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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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: […]