How to install CodeIgniter with Composer

Run the command below to install CodeIgniter via Composer. This may be useful if GitHub has an outage and you can’t download a zipped version of the source.

composer require codeigniter/framework

You will then need to look in vendor/codeigniter/framework for the usual folder structure.

We all have days like this one:

GitHub can have problems

Best website for buying a car privately

What is the best website to search if you are looking to buy a car privately?

I carried out a little bit of research – searching in a 30 mile radius for a Volkswagen Golf, here’s the results:

Site Trade Private
AutoTrader 293 23
Exchange & Mart 74 1
Gumtree 83 68
eBay* 51 10
Motors.co.uk 256 0
Pistonheads 92 5

Conclusion

I would have thought that sites like eBay and Pistonheads would have been popular with private sellers but this isn’t the case. Exchange & Mart are much cheaper than AutoTrader but obviously not as popular with private sellers. The most prominent site to go to is Gumtree.

* eBay didn’t allow a 30 mile search radius so I had to use 25 instead.

Using ngrok to access multiple homestead sites remotely

ngrok can be used to provide access to a local homestead or vagrant site remotely i.e. to a client.

You need to use header rewriting to work with the homestead configuration, the syntax for using a single site looks like:

ngrok http -host-header=rewrite mysite.app:80

If you have multiple sites then you will need to use ngrok with a config file, stored in ~/.ngrox.config.yml. The docs are vague on how to do the rewriting in the config file so here it is for reference:

tunnels:
    mysite:
        addr: mysite.app:80
        proto: http
        host_header: rewrite
    myapi:
        addr: myapi.app:80
        proto: http
        host_header: rewrite

Note that host header rewriting doesn’t work nicely with cookies which seriously limits this.

See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/41523847/fail-to-create-cookies-while-using-ngrok-with-header-rewrite

BMW 1 Series (F20) boot light fuse

I wanted to charge the battery on my BMW 1 Series (F20), the battery is in the boot so charging it meant the boot would have to stay open. The boot light felt pretty hot and I couldn’t find a way to switch it off. Knowing that the boot would probably have to stay open for several hours and the bulb probably wasn’t designed to handle that, I found a way to disable the boot light.

There’s a fuse compartment behind the battery compartment, in the top right of this photo:

Just remove the labelled fuse – for reference it is position 153 – and the boot light will go out:

Reinsert when you’ve done charging to restore the light to its normal function.