Two-Factor authentication is a good way of increasing login security in systems, and is now quite widespread: it’s the six digit number that rolls over every 30 seconds. It’s designed to be very simple to operate as a user, but how much effort is involved as a developer?
I recently flew to Bali for a holiday with my partner and some of my family. It was a really good trip for me to unwind, relax, and take some time away from work. Even though I wasn’t working, I was still thinking, and there were a few things that stood out to me during my travels.
I mentioned in my last post that we’d had a 3D printer at work for a couple of months. In that time there’s been a lot of hype and printing, with many custom designs floating around. Most of my colleagues have used TinkerCAD, but I’ve had a lot of fun (and some headaches) with OpenSCAD.
Recently, work bought a 3D printer for prototyping and to encourage staff innovation and creativity. It’s been quite fun playing around with it and seeing designs I’ve found and made come to life. This post is going to be a quick recap of what I’ve printed lately.
I’m a big fan of fitness tech, and one of my favourite devices is my Garmin fēnix-series sports watch. Garmin’s Connect platform lets you examine your data and activities, but there’s no public API for us to interact with programmatically. Consequently, it’s a perfect opportunity for me to look at it and see what I can pull out.
It’s been quite a while since I set up my blog using AWS S3’s static website hosting and while it’s been great so far, there’s one long-overdue feature I’ve been missing: transport encryption. I’m ashamed it’s taken me this long to add it, but it’s now available and you can learn how to set it up yourself!
Now that we’ve resolved all of the major teething issues we had with Python 3 and nfcpy, we can look at reading the contents of tags presented by the user and writing our own. There’s a wide variety of tags that can be written, so I’ll cover a couple of the most interesting — Wi-Fi credentials and URIs.
I’ve recently been looking into using an NFC reader/writer pad at work to make configuring some devices we have much quicker and easier, as the standard process for these devices is an Android phone and a lot of manual data entry. Checking the device using a mobile is great, but configuring them this way is not scalable.
Following on from my post about Push notifications with Python, I’ve recently been looking at using Slack for more advanced notifications and interactions. This post will go through the process from the start, including setting up a Slack workspace and making a new App integration. If you’ve already done part or all of this stuff, feel free to skip ahead!...
Following on from my last post about sending SMSes with Python, we’re now going to look at ways to get SMS responses and how we can use this to build a basic conversation flow. I find I learn best when I have a goal or project, so here I’ll use the example of an SMS-controlled stopwatch.