Today, Paul Thurrot confirmed that Windows 8.1 was going to bring back the Start button, boot to the desktop, and use your desktop wallpaper as the Start background too. Unfortunately, these do not fix (m)any of the user experience issues that have been brought up by a majority of the users. The Start button is slightly less than obsolete (we’re still clicking in the bottom left to bring up the Start screen, does it really matter if a button is there or if an icon shows up when our cursor is in the bottom left)? ...

Creating a PDF (optionally, a flattened / uneditable PDF) from PHP code is super easy when using The PDF Toolkit (or PDFtk for short). Most web hosting providers already have it installed on their servers, and those that don’t will usually either install it for free or for a small fee. If you need to install PDFtk on your server, you can download the latest version here. Lets get started on filling in that PDF form with our PHP code… ...

Windows 7 introduced us to libraries, which are supposed to make it easier to find, work with, and organize files across your computer and network. Each library brings related files together in one place – regardless of where they are actually stored on your computer or network. However, you could not add a non-indexed (either locally or remotely) network location to your Windows 7 libraries! Optimistically, I was hoping that with Windows 8 I would be able to easily add these non-indexed network locations like the folders on my QNAP NAS through the normal menus. Unfortunately, I was too optimistic – you can’t. ...

I am super excited to write this post because it is the first of many awesome posts you will see on this blog! My name is Ryan Kempt and I’m a web developer, network engineer and creative thinker. I love problem solving, clean code, security and efficiency. I once thought being a master at one thing was the best way to go but since have become a little bit of a generalist. My skills now range from database design and complex queries, to reverse engineering and application cracking, to configuring network security appliances, to scripting and web development, and even a little bit of design. ...