Last week I read about the functions imagegrabscreen() and imagegrabwindow(). They were added to gdlib and are available in PHP since version 5.2.2. Because I got excited I installed the latest version of WAMP5 on my windows XP laptop (the functions are windows-only) and started typing. The examples on php.net however will not work at first when you use WAMP out-of-the-box, so this is a little how-to document about how to get it working.

Some weeks ago I experienced the most severe amount of stress I have ever experienced. Of course I had some healthy stress before, which is good because without it the job would most probably get pretty boring. But this time it was different. First my shoulders and neck started hurting, and after a while my head started to ache as well. When I continued I realised my hands were shaking severely. It was a weird and not very pleasant experience. I thought I knew what stress was but this was something totally different. Whatever it was, I knew I didn't want it to happen ever again. My quest for reducing stress had started!