How to Get Laravel Debugging to work with PHPStorm and MAMP Pro 5
This has been one of the more aggravating things I've had to deal with in setting up software for development. I've followed the official documentation from JetBrains, over 30 other blog tutorials, and literally failed in getting any of them to work.
I figured out an easy way to make the setup work so I'm sharing it in case someone else finds it useful and for self-reference since I'll probably forget how to do this again in 6 months when I start a new project.
How to Automate Sending Emails through Outlook interop using C#
I was tasked with a tricky issue in sending emails. Due to security concerns, the client's IT team was not willing to share SMTP information for their mail settings and was only willing to set up an account in Outlook directly on a dedicated machine without sharing the password with us to send the emails. The client's ask was to send emails through Outlook without letting users see the emails or Outlook itself.
Self-signed SSL certificates not working with MAMP and Chrome
I use MAMP Pro for most of my PHP development and Chrome has annoyingly been blocking the self-signed SSL certificates MAMP generates, saying the certificate is not valid and "Your connection is not private":
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 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.
How to fix VMWare Fusion Pro 10 “Cannot find a valid peer process to connect to”
I recently got a new mac and was migrating a VMWare Windows Virtual Machine from my other computer. When starting the virtual machine, I received a random message from VMWare Fusion saying "Cannot find a valid peer process to connect to." The fix was rather simple as it was just Apple blocking VMWare from running. To fix it, follow these steps:
Windows 7 & 10 How to Bulk Unblock Blocked Files
While setting up a new computer, Windows was throwing up warnings that files transferred from a backup drive might be unsafe. The files were text and images, so the warnings were safe to ignore but the directory had over one thousand files. Rather than unblocking each file manually, Windows PowerShell makes it easy to unblock files in bulk. Load up Windows Powershell:
How to Fix ‘Converter Failed to Save File’ with Excel 2016
I recently upgraded to Office 2016 on my Windows 10 desktop and was getting the error "Converter failed to save file" when double clicking on the file along with an "There was a problem sending the command to the program error" every time. I finally had enough with the annoyance to troubleshoot it and figured out a solve. If you have the same issue, here's how to fix it:
One-line snippet to update linux and apps on Ubuntu using apt-get
I find myself using this command on Digitalocean droplets fairly often and am sharing in case anyone else finds it useful. Use this one line to install all updates, security fixes, and system upgrades.