Blog – Mr Ant

AI Text Cleaner

23 Jun 2025 by MrAnt

The AI Text Cleaner is a tool designed to strip away the telltale signs of AI-generated writing, making text feel more natural, human, and authentic. While modern AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini produce fluent prose, they often reveal themselves through overly polite phrasing, unnatural punctuation, and a risk-averse, overly balanced tone. These traits are …

Free QR Code Generator

23 Jun 202527 Sep 2024 by MrAnt

Generate pages of QR codes ready for printing. Simple, but does the job. Free QR Code Generator

Million Dollar Pixel

27 Sep 202427 Sep 2024 by MrAnt

The World is full of many pixels in a variety of many different colours, but this one right here is unused and is available to you right now for the special price of $1,000,000.00 – a cool million United States Dollars. This pixel is the one. That one, there on the left. Frequently asked questions …

Power Apps are rubbish #206

17 Aug 2024 by MrAnt

I want to set a field in a SharePoint List to the current User Easy enough. You can use the Patch Command to update a record in a SharePoint list so as follows? Nope Thanks for the Low Code solution Microsoft!

VPS Hosting comparison

4 Feb 202528 Jul 2024 by MrAnt

Digital Ocean, Hetzner, Linode and Vultr offer some fantastic Virtual Server solutions from as little as $5. A comparison table of the entry level virtual servers from these three providers are listed below and any of them will provide a great solution if you want to run your own server. Linode and Digital Ocean have …

My PHP Singleton

27 Sep 202428 Jul 2024 by MrAnt

If you have not come across design patterns, they are well worth reading up on. There is a great overview for PHP developers at IBM.

Composer behind corporate Proxy Server

10 Apr 202528 Jul 2024 by MrAnt

Don’t use quotes around the parameter Encode passwords with Self signed certificate in certificate chain

Free print at home Xmas Present game

10 Apr 202528 Jul 2024 by MrAnt

Help yourself to a very merry Xmas Present Game, totally free and great fun for the family. Warning This Game can bring out the best and worst in your family.

Show vehicle positions with the Google Maps v3 API

30 Jul 202428 Nov 2018 by MrAnt

Most people are already familiar with Google Maps, so why not utilise that to present your business data to your users. Today I am going to show you how to use the Google Maps API to track vehicles using their AVL data. This is something I have done for the Fire Service to show the location of Fire Engines across the county.

For this we are going to need the following:

JQuery
The Google Maps JavaScript API
A page that displays the google map
Some JavaScript to pull the vehicle locations
A PHP Script to serve the vehicle locations
A way to generate dynamic icons

To start with we will need a simple page that will include the required JavaScript, StyleSheets and HTML code to provide a placeholder for the Google Map.

Generating Dynamic Icons for Google Maps with PHP

30 Jul 202428 Oct 2018 by MrAnt

Google Maps provides a standard Marker marker image that looks like this and whilst I do not intend to offend Ji Lee, this icon can be replaced with an image of your choice. By using PHP to create an image dynamically on the fly you can have images that provide much more information.

Rumblings from a tired mind