to use for my music recording and composition) it became obvious that all was not well in JACK land. My excitement at everything 'working out of the box' was somewhat premature on this machine! 

Having started to learn the flute three years ago and taking up piano during lockdown to help me with learning how to compose, I've increasingly been tinkering with open source digital audio tooling to record and tweak various musical endeavours.

Some time ago after complaining about the challenges of getting audio (and specifically MIDI) working under Kubuntu, someone happened to suggest taking a look at Ubuntu Studio - a distribution of Ubuntu specifically aimed towards creative folks.

In Mautic, we make use of the open source tool DDEV heavily as a tool to help you get a local development environment spun up quickly. It's an incredible tool, based on Docker (and can also be used with Colima if you prefer). While I was working on migrating this website to Joomla! 4, I decided to see how it stacked up when working with Joomla.

Having run the last two manual User Acceptance Test processes for Mautic 3, it was clear that relying on users to manually test every aspect of Mautic was both error prone and time consuming. 

Sometimes I find there are annoying little things that I don't know how to fix on my Linux systems, but aren't THAT bothersome that I can be bothered to dig a bit deeper and to find the answer .. setting icons for custom desktop shortcuts is one of those.

NOTE: This article is quite outdated and remains here for archive purposes.

Joomla! is fast becoming one of the most popular content management systems in the world, powering almost 3% of the web and exceeding 30 million downloads - the chances are during your day you probably browse at least one website using Joomla!

NOTE: This article is quite outdated and remains here for archive purposes.

You may have noticed recently that extra bits of information have started appearing in search results, perhaps photos of the author, reviews of a product, maps showing the location of a store or links which allow you to jump to a certain location within a page.