How to Prevent Raspberry Pi Zero from Blanking or Sleeping
I was setting up a Raspberry Pi Zero in an office to use for displaying a slide show of pictures on a TV in the waiting room and dismayed to learn it would constantly go to sleep after a few minutes. I researched and tried setting the consoleblank=0 in config.txt with no luck along many other solutions, but learned none of them worked for the Raspberry Pi Zero.
I'm not sure why, but I got an error that some dependencies were not installed. If that happens to you as well, run this command in terminal:
and then run the install for xscreensaver again
Now under Preferences, you'll see a new option for screen saver:
On the Display Modes tab, you'll see a drop down for Mode. Choose "Disable Screen Saver":
Your raspberry pi zero will now no longer go to sleep.
How to test email sending in Laravel 5.3 using artisan tinker
I'm building a Laravel app and ran into an error when trying to send mail but wasn't getting an error back since the request was posted through ajax. If you're trying to troubleshoot it, artisan tinker app is very useful to get more information on the error.
Fire up terminal/command line and run:
and then run the following snippet:
You should either see a success/null message if everything was correct, or an error with details on what went wrong.
The error I encountered required configuring 2FA in Gmail or you can choose setting the insecure app option up to send through Gmail for testing.