March, 2017 | The Tech Check

Create an animated GIF of your screencast on Linux

Sunny SrinidhiMarch 13, 2017146 Views0

Animated GIFs of screencasts are everywhere today. How do you go from taking a screenshot of your desktop with the "Print Screen" button and recording a video of your desktop to creating an animated GIFs of your screencast to share on the internet? It's actually easier than you think. I'm going to tell you how to do it on a Linux machine, specifically Ubuntu, because I use an Ubuntu machine. The commands here are for Ubuntu, but they can very easily be ported to other *nix machines as well. First, you'll need to install a few tools: ImageMagick, MPlayer, and RecordMyDesktop. We'll be using RecordMyDesktop to record the activities on your screen or a portion of your screen as a video file. We'll use MPlayer to convert that video into a bunch of JPEG images. We'll then use ImageMagick...

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Use Config Caching to Speed Up Your Laravel App

Sunny SrinidhiMarch 13, 2017194 Views0

As web developers, we're always looking for ways to speed up our app. It's all about milliseconds today. There are several ways by which a web app or a web service could be optimised for speed. Being one of the most used and popular PHP frameworks, Laravel has a few tricks up its sleeves to make this happen. One of them is config caching. Obviously, this is not going to make tremendous improvement, but significant enough to be written about. So what is config caching? Well, it's exactly what it sounds like, you cache all your configuration so that you don't have to go looking for it every time you want to read a configuration. Laravel, as usual, has an artisan command for this: php artisan config:cache What does this command do? It's common to have all sensitive configuration (such