Luke Browning | Tech, Dev & Web

Running a Memory Test on my Synology DS920+

Having just picked up a new Synology DS920+ to replace my ageing HP N40L MicroServer I decided that the included 4GB of memory may be a bit tight once I migrate all of my docker containers over. Therefore, I had a quick look around for a stick of RAM that fits in the single accessible memory bay.

Make your Dumb Wireless Doorbell Smart with Home Assistant

Smart doorbells such as Ring, Nest and Arlo have become all of the rage in the last couple of years with promises of real-time press and motion notifications, two way communication and a camera to see who’s there. On the whole, they work well but often have a number of disadvantages to a regular old doorbell…

Update Dynamics 365 Navigational Properties through the Web API

After taking my first steps into integrating services with Microsoft Dynamics 365 I have learnt a thing or two about the service and feel I should share them. The first thing I’m going to go through is how to update a navigational property of an entity using the provided Web API. I am going to assume you know how to access the API and have an token as that is a whole other guide!

Top Travel Gadgets 2017

Off travelling in the near future? Then you’ll want to check out my top 10 travel gadgets for 2017. From cameras to headphones, I’ve picked my favourites!

UK Smart Heating Systems – Hive 2 vs Nest 3 vs Tado 3

With so many smart thermostats being available on the market and each company’s product ranges beginning to mature, I thought it was time to run through the latest releases from the most popular smart heating systems on the market in the UK. These are; Hive Active Heating 2, Nest Learning Thermostat 3 and Tado 3.

The Current State of Smart/Connected Lighting in the UK

Since the emergence of home automation hubs such as SmartThings and Wink in the US in the last couple of years, us Brits have been left longing for similar tech to come to our shores.

Xiaomi XiaoYi (Night Vision) Camera Review

Much to my surprise, it seems that China based Xiaomi don’t only make attractive, low cost phones with high end specs, they also make decent looking IP cameras (among other things!). I was recently on the lookout for a couple of cheap cameras so that I can see what’s happening around the house whilst I’m out. Whilst browsing the EU warehouse at GearBest I found stumbled across these for £20/$30 for the top of the range model (they do a model that looks identical but without the night vision) so I thought I’d take a punt.

Visual Studio Community 2015 Crashing on Startup

Since yesterday I have been having a very strange error in Visual Studio Community 2015 where as soon as I open a solution VS crashes with no error. Now the only thing that has changed since yesterday was that I installed a large number of Windows updates that had been waiting for probably several months! I checked my installed updates but found nothing directly related to VS. I did find an update that made changes to .net but was unsure if this was related. The error I received was as follows;

Migrating Multi-Device Hybrid App (CTP3/3.1) to Visual Studio 2015 Apache Cordova App

After upgrading to Visual Studio 2015, Multi-Device Hybrid Apps (Cordova based apps) have a new project structure and are incompatible with VS. Microsoft have released a how-to guide here for upgrading your projects but due to it not being visible on search engines, being a little bit lacking in depth and taking me about half an hour to find the instructions – I have decided to replicate it here (with some extra details missing from the original). So, in order to update your previous project to the new structure, follow these steps;

NUnit HTML Report Generator

After doing some work with Selenium to perform some automated testing of a number of web applications and websites, myself and the team at Jatech came to the conclusion that the reports were not attractive enough to present to clients and thus embarked on creating a more attractive and responsive report.