Archive

Good customer service is becoming more valuable

More and more often, poor customer service seems to be the norm. I purchased a new washer and dryer two days ago on costco.ca. Everything went through and payment was processed. Then out of nowhere I receive an email last night saying that the order was cancelled. Reason: out

World Cup: thoughts after the Round of 16

Brazil & Croatia Brazil look good but I kind of think they haven’t faced a real challenge yet. They should beat Croatia but I’ll be really interested to see what happens if they meet Portugal in the semi-finals. Croatia didn’t look very good in their last game but

Browser & OS password managers encourage poor password habits

On the surface, built-in password managers like Chrome's password management or Apple's Keychain provide a useful service. They make things more convenient for users to create different passwords for different services and make it easier to not have to repeat insecure passwords over and over. Yet, despite any convenience that

Rebuilding Kipos & learning online marketing

Kipos was one of the first applications I built with Ruby on Rails. The app allows you to view your upcoming bill payments and paycheques, check off that you have paid them, and view a forecast of your future account balance based on your upcoming cash flow and your current

Change Ruby version with RBENV

Check versions installed on your machine: rbenv versions Install a specific version to your machine: (replace 3.1.2 with the version you want to install) rbenv install 3.1.2 Install the latest stable version of Ruby: rbenv install -l Set the Ruby version of a specific application by

Mix: Long Game Learning, Atmospheric Pressure, Bitcoin

Long game learning It took around two and a half years from the time I started learning to code to the day I was able to switch my career  100% to web and software development. There are plenty of stories of people who have made that journey in a quicker

Server is already running

From your project directory: cat tmp/pids/server.pid (or project_path/tmp/pids/server.pid if not in project directory) This will return a port number. kill -9 port_number (insert port number from above) Unsafe way if the above doesn't work connection to server at "localhost" (::1), port

Edit Rails Credentials

You can edit your Rails credentials file using the nano editor in Terminal using the following command.

Mix: International Space Station, Real Estate, Bitcoin

The International Space Station is only 408km from the surface of the earth. That is less than four hours of highway driving in terms of distance.

Open links in a new tab for Ghost

Ghost currently doesn't provide the option to set a link to open in a new tab. So in order to do this, a little bit of Javascript is needed. Here is the code snippet that can be added to your site. To do so, visit the Code Injection page in

Edit Rails credentials with RubyMine on Mac

You can use RubyMine to edit your Rails credentials file on Mac with the following command: EDITOR="/Applications/RubyMine.app/Contents/MacOS/rubymine --wait" rails credentials:edit This will open the file for editing in RubyMine and wait until the file is saved before saving and encrypting the encrypted version

Measuring elapsed time with Ruby

Over the weekend I was working on a side project and I found myself needing to improve the speed of certain methods, so looked up some ways to measure time in Ruby for this purpose. Several posts gave the obvious answer - set a start_time variable at start, set

Goodbye WordPress, Hello Ghost

The time to say goodbye to WordPress is here. I've migrated my blog to Ghost. Even though WordPress was the start of my journey into web development and programming, I can't really say I'm sad to be writing this. I don't feel a single shred of attachment to what WordPress

Customizing Gmail's appearance to make it less busy

I don’t use Gmail for personal email and switched to Fastmail a couple years ago with a custom domain. I very much dislike Google’s invasiveness and don’t want them scanning my personal email. However, when it comes to business tools, there’s not much else that provides

Rbenv Unable to Change Ruby Version on Mac OS

I’ve run into this issue on two different Mac machines now so I figured I would document the solution if it comes up again or if it comes up for someone else. Basically – you can’t get your terminal to use the Ruby version that you want. You run

Simple Pagination Concern for Ruby on Rails

This is a reusable pagination concern that provides a simple solution for pagination in a Ruby on Rails application. Some of the code comes from Jonathan Allard who originally shared it here. However, I came across issues with the original code when specifying which page should be displayed. Rails would

Why I Stopped Using Roam Research and Started Again a Year Later

I started using Roam Research sometime in early 2021. While it was rough around the edges, there was a lot I liked about it and I found myself easily using it. As I used it I realized that I was using it for everything. Personal notes, planning my day, logging

Crypto Wallets Cannot Be Frozen

All these reports about crypto wallets being frozen are very deceptive. With the way these things are being reported, it makes me wonder if they’re purposely attempting to delegitimize crypto. If they’re not, then uninformed journalists are doing a really poor job of researching and understanding the subjects

Spin up a new Rails 7 Tailwind app with the app generator

TL;DR: spin up a new rails app with Tailwind with this command: rails new app --css tailwind I don’t know about you but I feel like my life would be just a tiny bit better if I didn’t ever have to ever work with CSS – which is

Use Base Controller

In a Rails app, when dealing with controllers that live within the same directory, we can create a base controller that those controllers can inherit from. This approach allows us to keep our code DRY and clean. controllers/ application_controller.rb admin/ base_controller.rb posts_controller.rb comments_controller.

Weird Heroku Gotcha: JPG not JPEG

I just deployed a change to Heroku where I added a .jpeg image and it broke the app. Apparently, you cannot use .jpeg extensions on Heroku – at least not using Rail’s <%= image_tag %>. I didn’t attempt to use an HTML tag to see if the issue still occurred.

Customize your VSCode font sizes

To edit your VSCode settings, use COMMAND + P to open your command palette and search for settings.json. Open the file. Once open, you can customize VSCode by adding the lines listed below. General Sizing The ZoomLevel setting allows you to adjust the size of everything within the VSCode window.

Your Google Analytics Metrics May Not Be Accurate

One of the reasons those annoying cookie notices are on so many websites now is because of analytics tools like Google Analytics that collect user data. Cookie notices really are not a positive user experience in any way. No one likes being interrupted by them. In addition to that, it

How to Add Super Admin to WordPress Multi-site Network

The simplest way to add a user as super admin is to have another super admin grant super admin privileges from WordPress dashboard. However, there may be times when this is not possible or is not convenient and you still need to add a super admin to your multi-site Another

Rails Hotwire First Impressions

Finally had some time to dive into Rails Hotwire earlier this week and the process was so smooth. It really does feel like “new magic” and I cannot wait to get started on some new projects with this. However, apparently, Devise does not yet work out of the box with

Text messaging is a nuisance

I came across this new service called texts.com over the weekend that looks promising. If it does what it says, I may not have to hate text messaging anymore. Text Messaging is really a nuisance. I don’t mean the people sending the messages, I mean the actual messaging

My new Household Assistant: Alfred

I started working on a new personal project a few weekends ago that I am referring to as Alfred. The general concept of Alfred at this stage is that Alfred is a custom Household Assistant that is able to help keep track of various useful data points for around the

It's none of my business if you opened my email

It’s none of my business if you opened my email. And it’s none of your business if I opened yours. Email tracking software may enable us to snoop on each other, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay. Just because I may find the information useful, that

iOS 14.5 is more than just a software update

As you may have heard, Apple just released a new update for iPhone and iPad, iOS 14.5. What makes this release more notable than most is that it includes a new feature called App Tracking Transparency. App Tracking Transparency requires an app to request permission from you in order

How to Edit Your Hosts File on Mac

Follow the below instructions to update your hosts file on Mac. 1. Open Terminal 2. Type in the following command to open your host file in Terminal: sudo nano /etc/hosts You’ll then be asked for your user password, enter it. Terminal will open the nano editor and it

Avoid Spam Filters with Proper G Suite Email Configuration

G Suite – Google’s all-in-one IT solution for businesses is a fantastic tool. It offers so much for such a reasonable price that it can get any small business up and running with email, calendar, Drive, docs, spreadsheets and much more. And not only that, but it’s quite simple

6 Reasons to Use Slack on Your Team

Email has its place in the workplace, but it’s far from a perfect communications tool. There are many times when email is not ideal for certain discussions, and that’s usually where a messaging application like Slack comes in. As a contractor who primarily works remotely, instant messaging applications

Accept Payments On Your Site Without a Heavy Shopping System

Have you ever needed to accept payments on your site but don’t have a payment system built in? Today I’m going to walk through setting up Stripe Checkout on one of your webpages. What’s great about Stripe Checkout is that you don’t have to design anything,

Create a Next Steps Page for Your Church Website

If you’ve been in the church for any length of time, then you surely know about the Connection Card. They’ve been an important part of how churches stay in contact and connect with members or new guests for a long time (as far back as I can remember

Set up a WordPress site to require an invite code

I recently built a website for a wedding and a specific feature they wanted was for the website only to be available to their guests. We didn’t want to have to deal with any cumbersome user login system, but just something simple that only invited guests would be able

Your Church Website Needs to Be More Than Just an Info Board

Churches today are faced with both an opportunity and a challenge that we’ve never seen before. The online world has shifted the way we communicate, consume information, and the way first impressions are made. First impressions are no longer made in person or when someone steps through your door.