March 12, 2017 by Daniel P. Clark

Installing the Adafruit 2.8″ TFT Display on the Raspberry Pi

One thing I’ve learned over and over from working on the Raspberry Pi is that it’s most likely going to take a chunk of time to get things set up just the way you want.  And this display is no different. I’ve written in the past about How to Play HD Video on a Raspberry…

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April 4, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

Getting Started with MiniTest

Whet ever you may believe about testing practices; tests still provide some peace of mind and clarity in projects.  Also; if you build a library for others to use, tests are a form of validation of your work and provide trustworthiness to your code.  In the case of working with a large project that is…

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January 28, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

Rails Helper Methods

When I had started developing in Rails it was months before I even heard of “Helper Methods”.  I did see the folder in the app directory, but I didn’t see any use for it at the time.  I mean Rails is pretty much Model-View-Controller, so why would anyone need helper methods? Well once I found…

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January 1, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

When to use Ampersand and/or Colon with Proc, Map, and Inject

So with Ruby permitting Procs called on Objects I’ve found sometimes a Colon Method will work, and sometimes you need a Ampersand Colon Method.  For example, when I map &:upcase on a list of strings it works. [“a”,”b”,”c”].map(&:upcase) # = > [“A”, “B”, “C”] But if I try without the Ampersand I get: [“a”,”b”,”c”].map(:upcase) #…

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August 4, 2014 by Daniel P. Clark

Create a Game Instance in Rails

So you need to load a class instance in Rails for your visitors to play your game. But Rails generally is a static website with static database lookups. So for this we’re going to assign a class instance to a game room. First let’s generate our project; we’re going to start with a prebuilt devise/bootstrap…

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August 1, 2014 by Daniel P. Clark

Manual Polymorphic Creation in Rails

Finding documentation online to do this was pretty much a no go.  The answer I’ve provided here was grasped from hints given on many websites of what could be done but without anything I could really sink my teeth into. What this code allows you to accomplish is to create a belongs_to/has_many relationship to something…

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March 12, 2013 by Daniel P. Clark

Part 2: Stepping Up With Tor

Alright.  So you’re in Linux and you’ve got Firefox running through your Tor client.  There are now two more things you need.  One is to update to the latest version of Tor.  And secondly to use any other application through Tor rather then just Firefox. So.  Here you are on that free wifi again.  And…

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March 10, 2013 by Daniel P. Clark

Privacy is Available Online.

One thing that people lack when they use the internet is privacy.  Well the good news is is that there is a solution for that.  Keeping your sessions encrypted and private is recommended to help prevent your personal information from being stolen. Do you enjoy free wifi hotspots?  Well now you can use them securely…

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February 3, 2013 by Daniel P. Clark

My Initial Raspberry Pi Raspbian Configuration

So I ordered the Raspberry Pi Version B for $35.  And boy was I surprised at how really small it is. So first thing I did was hook it up.  But I can’t run it without an operating system so I downloaded the Raspbian OS 2012-12-16-wheezy-raspbian.zip from http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads. Unzipped it to get 2012-12-16-wheezy-raspbian.img . And then…

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