I’m working on an app for tracking meals at work, so I’m setting up a couple Mac minis as servers.

The first time I worked on this app, I used MAMP to help with development. It was very handy and made a complex task much easier for me.

But, I always felt like I was taking the easy way out. That by skipping the server setup, I was missing some knowledge that would be useful, elsewhere.

So, now that we’re slowly returning to work, I have been charged with getting the Meal Tracker back up and running.

This time, I have a couple Mac minis (one at home and one at work). I’ll be setting them up with MySQL and PHP and Apache. And, I’ll be setting them up “properly.”

I found these pages useful:

Install Apache, PHP, MySQL and phpMyAdmin on Mac OS X

Updating Apache, PHP, and MySQL for macOS Catalina

I was thinking that something that has changed, since the last time I worked on this, is that I’m much more comfortable working in the Terminal and working on servers, in general. This time, I am using Homebrew to help manage installations.

But, now, I’m wondering about whether I should be using Docker…

We recently added an AppleTV to our home entertainment setup. I love it. It solves multiple problems we have encountered with our “home media experience.”

Our CD collection used to be right next to our CD player. It was easy to browse and select something to play. Our collection now has almost 2000 CDs and they’re now in a room at the other end of the house.

It’s really cramped the music listening. As a result, we don’t listen to our music as much. We listen to the radio (which, in my opinion is not always desirable)

Another thing, we have thousands of photos. But we only have a few dozen printed out and on display.

The AppleTV has made it easy to browse our collection of music, photographs, and movies. And it’s done it without adding (a) stacks of discs to our living room, or (b) lots of big electronic boxes to our living room decor. (not that I’d mind, but I’m not the only one who lives here.)

As much as I dislike most traditional radio stations, I love the medium. So, I’m turning to internet-based stations. On my desktop computer, which is in the office, at the back of the house, I can use iTunes to browse and listen to tons of great stations.

I know that there are others in my house that are turned off by the list of hundreds of stations. So I created a playlist of about a dozen internet radio stations in iTunes. I was a bit irked when it didn’t appear in my list of playlists on the AppleTV.

But, just now, I went to the radio section of AppleTV and at the top of the list of genres, is my playlist! It made me laugh! I love it!