Several months back, we realized that we go through WAY too much paper here in the GetOffTheComputer.com office complex. Being the high-tech geeks that we are, we set out on a mission to move our office into the 21st century and eliminate as much paper as possible. How’d we do it you ask? I’ll spare you the boring technical details and give you a much easier solution, Win2PDF. Win2PDF is a shareware program that installs a faux printer driver on your Windows computer, allowing you to print to an Adobe Acrobat PDF file instead of paper. This may seem like a foreign idea or even somewhat silly, but there are huge advantages. This obviously won’t work if you need to turn in a term paper to your 95-year old German professor or if you’re printing out directions to your hotel in Vegas for your next family vacation, but if you’re printing a ton of pages each day for archival purposes, STOP! There is no loss in quality of the documents when you print to PDF and the cost is actually amazingly less than it’s paper counterpart. Once you have the file in PDF form, you can print only selected pages if you need them. A common occurence here is needing to print a document that spans 200 pages so that we can pick out any of the pages that have the phrase “u R 1337″ or “w3 0wnz u!” on them. Open up the PDF, search for these pages, and print only the ones you need.

Win2PDF is only one of many utilities out there that do the same thing. Win2PDF is shareware so we strongly encourage you to purchase and register a full version so you can stay legal.

The example… (more…)

I recently finished a little PHP program to process online forms for my work. I couldn’t find anything on the net generic enough to do everything I needed it to do. Basically, this program parses the PDF and emails the recipient with the information, among a few other things. For the purpose of this tutorial, that’s all that needs to be said, anyway. Today I’m going to give you a little write-up on the mail function in PHP.
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Online rental of DVD’s is not a new concept by any means. What is new in recent months is that another provider has surfaced. Several months back, the chain rental store Blockbuster entered this market to compete with the existing companies offering this service such as Netflix and Wal-Mart. All of these companies offer practically an identical service on paper, but how it’s handled in reality is quite different. The company sends your movies in an envelope that doubles as the return envelope with the postage prepaid. All you have to do is open the package, watch the movie, seal the package back up, and put it in your mailbox.
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