Rx

Converting a PDF to ePUB format isn’t difficult, but getting quality results seems to be nigh on impossible.

DevelopRx assembled a team of crack engineers (actually just me) to tackle this issue and solve it using readily available open source software (a.k.a. FREE!).

The process described in this article is primarily for text-based PDFs with common headers and footers otherwise known as “books.”

Git is a software configuration management (SCM) program. This is just a fancy way of saying that it’s a software package that tracks and controls changes in the code.

I initially installed Git because I was playing around with Vagrant (local web development). It’s also a safe way to get the nerdy Bash shell (UNIX-like scripting language) for Windows without going into Cygwin .

Looks like updating Local WordPress version can be a painless. First, fully backup your local WordPress folder. Download the latest version of WordPress. Unzip it. Overwrite the local Wordpress files.

So far, so good.

The planets aligned and I lost three years of emails. I had backups and, as a last resort, surely my host did too, right? Nope.

It’s too late for my emails. Maybe it’s not too late for yours.

Here’s what happened and how you can keep your emails safe…

There was a Kevin Costner movie where he kept on hearing, “Build it and they will come.”

Great for Kevin, not so good for webpages. If you want to be found on the net, you need more… SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Some audio files in M4A format do not play on some devices.

Remuxing reassembles the data packets of the audio stream and that’s exactly how to fix the problem.

I have some video files in MP4 format. I want rip out the audio (.M4a) without re-encoding.

This method uses a command line program and a batch file, but YOU CAN DO IT!

Clean up that M4 Garbage!

Ever been sloppy and left a bunch of junk at the beginning of a screen recording figuring to trim it up later?  Easy, just grab a free MP4 trimming tool and clean it up, right? Ah… no.

MS-Word and PowerPoint recognize only bold/italic even if other styles are installed?

I found the perfect font to use for titles in a presentation, Raleway Semi-bold. I installed it and when I went back to PowerPoint, I had two options: bold and italic. So, where’s semi-bold? A quick search found that it’s a MS-Office problem. A hack around it was to remove all other variations of the bold font, except for the semi-bold. This would be great unless I wanted to use the actual bold font. My solution was to rename the Semi-Bold Raleway font and install it as a “new” font.

Duplicator is a WordPress plugin to backup, migrate, copy or clone a site from one location to another.

I wrote a recipe up some time ago to do a localhost database restore using Duplicator, but never prettied it up. Since it might be of use to someone in the future (like me), I’m going to go head and publish it.