Android

Zones – Geofence API Launcher

Tech Stack:

Xamarin Forms, Android Location Services, Android Wear

Summary:

A battery-efficient app that uses Google Play Services geofencing and background services to detect geofence entry/exit to activate quick shortcuts on a phone and smartwatch. I wanted this app to put a button on my watch to integrate with my building complex front door buzzer, and front door (which I exposed a web APIs for). I’d tried the IFTTT app but the latency was too high to be acceptable, and this way I got to try out building a native-ish app for Android via Xamarin.

Web

Feedability – Full-Feed RSS Feed converter with Readability

Tech Stack:

ASP.NET Core 1.0, Materialize (later converted to Polymer Elements), PhantomJS / Mozilla Readability

Summary:

I’d been using Feedly as a replacement for Google Reader ever since the sunset in 2013. More and more feeds were going partial/excerpt rather than full-feed (for analytics and ad-revenue, I assume), which made feed-reading increasingly annoying (especially when offline, like on an airplane which I frequently find myself on). So I decided to mash up Readability (a JS library to extract readable article content from a page) with an RSS feed proxy to make all of my partial/excerpt RSS feeds be full readable feeds. Success! I added in a few items of flair such as CSS selectors for white/blacklisting elements.

Other

ChromeCookieBackup – Back up and restore Chrome’s encrypted cookies

Useful for keeping your cookies during Windows re-installs to avoid 2-Factor-Apocalypse.

Sunrise – a wake up alarm with light and sound

A hacked-together IoT replacement for a Philips Wake Up Light

If you have a Pi, Hue lights and a Chromecast in your bedroom already, why not wake up to the sunrise? Implemented using the Hue REST API, a python chromecast streaming library, cron jobs and a Nodejs webapp. Also hooks for X10 remote hardware for physical buttons to turn things on and off.