Blog – Babbacombe Computers Ltd

Why you shouldn’t use Google Authenticator

For some time I have been using 2FA as much as possible, to secure various logins and accounts.

The app I have been using for it is Google Authenticator on Android. This was because the first time I used 2FA was on starting a new job, and it was what the company was using for OpenVPN and Xero. It all seemed simple enough – when setting up an account on a site it showed me a QR code and I scanned it with the phone. Then to login I would just type in the number currently shown in the phone app for that site.

All worked fine for a couple of years until a hardware fault completely bricked my phone. Without ever checking, I had assumed that Google had backed up the codes it needed and I could just log into my Google account and have them loaded into the app on my new phone. Turns out that that is not the case, and there is no way of backing up Google Authenticator at all. On getting a new phone you can transfer codes across, but that’s all. If you don’t have old phone, that obviously can’t be done.

Converting to Nextcloud Contacts and Calendars

I recently bought a Syncloud Cloud server, primarily so that I, my girlfriend and my band could all have large dropboxes and shared dropboxes without each having to pay large regular fees to a cloud company. The dropbox facilities the Nextcloud server on it provides are similar to those of Dropbox, but Nextcloud also has a wide range of apps that can be installed to provide more cloud facilities.

Among them are Contacts and Calendar apps, which I decided to install and convert to in order to reduce the amount of information that Google can trawl about me. To consider them working I needed to get both to operate in the Nextcloud web interface, Thunderbird (on Windows, but that is probably not relevant) and Android phone and tablets.

Netgear OVPN Configuration

A few months ago I bought a Netgear Nighthawk router (D7000v2), largely because I wanted a router that supported Open VPN so that I could connect up and use Remote Desktop etc when away from my office. I had previously set up something similar by using the Windows VPN server, but wanted something safer and more robust.

It all works pretty well out of the box, but there have been some interesting glitches.

Continue reading “Netgear OVPN Configuration”

Windows 7 Update Problems

I’ve had problems for a while with Windows Update failing on Windows 7 VMs. The result is that the Windows Update service uses 100% of CPU (or 50% with 4 cores) and completely locks everything else out for minutes at a time, without ever installing anything. I’ve been getting around it by disabling the Windows Update service, but decided I had better get it working. After a bit of hunting around, I found the explanation and a fix that actually works at http://www.askvg.com/fix-windows-7-keeps-checking-for-updates-for-hours/ Continue reading “Windows 7 Update Problems”

Adding iCloud support to a Xamarin app

One of the facilities in my Mobile DMX app allows the user to back up all of their workspaces (light shows) into a zip file, which can later be restored. In the currently released Android version the backup can be written to a folder on the tablet, or saved on a PC by using the Windows Companion app. Continue reading “Adding iCloud support to a Xamarin app”

Linux and Xamarin socket problems

One of the requirements I set myself for my Socket library was that it should be as robust as possible about knowing that the other end of a connection had gone away. The .net socket objects are pretty bad for this, and the only way to be certain that the connection is up is to attempt to read or write its data stream. Continue reading “Linux and Xamarin socket problems”

MS Test and NUnit

When I wrote my Socket library I also wrote a set of Unit Tests for it, using the MSTest framework built into Visual Studio. Now that I have released it, including a build for Android, I thought I had better run the unit tests on Android as well. Continue reading “MS Test and NUnit”

Security bug in Dropbox sample code

If you have read the last entry on Dropbox login using the V2 API and compared it with the original sample code from Dropbox you may have noticed that I haven’t called the routine to initialise certificate pinning. Continue reading “Security bug in Dropbox sample code”

Dropbox support for Xamarin.Forms

The new Dropbox v2 API makes it quite straightforward to add support for Dropbox into an app running on a phone or tablet. When I decided to add Dropbox support to Mobile DMX it quickly became obvious, looking at the “SimpleTest” sample app, that the awkward part is logging in, but uploading and downloading small files would then be very easy. Continue reading “Dropbox support for Xamarin.Forms”

Xamarin.Forms Error CS0117

Now that I have completed the first release of Mobile DMX I thought would convert the project over from Xamarin Studio to Visual Studio. I wasn’t able to do this until recently because I have an “Indie Android” licence, which meant I had to use Xamarin Studio, but since MS have bought Xamarin I can now use Visual Studio (Xamarin Studio is deprecated), which is good.

Took a while, though. At first I was getting several hundred errors of the form

error CS0117: 'Resource.Attribute' does not contain a definition for 'mediaRouteSettingsDrawable'

Continue reading “Xamarin.Forms Error CS0117”