Solution: Can't start MAMP 3.2 on Mac OS X Yosemite

Trying to prepare my laptop for a bit of coding practice, so I decided to grab the free version of MAMP 3.2 to use on my Macbook Air. I download and installed the app and tried to fire up the servers, but I got an error: Apache couldn't be started. Please check your MAMP settings.

After a lot of searching, including a lot of old solutions that recommended changing envvars to _envvars, I finally found the solution. Manually trying to start MAMP via console I saw this error:

httpd: Syntax error on line 83 of /Applications/MAMP/conf/apache/httpd.conf: Cannot load /Applications/MAMP/Library/modules/mod_example.so into server: dlopen(/Applications/MAMP/Library/modules/mod_example.so, 10): image not found

So to fix the problem, I edited the httpd.conf file and commented out (#) the load module for mod_example and it worked. I've no idea why the default httpd.conf file references a missing module, but that seems to have fixed it!

Let me know if this helps you.

Stop auto-selection of text in Office 2013

In Outlook I found something very frustrating, when you select part of a sentence or word, it tries to 'help' by selecting the rest of the word. This isn't always that handy, for example when you're trying to copy something within brackets. I finally found the solution, thanks to Electroscribe_2014 on this thread. As ever, I'm recording it here for future reference in case the source gets edited/lost.

So, to stop automatic/smart selection of your text in Outlook 2013, take these steps:

1. In the File menu, choose Options.
2. Click Mail.
3. Click Editor Options.
4. Click Advanced.
5. Clear the checkbox next to When selecting, automatically select entire word.