James Hibbard

Export Thunderbird Accounts to Mobile When Stuck on an Older ESR Release

Mozilla recently launched Thunderbird Mobile for Android, and I was eager to give it a try. However, I am running Linux Mint 21.3, and installing Thunderbird from the repositories means you’re stuck with version 115.x, which doesn’t include the “Export to Mobile” feature. This is only available as of Thunderbird Desktop 128.4.0 or Thunderbird Beta 132 and newer.

Manually setting up my many email accounts on mobile wasn’t something I wanted to deal with. Instead, I downloaded a newer portable version of Thunderbird, used that to export my settings to the mobile app, and then reverted to my distro’s ESR release. This post explains how you can do the same.

How to Create a CRUD App with Rails and React

Most web applications need to persist data in one form or other. When working with a server-side language, this is normally a straightforward task. However when you add a front-end JavaScript framework to the mix, things start to get a bit trickier.

In this tutorial I am going to demonstrate how to build a JSON API using Ruby on Rails and then code a fully-functional React frontend to interact with the API. The app we’ll be building is an event manager, which will let you create and manage a list of academic events.

The app will showcase basic CRUD functionality and will add a couple of extra features, such as a datepicker and search.

How to Prevent the .xsession-errors File From Growing Too Large

Sometimes, without warning, your .xsession-errors file will grow to an enormous size. This can be inconvenient at best, or crash your operating system at worst.

In this post I explain how you can set up a cron job to automatically watch the file and get notified if it exceeds a certain size.

How to Send Tweets With a JavaScript GitHub Action

GitHub actions is a feature which allows developers to construct workflows that run in response to various GitHub events. You can use them, for example, to run tests when a new pull request is received, post new issues to Slack, or publish a package to npm.

Previously, this kind of setup would have required a service such as Travis, or Circle CI. Actions however, are an official GitHub offering and give you first-class support for your automation needs.

In this article, I’m going to demonstrate how to create a GitHub action using JavaScript. This will post a tweet to Twitter every time a pull request is merged.

Authentication with Devise and cancancan in Rails

This is a tutorial on how to set up authentication (verifying who you are) and authorization (what you are permitted to do) using Ruby 2.7, Rails 6.0.3 and two popular Ruby gems: Devise and cancancan.

The code for this tutorial is on GitHub: https://github.com/hibbard-eu/authentication-with-devise-and-cancancan

Make a Filterable Table With Vue.js

One of the things I love about Vue is its unobtrusive reactivity system. Models are plain JavaScript objects and when you modify them, Vue automatically updates a page’s HTML to reflect the change. This makes state management easy and intuitive.

In this tutorial, I’ll demonstrate how to leverage Vue’s reactivity to build a filterable table. This will only display the rows that match whatever text a user has entered into a text input. I’ll also show you how to highlight the matches.

This might be useful to help users quickly find what they are looking for in a long table. Once you have understood how it works, you can easily adapt it to lists or anything else you need to filter.

How to Install Ubuntu Server on VirtualBox

In this post I’ll show you how to install Ubuntu Server 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) on Oracle’s VirtualBox. I’ll also demonstrate how to connect to the Ubuntu instance via SSH, as well as how to run VirtualBox in headless mode.

Let’s get started!

Getting Started with NodeGUI

NodeGUI is an open source library for building cross-platform, native desktop applications with JavaScript and CSS-like styling.

In this article, I’m going to demonstrate how to get up and running with NodeGUI. We’ll set up a development environment, take a look at several of the library’s basic concepts, then finish off by creating a simple password generator app.

If you’re curious as to what we’ll end up with, the finished code can be found on GitHub.

A Beginner's Guide to Installing a Custom ROM on an Android Phone

I have an old Sony XPeria S phone (from 2012) which has long since been abandoned by my carrier. It no longer receives any updates and is stuck on Android 4.2, which kinda sucks….

So I decided to take matters into my own hands and get an up-to-date version of Android, by flashing the phone with a custom ROM. While this didn’t prove to be that difficult, I did hit a few stumbling blocks along the way, which I wanted to document.

This post will serve two purposes. Firstly, it will provide detailed instructions on how to install a custom ROM on an Xperia S. Secondly, it will also outline the general process of flashing an old Android phone and offer a high-level overview of the concepts involved.

How to Create a Simple CRUD App with Rails and React (Class-based Version)

A tutorial explaining how to create a Rails API then, using the Webpacker gem, build a React front-end to consume it.

This is an older post which uses React classes.