The Scourge of Email Click-Bait

We all get some SPAM in our Inboxes – despite the best efforts of our email hosts, be they Google or otherwise. But another type of message is starting to gain traction and I receive a number of these a week now – normally from recruiters is has to be said – and they are akin to the Click-Bait links you see all over the web (you know, the ones that normally end with ‘you’ll never guess what happens next’).

Online Tool of the Month – base64-image.de

I recently had a need to create HTML email templates for a project which needed to include a couple of images, e.g. the company logo and feature image. I have of course done this in the past and just linked to the required assets on the hosting website – but this time is was different.

This time the website was potentially not accessible from outside of the local intranet and the requirement was to embed the images directly into the message.

One way to do this is to encode the images to a base64 string and use the resulting text, with a data:image/jpeg;base64, prefix in the src attribute of the image tag – something like this;

<img src="data:image/jpeg;base64,/9j/4AAQSkZJRgABAQEAYABgAAD/4QBoRXh....." />

Now all I needed to do was encode the images.

FillLPG for Android is dead .. long live FillLPG for Android

Please note that I have now removed FillLPG for Android from the Google Play Store. You can read more about this here. – August 2020

TLDR; The FillLPG for Android app has reached end of life and no further development or maintenance will be undertaken. It will remain in the Play Store for as long as the third-party FillLPG website remains online but I have no control over that.

The FillLPG for Android app was initially developed to scratch an itch – I had an LPG powered vehicle (I don’t anymore) and had stumbled on to the FillLPG website. I responded to a request from the website owner for someone to write a mobile and thought it would be a good little project to get started in this arena.

It has proved itself to be just that, initially written in Java and then migrated to C# using Xamarin this little app has helped me keep my skill levels up – or at least it did.

Your app does not support Android Pie!

I receive a lot of SPAM regarding the FillLPG mobile app, mainly offering to increase my install numbers and ratings, but today new approach appeared in my Inbox.

Hi there,

I was reviewing your app FillLPG – LPG Station Finder, and it looks great. But it appears the app does not support new Android Pie. Without it, more than half of the users cannot use the app properly. I am an app developer and I can update your app in a couple of days if you want.

Thanks

Jon

It may not be obvious but this is just SPAM, sent by a bot and I doubt that anyone called ‘Jon’ is actually involved in the process, let alone reviewing my app.

PersonalEncrypter – New and Improved

A couple of months ago I updated the PersonalCLI project to remove information leakage in the form of the original filename of the encrypted data. In my original post about this project I eluded to updating it to move away from the Microsoft encryption libraries and to implement the libSodium library instead.

Well, I’m happy to say that I’ve found some time to do this and moved to .NET Standard at the same time – yep, the future is here.