WebDev &Amp; Code on Blowfish

Quickly convert a Xero batch payment CSV to a format that works on Metro Bank

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 12:28:06 +0000

Marathon training, turning planned run times into distances

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 22:36:32 +0000

Building a low power server

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 20:27:26 +0000

Santa-pi, a music player for a charity fundraising float

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 20:29:49 +0000

Solution sharing: My small business phone system, 4 lines, 6 extensions, and costs less than £10 per month

Thu, 28 Sep 2023 16:36:36 +0000

FreePBX adding additional network card

Fri, 09 Jun 2023 15:17:13 +0000

Google workspace – printing the collaborative inbox / printing google groups

Tue, 02 May 2023 09:10:29 +0000

Automatic Letterheads from a printer

Thu, 03 Nov 2022 19:53:55 +0000

Moving my small business [cloud email, file sharing, calendars] to a new provider

Sat, 28 Aug 2021 15:05:48 +0000

Magic letterhead tray – making preprinted stationary automatically on plain white paper

Tue, 19 Nov 2019 09:26:19 +0000

How many 1st class stamps to use on heavy letters?

Fri, 20 Oct 2017 16:13:21 +0000

Google Chrome ” Failed – Network Error.” on downloading files greater than 5MB (ish) – solution for me = Disable QUIC

Mon, 24 Apr 2017 13:32:56 +0000

Blog traffic

Fri, 30 Sep 2016 12:23:53 +0000

Upgrading my server to PHP7 broke wordpress admin interface (cloudflare)

Fri, 30 Sep 2016 12:06:56 +0000

Hot topic – our backup server (overheating!)

Fri, 24 Jun 2016 14:59:23 +0000

Royalty free music and a time lapse video for work

Tue, 05 Jan 2016 12:01:24 +0000

Migrating from phpBB to Google Groups

Tue, 03 Nov 2015 17:09:31 +0000

Birthday Calculator – in case you don't want to wait a whole year to celebrate being alive

Thu, 08 Jan 2015 18:34:11 +0000

Virtual PDF Printer for our small office network – a step by step how to

Sat, 22 Nov 2014 16:23:52 +0000

Alternative title: How I got multiple cups-pdf printers on the same server. (I didn’t, but postprocessing let me work around the problem).

Preamble:

I have a small business. For years we’ve been creating PDFs from any computer on our network through a “virtual appliance’ called YAFPC (“Yet Another Free PDF Composer”).

The appliance originally ran on an old PC, then on a server that ran several other virtual machines. It had a neat web interface and would allow PDF printers to be created that would appear on the network for all of our users to use. It had one printer for plain A4 paper, one for A4 paper with a letterhead background, another one for an obscure use of mine, and so on. If you printed to it, it would email you the PDF (for any user, without any extra setup needed per user). It could also put the PDFs on one of our file servers or make them available from it’s built in file server.

If I remember correctly it cost £30 and ran since 2006 right through until today, November 2014. One of my best software investments!

However, Windows 8 came along and it no longer worked. Getting Windows 8 to print to it directly turned out to be impossible. The program was not going to be updated or replaced with a new version. I managed a short term work around having windows 8 print to a samba printer queue which converted and forwarded to the YAFPC virtual appliance. There were problems, page sizes not be exact and so on but it worked in a fashion.

Roll forward to today when I’ve just got a new network PDF virtual printer working. It wasn’t so easy to do (some 20 hours I guess) so here are my setup notes for others to follow. The final run through of these notes had it installed and working in about an hour.

These steps assume you know quite a bit about setting up linux servers. Please feel free to use the comments to point out errors or corrections, or add more complete instructions, and I’ll edit this post with the updates. Also please suggest alternatives methods that you needed to use to meet your needs.

Overview – We are going to create:

a new Ubuntu based linux server as a virtual machine
Install CUPS, the Common Unix Printing System
Install CUPS-PDF, and extension that allows files to be created from the print queue
Create a postprocessing script that will run every time CUPS-PDF is used that will customise our PDF’s and send them where we want them (to our users).

Sounds simple, right 🙂

sunspot solr slow in production (fixed by using IP address instead of domain name)

Thu, 02 Oct 2014 11:25:02 +0000

BT Wifi hotspots intercept and redirect google SSL searches

Mon, 05 May 2014 07:28:23 +0000

How to change a folder icon to a picture in Mac OS X

Tue, 22 Apr 2014 14:54:49 +0000

VMware consolidated backup missing a catalogue file – fixed!

Sun, 13 Apr 2014 14:23:31 +0000

A quick note on my first steps using stripe.com

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 16:44:40 +0000

A new form of Comment spam? – url shorteners and redirection?

Tue, 21 Jan 2014 14:26:22 +0000

BitDefender v Nod32

Mon, 18 Nov 2013 17:40:10 +0000

Parallels virtual disk much larger on mac than windows is actually using

Tue, 12 Nov 2013 10:55:53 +0000

Network PDF printing from Windows 8

Thu, 24 Oct 2013 15:57:35 +0000

After Win 8.1 update display has shrunk

Thu, 24 Oct 2013 07:51:32 +0000

Mac OS X Screenshot save to folder (instead of desktop)

Fri, 23 Aug 2013 16:13:36 +0000

Rails Sunspot/Solr returning result for single character searches

Wed, 17 Jul 2013 11:47:38 +0000

Backup! (Bye bye TimeMachine, hello Carbon Copy Cloner)

Sun, 07 Jul 2013 10:50:51 +0000

Gandi said thanks :-)

Thu, 23 May 2013 13:08:51 +0000

Extracting images from PDF (free, using command line)

Wed, 22 May 2013 15:01:34 +0000

Building an automatic infrared remote control for the shop

Mon, 06 May 2013 17:27:43 +0000

A quick review of WordPress comment and trackback spam

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 18:46:44 +0000

BT Openzone, Mac OS X connection problems

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 10:13:13 +0000

Grey text on a web page not visible when printing, how to fix it

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 19:46:54 +0000

Mac Timemachine backups are NOT complete

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 16:12:30 +0000

Calc (Openoffice / Libreoffice) If statements using 'between' or 'and'

Sat, 15 Dec 2012 17:02:37 +0000

Gitolite won't let server read repo

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 16:03:54 +0000

WordPress redirects

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 15:26:44 +0000

Technical notes on migrating from MovableType to WordPress

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 22:46:55 +0000

Goodbye MovableType, hello WordPress

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 22:22:19 +0000

Mail merge onto a PDF background

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 15:22:37 +0000

The joy of being a forum/newsgroup moderator

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 09:31:03 +0000

Screen recording on a mac

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 17:39:42 +0000

Useful bash command for ruby programming (find a string within a file including sub directory files)

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 16:30:24 +0000

SPF with google site verification

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 11:07:55 +0000

My SSL certificate was not working in Safari, but it did in Chrome and Firefox

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 15:54:31 +0000

Outlook Web Access – missing options

Sat, 26 May 2012 09:44:27 +0000

Installing Sphinx on Mac OS X Lion

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 12:46:54 +0000

Windows to Mac continued

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 17:44:41 +0000

CRON – multiple cron jobs on one line (running consecutively, not concurrently)

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 20:23:21 +0000

cciss-vol-status on Ubuntu didn't work, it was cciss_vol_status

Sat, 22 May 2010 13:13:34 +0000

ruby on rails sql_type – A reminder for me

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:46:45 +0000

Migrating Coldfusion to Open Bluedragon – form.FIELDNAMES

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 18:21:45 +0000

Fresh Ubuntu install could not resolve domains names – and how I fixed it… maybe

Mon, 04 May 2009 14:17:27 +0000

Ruby woes: NameError and uninitialized constant

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 18:03:20 +0000

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 22:18:08 +0000

Automatic backups of my windows laptop

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 19:05:50 +0000

webERP Virtual Machine

Sat, 24 Feb 2007 16:13:52 +0000

creating a new column in a MySQL select query

Wed, 04 Oct 2006 20:42:29 +0000

First Lessons

Wed, 05 Jul 2006 18:27:37 +0000

My return to education begins…. in a distant sort of way

Wed, 05 Jul 2006 15:51:10 +0000

Woohoo! a new uptime record for my Win XP laptop

Fri, 09 Jun 2006 13:31:15 +0000

I just noticed my laptop was turned on 5 days and 4 hours ago (yes, it’s Friday today, and yes, I do work Sundays). Now, if only I could work for that long without a rest….

The Big Server Move

Tue, 10 Jan 2006 16:26:27 +0000

Linux on a USB Memory Stick

Sun, 10 Jul 2005 01:25:36 +0000

I’ve finally got it working! Linux running of a USB Key.

It wasn’t so hard to set up once I’d found Puppy Linux.

As this is going to get more technical, you’ll have to follow the link to the extended entry about this (otherwise I’ll bore most of you reading this).

New Category – WebDev & Code

Sat, 01 Jan 2005 13:13:20 +0000

I’ve always enjoyed making computers do what I want them to – especially where it saves me doing the same work more than once. That’s why I first learnt to program a computer.