I’d decided to make a good list of my previous owned mobile phones. I have blogged about it before. And made a list of it back in 2013, so it’s time for an update:
Nokia 5110 Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Nokia 3210 Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Nokia 5210 Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Alcatel 511 Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Motorola T720 Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Sony Ericsson W800 Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
HTC S710 (first Windows Mobile phone for me) Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
LG Cookie (worst phone ever!) Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
HTC Touch Diamond 2 (2nd Windows Mobile) Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
HTC Desire (Android 2.x never got to 4.x) Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
HTC Desire C (Android 4.x never got to 4.1 etc.) Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Nokia Lumia 920 (Windows Mobile 7, 7.5 and even Phone 8) Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Nokia Lumia 930 (Windows Phone 8) Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Microsoft Lumia 950 (Windows 10 Mobile) Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Nokia 8 (Android 7 or 8, now running 9) Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
There are rumors about the Nokia 9 which seems awesome, but I've also heard good stories about the Xaomi Mix serie. I will stick to my Nokia 8 for a bit longer.
My previous blog post was about my history with mobile phones. How I have switched from Windows Mobile to Android to Windows Phone and back to Android. I have had a temporary car in the beginning of this month. It was a highline Volkswagen Polo which contained the native Volkswagen RS multimedia system. Android Auto worked perfect. Of course I had to download the .apk myself on the phone. But there are plenty of guides explaining that. I was really excited that my new car (Volkswagen Golf) Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.would contain a Pioneer system. It was the Pioneer AVIC-EVO1-G72-BBF which has Apple Carplay and Android Auto. I connected my phone with a cable and…. nothing. So I called the Volkswagen dealer and they had to look into it. I got a call back that I would not have that option which seemed weird to me because it was the top most feature on the Pioneer website. After a few days my wife connected her iPhone to charge it and it launched Apple Carplay. I was blown away and took a look at the manuals that I found in the dashboard glovebox. In the installation manual it mentioned on page 8 that you had to connect a USB to a specific port on the back of the Pioneer. So that would explain that Carplay works and Android Auto did not. So I mailed and called the dealer again and they told me to bring the car in.
It took them over three hours to switch the cable on the back and test it. They could not get it to work. They even called Pioneer support and got an answer that it was not supported and would not work. They retrieved a brand new Pioneer system from the warehouse and it was largely displayed on the outside of the box that it would have Android Auto support. So a lot of effort and still no Android Auto. But at least the radio was connected to USB 2. I searched a while online and found this link. I thought it would not affect me because I do not have a Pixel. But I do have USB-C (Nokia 8) and when they delivered the car, there was an USB extension cable in the glovebox so I decided to give it a try. And it finally worked. So buying a short USB-C did not help me, because due to an issue on Pioneers end, I will always need an extension cable Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Next step: try to update firmware of the adapter and the system itself. Currently I just keep getting incompatible USB stick. Even when it’s formatted as FAT32 filesystem and only has the firmware file on it in the root directory.
Recently the Raspberry Pi 4 was announced, But I am currently using my rpi 3Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view. and want to run Rabbit MQ on it in Docker. So I used these two commands to get it to work and I just wanted to share it:
sudo rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list;
curl –sL get.docker.com | sed ‘s/9)/10)’ | sh
If you would like to use Docker as a non-root user you should add your user to the docker group:
sudo usermod –aG docker pi
To get Rabbit MQ (which has arm container) on the pi with a management web interface run:
Then you can launch a browser and go to http://thatipaddress:15672 and login with 'guest/guest'. If you did not lookup the ip of the container you can use the ip of the pi because you opened container ports when running it.
As you have noticed, you need Visual Studio Enterprise for live unit testing, or Jetbrains Rider, or some Visual Studio Code “hacks”. Here is a method to have coverage of .Net core with a global tool:
Of course you can go to the project properties and add the three lines of powershell to a file in the root of your solution and add to the build events tab as post-build:
When you have a nice .Net core solution and want to see the code smell and technical debt, you can analyze it with SonarCube
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
I started by browsing to the docker hub and used a container:
docker pull sonarqube
docker run -d --name sonarqube -p 9000:9000 sonarqube
The default username is ‘admin’ and the default password is ‘admin’ so once it is started you can head over to http://localhost:9000 and login. Configure your project there and copy the key/hash
dotnet sonarscanner begin /k:"project-key"
dotnet build <path to solution.sln>
dotnet sonarscanner end
Wait a minute after it finishes so that the SonarCube server has some time to process the results. Check the dashboard again to see the smell, bugs and tech debt. This does help you verify if you are still coding SOLID.
There are a lot of guides on how to install Pi-hole on a pi. I just used the win32DiskImager to put Rasbian on it and I did put an ssh.txt file on the SD card to enable SSH. I just had to plug it in the pi and wait for it to show up on the DHCP list of my router so that I knew the IP to ssh to.
I have an archer c7 router which has “DNS rebind protection” so I could not change the DNS to the local IP address.
In order to fix it I had to go to the Archer web interface and follow these steps:
Add in dhcp –> dhcp settings, set the primary DNS to the local ip
in the dhcp –> address reservation “add new “ paste the mac address which you can find in dhcp –> dhcp clients list.
and the local ip which the pi has. This makes sure that the next reboot, the pi/dns server will have the same lan IP.
By the way, I had an issue with the ‘ftl’ part in the installation of pi-hole
I fixed it with : `sudo nano /etc/resolv.conf`
add a line with: `nameserver 8.8.8.8`
That is the google dns and that makes sure that there is a know dns so that the installation can lookup ip’s and continue.
Save the .conf file and run `sudo bash /etc/.pihole/pihole –r`
That will repair the installation and the FTL part will succeed now that there is an dns entry to the google dns in the resolv.conf
Good luck!
ps. please let me know if you know a way to block youtube ads. No browser plugin, but a pi-hole solution please.
To keep kids entertained, people from all over the world put a teddy bear in their window so that kids can spot them during a walk.
I don’t know the origin. It’s in Canada, USA, New Zealand, UK etc. It’s also in my hometown so I decided to make an app for it.
People made a Facebook group with a google form to submit the teddy bear and an URL with all bears on google maps.
I thought that I had to get access to the Google spreadsheet containing the data, but it seems that it would not hold that much info if we take a look at the entry form and the maps data. In Google maps you can download a KMZ file which is a zipped KML (Keyhole Markup Language) It’s XML. Here is the full KML:
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
So there is a web link in it to get the live data. I used the webclient to pull it in and read it and tried to make pins out of it.
My first step was to add the Xamarin.Forms.Map Nuget package and the SharpKml.Core
Here is the full code:
private void AddMap()
{
var map = new Map(MapSpan.FromCenterAndRadius(new Position(51.697815, 5.303675), Distance.FromMeters(10000)));
using (var client = new WebClient())
{
var kmz = KmzFile.Open(client.OpenRead("https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/kml?mid=1kedGv2twtsWmzgxRpZcu5hr-qpE77plL"));
Kml kml = kmz.GetDefaultKmlFile().Root as Kml;
if (kml != null)
{
foreach (Placemark placemark in kml.Flatten().OfType())
{
Console.WriteLine(placemark.Name);
var pin = new Pin()
{
Address = placemark.Address,
Label = placemark.Name,
Type = PinType.Place
};
map.Pins.Add(pin);
}
}
}
this.Content = map;
}
But the pins won’t show up (of course). Because I did not set the position. The real Kml contains data like this:
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
So as you can see there is no Latitude Longitude for the placemarks… So how does google maps work then? It seems that both Google Maps and Google Earth Geocode the address to get the lat lng. But that service unfortunately is not free. I tried to load the kml in Google Earth and export it, but that also does not add the latitude and longitude. I also thought that kml support for the map control could be used. So that I could just provide the kml to the map and have it sort it out, but that was build with monoandroid 9 instead of netstandard2.0 and would probably not fix the geocode issue.
I planned to make an app with no central backend. But because of geocoding, I would have to use a webapi or Azure Function to keep track of the “database” with all teddy bears and their corresponding lat lng. That would also lower the requests for geocoding if it would be moved from the phone (client) to the server.
But I’ve not found a good free geocoder
nominatim.openstreetmap.org does not work if I would provide the kml data. I think that I will come back to this one….
In my previous post I thought that I would not make the app because I did not had a nice geocoding service. I did find Azure Maps, but there is no nice C# client at that time and I did not feel like doing manual REST calls. I know I can, I just didn’t feel like making it (sorry).
So I’ve worked in the past with the Geocoding.Net Nuget packages and decided to go for the Bing version. Googles version requires an account with billing because the first 200 dollar is free. It does feel like a hurdle for me as I do not work that much with Google Services.
So I did create an Azure Function which reads the kmz and extracts it to kml and for each unknown placemark would do a geo-location and store it in a file, so that only new bears would require a call to the Geocoding service of Bing.
The app is up now in the play store. Not in Apples App store, because I did not buy a license for it.
Where you manually have to edit a XML file to get it to work in iOS and add the font for each platform you want to support. So for FontAwesome (regular, bold, brands) and UWP, Android, iOS. That gives 9 files!
There was an email earlier this year about a change in declarations from my employer. You can’t just drop receipt on someone’s desk anymore, but since we are in a digital era, we should make a picture of it and send it by mail. That sounds fair. But that would require me to remember the constraints, like letting know for which client it is and to which address I should send it to. So I decided that it needed automation.
Because some coworkers have iPhones and some have Android, I decided to go for this approach:
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Xamarin Forms (Android, iOs) post a picture of a receipt to Azure Functions in the Azure cloud which sends it to Sendgrid. (Because Azure Functions cannot send mail)
Here are the steps I took to make a simple camera app:
1. File, new project, new Xamarin Forms project (no web api)
2. Add new project to solution (Azure Functions)
3. Add the nuget package ‘Xam.Plugin.Media’ to the shared/main xamarin project
4. Add UI code:
5. Add code to cs (code behind file)
I had three class variables (type string) filePath, filename, url (url to your azure function) I forgot that the emulator is a vm so you can’t use the localhost if you are testing the Azure Function but you should use your LAN ip.
private async void takePhoto_Clicked(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
if (!CrossMedia.Current.IsCameraAvailable || !CrossMedia.Current.IsTakePhotoSupported)
{
await DisplayAlert("No Camera", ":( No camera avaialble.", "OK");
return;
}
filename = DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyyMMdd-") + Guid.NewGuid() + ".jpg";
var file = await CrossMedia.Current.TakePhotoAsync(new StoreCameraMediaOptions
{
PhotoSize = PhotoSize.Medium,
Directory = "Sample",
Name = filename
});
if (file == null)
return;
filePath = file.Path;
image.Source = ImageSource.FromStream(() =>
{
var stream = file.GetStream();
file.Dispose();
return stream;
});
sendPhoto.IsEnabled = true;
}
private async void sendPhoto_Clicked(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
HttpContent fileStreamContent = new StreamContent(File.OpenRead(filePath));
fileStreamContent.Headers.ContentDisposition = new System.Net.Http.Headers.ContentDispositionHeaderValue("form-data") { Name = "file", FileName = filename };
fileStreamContent.Headers.ContentType = new System.Net.Http.Headers.MediaTypeHeaderValue("application/octet-stream");
using (var client = new HttpClient())
using (var formData = new MultipartFormDataContent())
{
formData.Add(fileStreamContent);
var response = await client.PostAsync(url, formData);
}
}
6. add `await CrossMedia.Current.Initialize();` in the android project in the mainactivity.cs just below the OnCreate call
7. add this code to the azure function:
string imageBase64;
using (var ms = new MemoryStream())
{
file.CopyTo(ms);
var fileBytes = ms.ToArray();
imageBase64 = Convert.ToBase64String(fileBytes);
}
string sendgridApiKey = "api-key-here";
var client = new SendGridClient(sendgridApiKey);
var from = new EmailAddress("mymailaddress@partech.nl", "JP Hellemons");
var subject = "Declaraton from app";
var to = new EmailAddress("mymailaddress@partech.nl", "JP");
var msg = MailHelper.CreateSingleEmail(from, to, subject, "plain msg", "html version");
msg.AddAttachment(file.FileName, imageBase64, "image/jpeg", "attachment");
var response = await client.SendEmailAsync(msg);
return new OkObjectResult("");
8. of course make a free account at sendgrid and just follow the tutorial/docs for adding the nuget package to the Azure Function.
Next post will contain a link to the Azure Active Directory for authenticating so that not everybody will send in receipts on my behalf.
As I’ve previously blogged, I created a Xamarin Forms application to submit pictures of my receipts to the company I work for. But if I’d publish the app in that state, the whole world could send in receipts on my behalf. So I needed to add authentication. Because the company uses Office 365, I’d decided to add Azure Active Directory.
There are a lot of resources about Adal (Active Directory Authentication Library) Some call it Azure Adal.NET
