Recently I had issues with my VPN setup, specifically with my VPN over at premiumize.me. They seem to have added the block-outside-dns option to their OpenVPN setup. As that’s a Windows only question it doesn’t work on my OS X/Arch Linux machine and causes problems. The error message was: Unrecognized option or missing or extra parameter(s) in [PUSH-OPTIONS]:6: block-outside-dns (2.4.0) You can fix that (given you run OpenVPN >= 2.4.0) by adding the following line to your client config: ...

Seen that error before? Possibly on a Raspberry Pi 2/3? Google seems to have problems guiding you to the right solution, so here it is: Add watchdog-timeout = 15 to your watchdog.conf file. Why is that? The Broadcom BCM2835 Watchdog timer only supports 15 seconds timeout ;)

I know, I know … it’s a bit late for a review, but here it is! Flights: 2016 was a year that forced me to travel a lot. I gained my H1B which forced me to go places and have me go back and forth. I flew 4 times to Atlanta, went to Egypt, Brussels, Rio, Florianopolis, Sao Paulo, Indianapolis, Denver, Milan, Istanbul and Santo Domingo. That’s my Flightmap (mostly, I forgot SDQ) ...

Part I Today we’re going to build something exciting together and you guessed right - it has to do with the Internet of Things. As we do more and more IoT business for our clients, we as software developers also get more and more into the hardware part of the equation. Which is an important part when you truly want to understand and solve a problem. To achieve this and to share my knowledge with you in the best possible way, I made a project that will will help illuminate what’s behind IoT. You don’t need much hardware to follow along, here’s what you need: ...

With BlackFriday and CyberMonday just behind us, a lot of us have received strange iCloud calendar invites like I did. We didn’t ask for that and certainly it’s annoying as they have no value to anyone. Why did we receive those invites? Spammers are sending emails out to email addresses they scraped off of google search results or to email addresses they know from breaches or data they bought. With iClouds ability to auto convert special encoded emails into calendar invites you’ll never see the actual email they sent you, but only the annoying calendar invite. ...

I recently had a few problems with signing my apps due to some Xcode 8 changes, mainly the difference between using PROVISIONING_PROFILE_SPECIFIER and PROVISIONING_PROFILE to specify your provisioning profile. There are wonderful blog posts out there that describe the process in detail, here’s what I found important: PROVISIONING_PROFILE_SPECIFIER setting is used to indicate the type of signing method that should be used for a given target. Targets that want to employ the manual method of code signing will not use this setting, and will instead use the deprecated PROVISIONING_PROFILE build setting. If the setting is set then, the new automatic code signing method will take over. Source: pewpewthespells ...

Deployment With all those scripts behind us, we should get a signed IPA in our OUTPUTDIR. From here on, we can use this IPA and distribute it to our testers. A few options are to either upload our IPA with curl to a custom FTP Directory or our XCode Server or some other custom routine. For this example we stay “simple” and upload our App to HockeyApp via curl. HockeyApp HockeyApp is a similar service to TestFlight which offers many options to distribute and test your apps. They offer their own SDK which enables automatic crash reports, analytics and feedback functions in addition to have different user groups for our beta/production builds. ...

We are going to pick up where we left off in part one of this series, with our minimal setup using xctool which built our app on Travis CI. App Signing In the process of creating a valid .ipa package and to deploy our app to a physical device, we need to sign our app with a bunch of certificates and package it. Packaing is the process where the compiled binary, assets and meta files are packaged into an app container (.ipa) to be installed on a device as one. Getting the right certificates and using the right actions to sign your binary and create your ipa is known to be difficult. Here we are going to explain one way that should work for everyone. ...

Full disclosure: I wrote this about 1-1.5yrs ago for another company but haven’t updated it yet. There’s a good chance some stuff is broken, I apologize for that and promise to fix it within the next days ;) Continuous integration has become an important topic and a significant part of a developer’s workflow. Finding bugs and ensuring a stable codebase are among the most important benefits of using continuous integration. While these benefits are huge on their own, we can extend our continuous integration setup to actually deploy new builds of our application to our testers. We call this extended setup continuous deployment. ...

I’ve been to ReleaseNotes last week. ReleaseNotes is a indie conference mainly centered around the topic on “How to build a business”. The conference was superb! But more to that later. One talk that I’ve heard there last week already came back to me, which I like to write about now: @sh’s talk “How to improve at support as a developer” The talk centered around the language you use when facing customers and what impact it has between talking like a human being or some neutral robot. Now I won’t be able to capture in writing how awesome the talk was or what a great speaker Sarah Hatter is, but I want you to profit from the talk, so let me refer you to @bsndesign’s notes to said talk: ...