Roll my own DDNS? Why Not.!

Update: Well, there’s certainly more to Dynamic DNS than meets the eye – who knew.

Investigations led to the decision that I should put my hand in my pocket and spend my time better elsewhere.

Not that I opted for the overpriced offering from Oracle, signing up with NoIp instead.

Like many devs I have been known to host websites and services behind my home broadband router and therefore needed a Dynamic DNS resolver service of some description. But in my recent moves to limit my reliance on third-party services – including those provided by Google – I wanted to see what would be involved in creating my own service.

Sorry Facebook – that’s enough

Sometime ago I deleted my personal Facebook profile and found that I really didn’t miss it – at all. Quite liberating in fact – you should try it. My departure pre-dated the Cambridge Analytica scandal and was more to do with the garbage that ended up in my feed than anything else.

That said, recent reports of plain text passwords and other dubious operating tactics of Facebook would have seen me making the same decision to get off the platform.

But – there was a problem! I had a Facebook business page and it needed an active user account to be associated with.

Updating an end of life application

A while ago I posted that the FillLPG for Android application was, in a word, Dead! But in few days time users will notice a new version, 2.0.28.5, hitting the Play Store as well as in-app notifications to update – so what gives?

Have I changed my mind about withdrawing support for this app – no, I haven’t. Essentially my hand has been forced by Google’s recent decision to deprecate some of the functionality I was using to fetch nearby places as part of the ‘Add New Station’ wizard as well as requiring 64 bit support – the latter being little more than a checkbox and nothing that most users will ever notice.

Getting to grips with OzCode

When I was at NDC London in January I watched a demonstration of the OzCode extension for Visual Studio. Not only was it well presented but it highlighted some of the pinch points we all have to tolerate while debugging.

In return for a scan of my conference pass, i.e. my contact details, I received a whopping 35% discount off a licence and without completing the 30 day trial I was so impressed that I pulled out my wallet (actually the company wallet!).

Hey Dude – where’s my online tool?

Over the past 18 months I’ve been posting details of various online tools that I’ve encountered – but not this month I’m afraid.

Why? Well, frankly I’ve run out! I’ve got nothing!

I’ve been hard at work but haven’t actually found the need for an online tool that I haven’t used before.

Now that’s not to say that there aren’t any tools out there – it’s just that I didn’t need them, not this month anyway. Next month may be different but I think it’s probably best to drop the ‘of the month’ banner and just categorise them as ‘Online Tool’