Author: Matthew Champion

Hi! I'm Matt, a software developer, consultant and blogger. I write tutorials and how-tos, design and develop projects and muse on all sorts of things! If you've found something I've written useful, I'd love to hear about it! Sharing knowledge is the reason I do it. There's no obligation, but if you did want to throw me a tip you can do so at https://ko-fi.com/mattjameschampion!

Migrating ASP.NET Core Development Secrets out of appsettings.json

A banner showing an appsettings file filled with fake secrets transforming into one with blank secrets

I’m sure I’m not the only one that has “temporarily” stored passwords, application keys or other development secrets in appsettings.json simply because it was easier or faster than doing it the right way (although if I am, this first sentence will surely come back to haunt me).

I get it. It happens! This blog post actually comes from my efforts to update a project I’m working on with some friends so that we’ve got a more consistent approach to keeping secrets… secret.

So how are we going to go about this? We’ll be using Secret Manager, a fantastically helpful tool built into the configuration API in ASP.NET Core that will let us keep the secrets out of appsettings while not require a change to how we access the settings in code. Sound good?

Continue reading “Migrating ASP.NET Core Development Secrets out of appsettings.json” →

Electric Bikes and Big Ambitions – EVieBikes Land in Guernsey

A collection of EVieBike branded electric bikes parked together at North Beach in Guernsey

EVieBikes recently landed in Guernsey, bringing the first ever dockless shared electric vehicles to the island. I got into contact with Gavin Breeze (founder and CEO of EVie), who kindly agreed to discuss with me where EVie came from, what the service means for the islands and their plans for the future!

Interview conducted on 2021/04/09.

A Brief History of EVie

According to Gavin, EVie bikes were “sort of all [his] fault”. After founding a software as a service (SaaS) payment company called DataCash and selling it to MasterCard, he found himself at a loose end. Deciding that he was “too young to sit around doing nothing” Gavin looked for his next project, which came shortly after hearing Phil Male (Chairman of JT) discuss a number of ideas he had for improving Jersey. Of the ideas put forth, Gavin decided that “as a private individual the only one [he] could have the […] remotest impact on was to try and move the dial towards the islands becoming all-electric islands” (moving away from internal combustion engine vehicles).

Continue reading “Electric Bikes and Big Ambitions – EVieBikes Land in Guernsey” →

Multi-Factor Authentication with Password and Private Key File in SSH.NET

If you want to use SSH.NET to connect to an SFTP server that requires both a password and a private key file, you’ll be happy to know that it is well supported! Unfortunately (and similar to my previous SSH.NET post about modifying the Host Key Algorithm) the documentation doesn’t really make it clear how to do this.

Continue reading “Multi-Factor Authentication with Password and Private Key File in SSH.NET” →

Regular Expression Tips for People That Hate Regular Expressions

A screenshot of a code editor. There are three lines, setting the variables "isCustomerNumber", "isProductNumber" and "isTransactionNumber" based on whether a series of regular expression (regex) matches succeed

I’ve been writing regular expressions (regex) for years and would consider myself pretty good at them by now (I decline to provide references). The problem is that although it’s common to see regex as cryptic and painfully terse (which are not invalid points), they remain one of the best ways to handle complex pattern matching and as such you’ll probably run into them at least a few times in your career.

Even if you really despise writing regular expressions, here are some tips that will help to make that process as painless as possible!

Continue reading “Regular Expression Tips for People That Hate Regular Expressions” →

Epson ET-2711/ET-2710 Series Printer Wireless Setup Made Easy

A photo of an Epson ET-2711 printer

If you want to just get to the good stuff, scroll down to the “Setup” section.

My wife and I finally got a new printer to replace the old one that has pretty much given up the ghost and refuses to print anymore (often considered an important feature for devices like this).

We settled on an Epson ET-2711 in large part because of the ink tank that should (hopefully) do away with the constant stream of expensive cartridges in favour of some cheaper-per-page ink bottles. I was excited to get it out and start setting it up (in part because we’re in another lockdown and what else is there to do right now)!

Imagine my frustration, dear reader, when I found out that the whole wireless setup process for this printer is terrible if you follow the official instructions. I genuinely spent a couple of hours bouncing between the Android app (which gave me a very helpful message telling me “Communication error”, to check the printer is on and not much else), the included software for Windows (which was just as helpful), the printed documentation in the box and the website, all to no avail.

You cannot convince me that this is a helpful error message

The good news is that I finally figured out how to get it working. The even better news for you at home is that I’ve gone through the process three times so that I could document all of the steps to get this working properly!

Continue reading “Epson ET-2711/ET-2710 Series Printer Wireless Setup Made Easy” →

Migrating from KeePass to 1Password

An image of the KeePass and 1Password logos, with an arrow pointing from KeePass to the stylised "o" in 1Password

I’ve been using KeePass for my password management needs since early 2014, but I recently decided that I wanted to move to something a bit more substantial. KeePass is an excellent (open source!) piece of software, but since it stores passwords in a single database file the only way that I could really sync it between multiple computers and my phone was to store that file… in Dropbox.

Yeah, as you can imagine that’s not a great solution.

Anyway, I wanted to move over to 1Password but when I tried searching for “Migrate KeePass to 1Password” I kept seeing references to 3rd party scripts I’d need to use to convert my exported data (no thanks) or that it would require a bunch of manual data entry. After giving it a go though, I can tell you it was actually ridiculously easy and straightforward and didn’t require any external tools or scripts! As such, I decided to put together this step-by-step tutorial for migrating your data from KeePass to 1Password!

Continue reading “Migrating from KeePass to 1Password” →

So You Want to Run Azure Functions Using .NET 5

UPDATE 2021/11/09: Since the release of .NET 6 yesterday, there is reportedly day 0 support for .NET 6 across App Services and Azure Functions. Unless you have an absolute requirement to use .NET 5, the solution to using the latest and greatest .NET in Azure is .NET 6! I’ve left the rest of the blog post as it was just in case it helps someone, but I predict that it will become something of a relic now that it’s targeting an older version.

I’ve spent the last couple of evenings trying to get a set of Azure Functions migrated from .NET Core 3.1 to .NET 5 so that I can play around with some of the nice new syntax options, nullable contexts and the like. Since .NET 5 has officially been released, it would be justifiable to believe that it would be well supported across the core Microsoft product catalogue, such as in… say… Azure Functions?

Ha! You’re a funny one.

Continue reading “So You Want to Run Azure Functions Using .NET 5” →

There Is No Such Thing as a New Idea, and That’s Ok!

A lightbulb laying on a chalkboard, with a thought bubble drawn around it in chalk

Mark Twain once wrote that “there is no such thing as a new idea” and quite frankly I’m starting to agree with him.

I’ve spent the last month or so actively trying to come up with some ideas for projects/ blog posts to work on that would be interesting and useful. The issue I’ve run into is that almost every time I come up with something, I give it a quick search only to find out that it’s already been done (sometimes many times over). That means another idea goes on the pile to be abandoned since “there’s no point in doing it anymore I guess”.

Well that’s not a fun feeling to have.

Continue reading “There Is No Such Thing as a New Idea, and That’s Ok!” →

Changing Host Key Algorithm in SSH.NET

I’ve used SSH.NET a lot over the years to send and receive files using SFTP and it’s a very flexible and practical library, but the documentation can be a bit thin on the ground when you’re looking to use some of the more esoteric features it has.

As an example, I recently ran into an issue where I was connecting to a remote server and the host fingerprint I was receiving through SSH.NET didn’t match the one that I expected to see (and could see in WinSCP). After verifying that I was using the same connection settings on both and more than a little spelunking through the SSH.NET source code I found that by default the host key algorithms used by the stable release of SSH.NET that I was on (2016.1.0) are RSA and DSA, while WinSCP uses Ed25519. For my purposes I needed to use Ed25519 in SSH.NET as well even though the SFTP host also supported these other algorithms.

Continue reading “Changing Host Key Algorithm in SSH.NET” →

SoundFloored: Open Source Soundboard Pedal (Part 4 – Final Implementation)

The top of the SoundFloored pedal. It is held together by various cross-head bolts and has six footswitches embedded in the top, with four along the close long edge and two along the far long edge (with a screen embedded in the lid between them)

This is the fourth and final post in a series about designing and creating SoundFloored, an open source soundboard pedal! Check out the other posts in the series:

So SoundFloored is now working just like I wanted it to with buttons and a screen, but the current build isn’t exactly what I would call robust. As such, the final part of the build involves moving what I’ve built so far into a more permanent home, one that can withstand the rigours of live performance and is far more practical to move around.

Building the Box

Design

Based on some preliminary research on the minimum usable distance between footswitches, I decided to keep them 7cm apart from each other to ensure good clearance. I also thought to leave a 3.5cm gap between the switches and the edge of the pedal since I didn’t need as large of a gap but still wanted the numbers to map out in a simple way.

Since there were going to be four footswitches across the length of the pedal, it would need to be 28cm long (3 x 7cm for the gaps between each switch, plus 2 x 3.5cm for the gaps between the outer switches and the edge). Similar maths for the two footswitches going across the width of the pedal gives us 14cm (7cm for the gap plus 2 x 3.5cm for the edges).

I wanted to find something with these dimensions (or near enough) that I could use to house everything, so I started by looking at “project boxes” (plastic boxes designed for maker projects like this). Unfortunately, the largest project box I could easily order was barely half the size that I needed and I wasn’t interested in putting in a custom order to create one. The only option left at this point was to build something myself!

I figured that wood would be the best material for this project; although not the traditional material for a pedal, I could make it pretty much whatever size I wanted, it’s readily available, cheap and I already have some basic experience in woodworking.

At this point even though I had the dimensions I wanted to get a better perspective of how big the pedal was going to be before I started building anything. Mediocre arts and crafts to the rescue!

A sheet of paper on the floor with a 1:1 scale drawing of SoundFloored on it. To the left of the sheet of paper is a BOSS RC-30 pedal and to the right is a DigiTech Drop pedal
Various pieces of cardboard cut into rectangles and placed on the floor. A Raspberry Pi is visible on the right along with a pair of scissors in the background and a metal ruler in the foreground
A piece of cardboard cut into a rectangle the size of the SoundFloored lid with lines drawn on the top to signify the position of the various components. Six footswitches are placed on top to show their position, with four along the close long edge and two spaced along the far long edge
Continue reading “SoundFloored: Open Source Soundboard Pedal (Part 4 – Final Implementation)” →