Boshdirect

Have you ever wanted to have a single URL with a standard web port to access all the web services you run on your NAS? Most consumer Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices come with a built-in web server which can be used to share all of your services under one address.

Summary

How does this work you might ask? Web servers can route traffic to other servers using what’s called a “Reverse Proxy.” A proxy is a server or device which can act as an intermediary for other devices. In this case, the web server in your NAS can proxy traffic from other web servers on the same machine or even in the network. This allows you to have a single base URL like http://myserver.com which you can use for all your traffic. Each of your servers will then either be accessible via a subdomain or path.

Subdomain

• http://app1.myserver.com
• http://app2.myserver.com

Path

• http://myserver.com/app1
• http://myserver.com/app2

Azure Functions provide a flexible and easy way to run code without having to worry about spinning up servers, managing an OS, or even managing a service. For that matter, with Azure Functions you only pay when your code is running. Microsoft takes care of spinning up the servers and services to run your code and you are only charged for the time your code is actually running. The beauty of Azure Functions is you focus on writing your logic while Microsoft takes care of everything else it takes to run the code in a scalable fashion.

Reolink, the manufacturer of several IP camera and Network Video Recorder (NVR) products, recently released a firmware update for their line of IP cameras enabling the ability to view the camera streams through HTML 5 enabled browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge.

Update: An update to the firmware seems to have established Flash as a requirement to view the streams from the browser. While this isn’t as bad as needing a proprietary plugin as was needed in old firmware, it’s still not quite as good as being completely plugin free for modern browsers.

It feels a bit odd to be excited about an IP camera that doesn’t require a browser plugin in 2016 considering browser plugins like Flash, Silverlight, and ActiveX components have died out across most parts of the web, but this is the sad reality of IP cameras where custom plugins, ActiveX components, and custom Chrome Apps are fairly standard. Mind you, if you are using your mobile phone you are probably going to prefer to use a mobile app from the vendor or even a third party app like TinyCam Pro or Blue Iris, but it’s nice to be able to pull up a browser and access your camera without having to install anything.

I’ve working on porting SharpTools, my Android home automation app, to Amazon Fire TV and Android TV using the Google Leanback library and ran into a snag today. After building a GuidedStepFragment, I was getting the error “Unable to start activity ComponentInfo{}: android.view.InflateException: Binary XML file line #22: Binary XML file line #22: You must supply a layout_width attribute.”

At first, I was a bit baffled as the developer guidelines clearly state that GuidedStepFragments should be added programmatically and not via XML files and there weren’t any clear references to our control over the XML file. I took a quick peek at the manifest from the androidtv-Leanback example and quickly realized the difference – they were explicitly specifying the theme in the activity declaration. In their example, they were using a modified theme, but in my case I simply added the theme attribute with the default Theme.Leanback.GuidedStep and everything started working as expected.

<activity
    android:name=".tv.TVSetup"
    android:label="@string/action_settings"
    android:theme="@style/Theme.Leanback.GuidedStep">

What is an Azure Queue?

Azure Queues allow you to store a large number of lightweight messages leveraging Azure Storage. Typical use cases for queues include buffering a set of data or actions for processing. And since the Queues are part of Azure Storage they are super cheap. As of writing this, each queue message can be 64 KB in size and a queue can hold millions of messages (up to the capacity of the storage account).

Examples:

Scott Hanselman has a post showing how an Azure Queue can be used along with Azure WebJobs to offload processing of images. This is a great example as it shows how a real application might accept images from a user in real-time, then use a queue as the hand-off for another service to actually process the images.

As another example, I have used Queues as a temporary staging ground for incoming IoT data from my connected SmartHome where a WebJob then took care of properly sorting the data and moving it to the destination Azure Table Storage location. This allowed me to take advantage of the massively scalable architecture of Azure Queues instead of having my logic running on a Web App where I would have had to take care of scalability.

Looking for Tasker Integration or Widgets for SmartThings? You are headed in the right direction. Checkout the Android app SharpTools for additional information.

http://sharptools.boshdirect.com/features

A summary of my findings with the Stick-N-Find stickers and their usability as an iBeacon / Bluetooth LE proximity device. I ordered a set of Estimote Beacons and Stick-N-Find stickers and have been playing with automation concepts within Android. In particular, I wanted to be able to have my Android device understand the proximity to a location and have a general understanding of indoor positioning.

Note: If you just want to know how to Configure your Stick-N-Find for use in Tasker, jump to Configure as iBeacon

There are several options for running a Raspberry Pi operating system on a 2GB SD card, but in the this blog post I’d like to talk about how to install the ‘official’ distribution, Raspbian, on a smaller SD card. This method requires the minimal Raspbian Unattended Netinstaller which can be found at the following link:

https://github.com/debian-pi/raspbian-ua-netinst

The readme file that is shown on the base GitHub project linked above covers the basics of installing the operating system which I will briefly touch on here and the cover a few additional configuration options I choose to do. Some of the key things I like about the raspbian-ua-netinst project is that it fits on a 512 MB card, it downloads the required components through an internet connection via the Ethernet port, and it can do all the hard work completely unattended.

At a high level, here is what is needed to perform the install. (Reference the github link above for more detailed instructions):

• Grab a 512 MB or larger SD card
• Download the 10 MB installer package
• Format the SD card as FAT32
• Unpack the installer archive
• Copy the unpacked files to the SD Card
• Plug the SD card and a network cable into the Pi
• Power up the Pi and let it install (this is the unattended part mentioned above)