Using Laravel Vite with MAMP
As seen in other posts, I use MAMP quite a bit for my web development environment. I know I can run docker, or any of the other platforms out there but they use more memory and resources that I'd prefer to devote to my dev tools.
I started a new Laravel project and wanted to use MAMP but Vite was throwing errors due to the SSL not matching out of the box.
When adding
How to use Backblaze B2 with Laravel
I am working on a Laravel project and decided to use a Backblaze bucket as it's cheaper for storage when compared to AWS S3. I couldn't find a tutorial on how to get it working from scratch and I tested a bunch of Laravel B2 libraries that didn't end up working. The good news is that you don't need a special B2 plugin and instead can use the S3 package recommended by the Laravel docs.
If you haven't added the flysystem-aws-s3 package, add it to your project using composer:
How to Clear Archive & Read-only flags on Files in Windows in Bulk
I ran into an issue where I had to move files from one system to another and was running into issues because files had been set as read-only, had the archive flag set, or both. It was causing the system to skip files which wasn't acceptable. Normally you could just use Windows to clear it in bulk, but that could potentially mess up file permissions. I needed a way to automatically just clear all flags but respect permissions.
I did some searching and didn't find a utility that would do the job and most of the solutions I found required Powershell which wasn't available on the system I was on. I ended up writing a quick console application in C# to do the trick. I've made it free and open sourced it in case anyone wants to use it.
If you need just the app, you can find the release build here with instructions. The app also prompts for input to make things a bit easier to use. There's no install, no tracking or metrics, or anything else related to privacy concerns in this app. It's a simple throwaway utility to get the job done and move on.
https://github.com/gregvarghese/clearflags/releases/tag/1.0.0
If you want to see the source code, that is available here:
https://github.com/gregvarghese/clearflags/
Please note that I did this in about 10 minutes for my own use so error handling is pretty much non-existent. I mention this because I did run into one issue where Windows was somehow seeing a folder with files in it as a file and it couldn't be deleted or renamed and the utility couldn't get past it until it was resolved. I didn't spend much time debugging and just used my Mac to rename the folder and Windows was able to recognize it after the change, so the utility was able to continue processing.
How to Generate a Page for Each Day of Month in Microsoft Word using VBA
I briefly joined my wife at her practice to help her grow the business and figure out how to make things more efficient. One of the things I learned is that my wife created a sign-in sheet for the office in Microsoft Word. Every week she would open the file and manually enter the date for each day of the week and then print out the documents. I took over the responsibility for a month and it annoyed me due to how inefficient the process was and I decided to automate the entire thing. I couldn't find a solution to the problem online so I had to roll my own and am sharing the code in case someone else can benefit from it.
How to Extract Text from image using Laravel and Amazon Rekognition API
I'm currently working on a project that requires extracting text from images of variable quality. I'm doing quick prototypes using PHP and Laravel, but I've found the documentation for accomplishing this a bit lacking. After working on it for a bit, I figured out a really simple solution and am sharing in case it helps anyone else.
This sample will send the image to the API as a blob instead of using a URL. I had tried Base64 encoding it without any luck. I discovered that using Imagick was the easiest way to make this work so the sample relies on that.
Fire up terminal and add a requirement for aws/aws-sdk-php:
How to get shape type in Visio using VBA?
I'm working with a Visio 2016 file with over 100 tabs and need to extract the data (mainly text, connector from/to, and shape) for data processing for a processing engine. I was trying to figure out how to get the shape type name in Visio using VBA. For example, in a flowchart, I'm trying to figure out how to tell if a shape is a process, decision, data, etc. The
How to remove wrapping tags in PHP Storm
How often do you code something and need to delete a wrapping link or div? I was using PHPStorm and had grabbed some code from another file that had links in the tags which weren't needed in the new file. I didn't want to manually remove each link and after a quick look around PHPStorm's menus, discovered that PHPStorm has a really useful command to remove the wrapping element for you.
Select the element, then from the menu, choose Code > Unwrap/Remove... or use the keyboard shortcut, Command + Shift + Backspace and then choose the appropriate wrapping element to remove.
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:
How to Reset Sitecore 7.1 & Sitecore 7.5 Forgotten/Lost Admin Password
In working on implementing a Sitecore site into an existing code base inherited from another vendor, I discovered that the admin password had been modified and the vendor would not share it. Not being able to login to the admin section of Sitecore was not ideal to say the least. After scouring the web, most articles contained instructions on how to reset the password, but almost all of them applied to Sitecore 6 and below. For Sitecore 7 and above, most articles were not applicable as they introduced the PasswordSalt field into the database which Sitecore uses to hash the password. If you've run into a similar situation, or you've forgotten or lost your admin account password, getting access back to everything is pretty simple. Load SQL Management (or your favorite SQL editor) and execute this query against your Core database: