Miscellaneous – Zention Technology Training

How to back up to an external hard drive using rsync

by mattaspeake / On July 12, 2020 / In Miscellaneous

Recently I've been getting myself more organised and focused with my business, and part of that process made me want to have a reliable back-up procedure in place for the work I do in creating my online courses. My case is that I have: a "master" folder on Dropbox in which I put all of my online business resources a "backup" folder on an external hard disk drive to which I want to replicate the...

Showing Tags in the Git Log

by mattaspeake / On November 4, 2018 / In Miscellaneous

When working with Git, we frequently look at the log to see the last few changes. For example to show the last couple of commits: ~/Development/company/website (master) $ git log -2 commit 584770a00b3a3cd16a24ecc9e7c5f4af95c76354 Author: Matthew Speake <matthew.speake@gmail.com> Date: Sat Nov 3 09:52:32 2018 +0000 Adding release package before applying tag commit...

Blocking Outbound Connections to Specific Hosts on Mac

by mattaspeake / On November 3, 2018 / In Miscellaneous

Sometimes it's useful to block outbound connections to a certain host. For example, when testing how your locally-running code reacts when a service it depends on or calls goes down. To block outgoing connections to a given host, say: api.zention.co.uk, edit the hosts file with sudo vi /private/etc/hosts and add a line like this: 0.0.0.0 api.zention.co.uk Then flush the DNS cache so the hosts...

How to check which service is running on a particular port

by mattaspeake / On June 26, 2018 / In Miscellaneous

I use MAMP for developing the Zention website locally (it's an awesome platform which contains the Apache, MySQL and PHP stack which runs on Mac - check it out if you haven't already!). Anyway, I wanted to hook up SquirrelSQL (my favourite JDBC client) so I could do some development work against the database for the website, but I wasn't sure of the port MySQL was using (it wasn't 3306 which is...

Reusing a private SSH key on another Mac

by mattaspeake / On June 25, 2018 / In Miscellaneous

I recently had to access a Git repo which was hosted on Bitbucket on another workstation. Rather than create a new private SSH key, I did the following instead: Create the ~/.ssh directory (it's not there by default on a Mac so don't worry!) Transfer the SSH key to the other machine (I emailed it which is fine) Copy the SSH key to the directory and set the permissions Register the key to the SSH...

Using file system check to fix a Mac that is stuck booting up

by mattaspeake / On June 25, 2018 / In Miscellaneous

I have an old Macbook Pro which I hadn't used for a while (at least a few years), and it just wouldn't start up correctly. i.e. it kept "hanging" on the main Apple loading screen (where you see the apple logo and the progress bar as it loads the operating system). I tried a few things but nothing seemed to work, except for holding down CMD+S after hearing the startup chime on powering up. Doing...