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In preparation for my upcoming conference talk “The Internet of Things and iOS: Don’t let your toaster bring down the internet!” I have been doing a lot of research on the Mirai botnet. The Mirai (Japanese for “The Future”) botnet was used in a DDoS attack against the DNS service provider Dyn on October 21st, 2016. In this attack, some IoT devices were used to block their servers, bringing down popular sites such as ...

360iDev is coming fast and you should come! Why? Let me give you six reasons why you should come: Sam Davies will give “A Fun iOS 11 Workshop” on Sunday, Aug 13th On Monday, Aug 14th Joe Cieplinski will talk about “Getting Past No: The Science of Moving Others” Jay Freeman (Too many references to link to) will be talking about himself?! Anyways, I’m sure his session is going to be great! The same day (Aug 15th) Ben DiFrancesco will be talking about “Threads, Queues, and Things to Come: The Present and Future of Concurrency in Swift” And on the last day (after my talk, which you should visit), hear Andrew Morrow talk about “Using C Libraries in Swift 3” And with all these great sessions in mind, don’t miss me talking about “The Internet of Things and iOS: Don’t let your toaster bring down the internet!” on Sunday Aug 16th And if that wasn’t already enough, I have something special planned for my talk, that includes: ...

Two weeks ago Apple held it’s annual WWDC keynote announcing the latest updates to their platforms and technologies. The keynote lasted over 2 hours and you might would think that in that much time they have touched at least all technologies on the surface, but one thing especially seemed to have been missing almost entirely. HomeKit! While Apple seemed to have not shown too much love to that topic during their Keynote, it seems as if they still have given that technology quite some thought leading up to WWDC as Apple quietly made quite a few changes. ...

📝 Note: This post was published in 2017. While the core git concepts remain valid, modern deployment practices often favor SSH keys over passwords, GitHub Actions for automation, or managed deployment platforms. This approach is still functional but represents one of several deployment strategies available today. I have recently reported about my new website and the workflow I am using. More specifically about Hugo and GitHub pages. One task GitHub Pages solves perfectly is the need to publish changes. GitHub Pages does that automatically for you, which is one reason I chose it in first place. Due to the limitations on https with custom domains though, I decided to self host my HTML pages once more. ...

📝 Note: This post was published in 2017. While Hugo and GitHub Pages remain relevant, some specific tools and approaches mentioned have evolved. Hugo’s syntax and GitHub Pages features have improved since publication. This is preserved as historical reference. With the publication of this post, my transition from Ghost to Hugo will be complete and this blog will be solely run with static HTML files compared to the dynamic Ghost installation I used before. Let me explain why I did this and how you can do this as well. ...

Part III This is part III of a series of tutorials that build up on each other. If you missed the first parts, you can find it here: Part 1 Part 2 In this part we’re going to use the esp8266 chip with the DHT11 sensor from part I to connect to our MQTT server from part II and publish the sensors data. Finally, we are going to build a iOS app to display our data. ...

A week ago I started a new project. I’m excited to talk about it as it’s coming along nicely. A unicycling app! I’ve been an electric unicycle rider for a bit over a year now and it seems as there’s a big problem with all the different brands of EUCs (electric unicycle) that are out there: Their Apps When riding a electric unicycle, you need an app from time to time to change the settings of your EUC or track your path, battery or any of those metrics. While all EUC brands I’ve seen so far provide an app, they come in different levels of usability and each with a different feature set. ...

If You're Not Paying, You're The Product - The Internet Some of you might already know Finance Fox - “My Insurance Hero”. This is going to be a short review with my experience I had using them for about a year now. Finance Fox is a platform/app that allows you to manage your insurances and other financial contracts that you might own. They also claim that they can optimize those for you. Their promise/service is that they claim to be your personal, always available broker that handles all your claims, cases and problems you might have with your contracts for you. ...

I was posting about the watchdog device on the raspberry pi a few days ago and how to solve a specific error with the configuration on the pi. In the meantime I had the watchdog device running for a few days and it worked … kind of … One should know, that the watchdog devices halts the pi immediately, so it’s not a clean shutoff but more like you would pull the power plug of the pi. ...

Part II This is part II of a series of tutorials that build up on each other. If you missed the first part, you can find it here: Part I Part II is going to be a little bit slower than part I, simply because we have to make a few preparations in order to keep going faster again in part III. We’re going to take a look at MQTT by going over the idea what this protocol does before we go ahead and setup a MQTT server that we’re going to use in part III to communicate with our little weather station. ...