Year: 2019

Installing Windows 10 on a MacBook Pro (2011) without Bootcamp

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I love my old MacBook Pro. It does everything I want for a portable coding, writing and occasional editing device. I’ve had it since 2011 and it’s still going strong.

Apple however doesn’t want to suport it anymore. I’m stuck with macOS High Sierra, without an option to upgrade without shadowy patches. Even if I could keep up with Mojave and beyond, the hardware might just not be fast enough anymore to give me an enjoyable experience.

So I thought, perhaps I’ll put in a new hard drive that I had in another old laptop and install Windows 10 on it. Apple’s recommended way is to do all this from macOS, using their own Bootcamp setup. However, being the hacker that I am, I thought perhaps I’ll try the “Windows Only” experience.

I did this in two live streams the other night, and continued the process over the following days – and now I’ve got a (more or less working) Windows 10 installation on my MacBook Pro (early 2011 Edition). I thought I’d take some notes on how I did this step by step, and give you my opinions if this was an adventure worth undertaking.

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Beginners Guide to Improving Your Audio

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This is a guest post by DreamLab Studio, who kindly shared this information on our Discord Server. This is an expanded edition I thought would be great for everyone. Enjoy!

So you have decided you want to start creating your own content to share online. Perhaps you want to make YouTube videos, create a podcast, or maybe start live streaming. One problem you may run into is working with Audio. You may think it’s going to be the easiest thing to deal with, after all humans have been recording audio since 1877 thanks to Thomas Edison.

Unfortunately audio is something that can be pretty tricky to work with and more importantly viewers are willing to put up with poor quality video much more than they will with poor audio. As an example, check out this video from RainDanceCanada:

I’m not an audio expert but I have learned a bit over the years that I hope will help you record better quality audio and make the learning experience easier and more enjoyable.

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How to add File Upload Capabilities to the Contributor Role in WordPress

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I never noticed this before, but it appears that the Contributor Role in WordPress does not come with ability to upload files to an instance. That’s slightly weird, given that most users will probably assign this role to users who shall be able to write content for a site, and with good content inevitably come images in this day and age.

According to WordPress, the roles included with WordPress are mere examples or “capability collections” so to speak, and we’re free to create our own, or add/remove capabilities from any role if we so desire. I did some digging and found out how that the add_cap() and remove_cap() functions do just that.

In this article I’ll show you how to add the upload_files() capability to the Contributor Role, without the need for yet another plugin.

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How to install Blender on CentOS 7

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I’ve been trying to build Blender from source on CentOS for many years, but never had any luck making it work. There was always one package missing, or something else that needed to be configured. Depressed and resentful, I gave up and never got a chance to try Blender on CentOS.

Recently, the Blender Devs have started releasing a pre-compiled version of Blender for CentOS for download. This should work on RHEL and Fedora just as well. Huzzah!

With a fresh installation of CentOS looking at me from my old Samsung Q330 laptop, I thought I’d try it out. It works great! Here’s what I had to do to make it work, step by step.

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How to revert a yum update on CentOS

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Every so often, a yum update brings unexpected results with it, like services no longer working due to spurious error messages that don’t tell you what’s actually wrong. This only very rarely happens though, and we may need to revert to the state of our system before such an update took place. Thankfully, yum has … Read more

How to create a read-only channel in Discord

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Some of the simplest things to do often turn out to be the hardest ones – only because we have no idea how to do them properly. One of those tasks is setting up a simple read-only channel on Discord.

What I mean by that is a channel that you and perhaps an admin can post in (like a welcome or rules channel), readable by everybody, nut you don’t want anyone to be able to leave reactions or post messages in it. I’m fairly new to Discord, and while many features appear very intuitive, this one neither of us could work out for the longest time. Looks like I’ve finally found out how to do this, so let me share it with you before I forget.

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