When working with web based systems where there are multiple instances of the same product, such as development, test and production environments, its often desirable to be able to apply a colour scheme to an instance to distinguish each apart. This isn’t dissimilar to potentially applying different Windows colour schemes to different Windows servers, or to a terminal or SSH client connecting to different endpoints. In some cases a web app will allow you to natively do this via some customisation of say the header, or by applying an entire themes, but where that’s not available Dark Reader is a browser add-on that can help.

As the name implies, Dark Reader is typically used to make light pages dark. Many people find reading on a dark background more comfortable, but many websites today have a single colour theme and do not implement a dark mode (it’s on my todo, but not today).

Dark Reader has a default set of rules that can be applied to darken a page, and this works very well if you just want to force pages into dark mode. However, there is also the option to apply custom CSS on a per site basis which allows for very fine tuned control of the customisations applied to a page. Given the CSS is user defined there’s no requirement to make the page dark. You can, if you want, just use CSS to change elements colours.

The user interface for Dark Reader can be a bit fiddly, but if you’d like to use it to customise the CSS of any page you can do so by following these steps.

1. Download and install Dark Reader. It is available for free on the Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Firefox or as an (unfortunately) paid Safari extension. Other Chromium based browsers, Brave etc, can use the Google Chrome link generally.
2. Navigate to the site to theme.
3. If you do not want to make all sites dark by default, in the extension on the Sites list tab, select Invert listed only and then add the URL for your site to the list.
4. In Dark Reader, under the More menu ensure “only for www.your-site.com” is selected. Then press the Static button for Theme generation mode. A little orangish pen icon will appear on the upper right of the button. Click this.
5. A CSS Editor will open. Ensure your webpage adders is listed at the top and not “All Wbsites”. If all websites is displayed, revisit option 4.
6. Enter your CSS for the page. You’ll need to come up with this for yourself, although there may be some online sources with alternative CSS for popular sites. Check the current sites source code in your browser to help you identify CSS to customise.
7. Click Apply to preview your changes.

As an example, here’s some CSS and examples of the changes you can produce.

/* Main Toolbar Colour */
#main-menu, #main-menu .menu-header.has-submenu, #main-menu .mega-menu-img-menu-link  {
    background: #eb8405;
}

/* Dropdown Menu Pane Background Colour */
#main-menu ul, #main-menu .menu-help-short, #main-menu .mega-menu-img-menu-link.highlighted, #main-menu .menu-header.has-submenu.highlighted, #main-menu .menu-help .submenu-no-hover, #main-menu a:hover
{
    background: #a85f03 !important;
}

/* Dropdown Menu, Hover Over Entry Background Colour */
#main-menu ul a:hover
{
    background: #c2700a !important;
}

/* Dropdown menu bolded title colour */
#main-menu .mega-menu-title
{
    color: #f2a83f !important;
}

/* Dropdown menu seperator line colour */
#main-menu .menu-sep
{
    background: #f2a83f !important;
}

Lastly, it’s worth noting there are other extensions out there that can do this. Dark Reader is one worth looking at however as it’s open source which can be verified to be handling your browsing data in a secure way. For an extension can that access and modify a page, this is always a consideration that should be front of mind.

I obtained a GameSir G8 Galileo recently and was unsure how the device would fare with an iPhone 15 Pro Max in a Bullstrap leather case. GameSir doesn’t specifically advertise case support and I was unable to find information on this configuration. I was prepared to need to take a knife to the GameSir to cut down the rubber patting in order to get a decent USB connection, which some users have had to do with certain cases. It turns out the GameSir G8 works amazingly well paired with the iPhone 15 Pro Max and this leather case and no hacking of the controller was necessary. That’s in part attributed to the open base of the case (which some dislike but I don’t mind) as well as the flexible USB port on the G8.

As a point of comparison the Backbone One 2nd Generation also works well with this phone and case. No problems there either.

Comparing those two devices, the Backbone is much smaller, sleeker and portable, but can be a bit cramped in some titles. The Games on the other hand is massive, similar grip size to an Xbox controller, but is more comfortable to hold. In terms of portability Backblaze has an official case where I haven’t seen a great fitting option yet for the G8.

The one other difference in the G8’s favour is the Backbone has issues with the iOS version of Inside. Horizontal movement works but the jump button and other actions do not. GameSir (and PS5) controllers work fine. As an indication that this may be a bug with the game, if you launch it with a GameSir attached then disconnect the GameSir and insert the phone into the Backbone, the Backbone works then on until Inside is restarted. Odd. I hope the developers fix the title (support ays they’re investigating the issue). Unsure if this issue with the Backbone will crop up in other games or not and hopefully it’s limited to the one release. Even Limbo by the same developer is fine.

Otherwise both are good options for iPhone 15 gaming. I think the devices will become a lot more valuable now we’re seeing titles like Resident Evil 5 and Village coming natively to iPhones. On screen controls just won’t cut it for many titles moving forward.

This article is going to go over the first things I’ll do when logging into a Debian server for the first time. For me, this will be a VPS that has been deployed by a web host, almost always with the latest Debian release. The first things I want to do are update and secure it. Much of should apply to other Linux Distributions.

I’ve been required to oversee a bulk update of a few thousand users into a manually managed portal group for which the FIM Portal is authoritative. Anyone who has had to add more than a few users knows this can be a cumbersome process by hand via the UI. To save time from doing this manually through the Portal interface I’ve thrown together a PowerShell script that will read a CSV file of users and operations (add or remove) and process those requests against a group.

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At one client we’ve had some issues with the consistency of dates as displayed in the FIM Portal. On some systems we were getting the desired AU format of dd/mm/yyyy while on others we had a UTC yyyy-mm-dd format being used on user edit forms, request history and other places.

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