vrypan — Panayotis Vryonis
My blog is a digital scrapbook of ideas, thoughts and personal events. My digital home is www.vrypan.net.
notes — @vrypan — The Letter — rss

Posts tagged "en" 217 total

2019 3

December

iOS 13 Books app and parental controls #en #ios #parenting
Is iOS 13 Books a parent's nightmare, or am I missing something?

November

It's time we regulate microtargeting #en #microtargeting #facebook #google #twitter

January

Thoughts on turtlecoin public nodes #turtlecoin #trtl.nodes.pub #en #projects
Changes to trtl.nodes.pub, API results and a possible attack vector.

2018 19

December

weekend project: trtl.nodes.pub #turtlecoin #crypto #projects #en #trtl.nodes.pub

October

A "dual" SIM setup with older iPhones (not X+). #en #howto
You can use two iPhones (one can be a quite old one) and carry only one with you.

The graveyard of Internet services does not have to be the graveyard of your creativity too. #google #socialmedia #en #copyrights #internet #thoughts

September

How to create an ad hoc, private Instagram with iCloud #en #howto
iCloud Photo Sharing allows you to create a small, private "Instagram". Here's how to do it.

Maybe Facebook is not the way to reach your potential audience. #socialmedia #en #facebook #blogging #thoughts
Your blog has a feature that Facebook does not: discoverability.

August

“Social Networks” don’t scale socially #en #socialmedia #thoughts
Monolithic, centralised social networking sites do not scale socially.

Sao Paulo #travel #en
Business trip to Sao Paulo, Brazil.

My Synology DS916+: a year later. #en #howto
How I set it up, how I use it and my overall impressions after a bit more than a year with it.

Riyadh #en #gr #travel

Print vs online magazines. #print #en #thoughts
Why do I enjoy reading print magazines when I can find the same articles online?

How many engineers in India vs USA? #education #en

airPods #en #apple

2017 5

December

Where is social for podcasts? #en #podcasting #ideas
Why isn't there a service where I can show the podcasts I'm subscribed too and the episodes I liked most?

September

Cryptocurrencies and the Labor of Computers. #en #digitalcurrencies
Crypto is to CPU cycles what money is to human labor.

July

Digital currency Industries and Indexes #en #digitalcurrency
I think we should create some digital currency indexes based on capitalisation, sector etc.

March

MONODRAW rocks! #en #appreview
A powerful ASCII art editor designed for the Mac.

February

A kill switch to countermeasure border controls? #en #howto #privacy
Creating a kill switch that will wipe sensitive data from my computer if asked to unlock it.

2016 18

December

My feed reading setup. #en #howto
If you miss the freedom RSS used to give us before we started relying on Facebook, read on.

A Driver Mode for smartphones. #en #ideas
Let’s use technology to limit -or even eliminate- distracted driving.

November

The Ultimatum Game #en #politics
A social experiment that may offer an explanation about the recent political developments in the world.

October

How to create a simple ASN.1 parser #en #howto
Step by step instructions to create a ASN.1 parser using asn1c.

September

Blog posts without titles. #en #blogging
I find blog post titles restrictive. Here is how I got rid of them.

Making GitHub part of my publishing workflow #en #howto #github
How I'm using a github repo as a notebook, and the first steps towards hosting my blog on github.

August

Dear Qatar Airways, you know nothing about customer care. #en #rant #qatar airways
How Qatar Airways gave my seat to someone else after I had checked in, turned a 17h itinerary to a 30h one, and acted as if this is a normal thing to happen.

June

Facebook instant articles first thoughts #en #facebook #instant articles
Facebook opened up Instant Articles to everyone a couple of months ago. I just had some time to give it a try. To be honest, I like it.

Brexit referendum first thoughs. #en
Such a pity.

May

UX tip: Users need your feedback too. #en
Give your users feedback for their actions. Especially if you are the one who asked them to do something.

March

Simple bash script for encrypted chat over keybase fs (kbfs) #en #howto #keybase
First impressions of the keybase.io filesystem, and a small bash script to implement a secure, encrypted chat service over it.

Not just what you know, but who you are too. #en #privacy #encryption
Privacy and identity are hard to separate.

February

How to bypass the Netflix VPN ban #en #netflix #vpn
So, after all, it seems like the recent Netflix VPN ban can be bypassed —at least for now.

A big Fuck Off by the content industry and Netflix to users worldwide. #en #netflix #piracy
How Netflix and the content industry is blocking users who are paying 60% more than the rest to access content legitimately.

January

POSE with IFTTT #en #howto #indieweb
Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere with ifttt.com

Comparing my Facebook to my Instagram feed #en #facebook #instagram
It seems that the people I follow can express more interesting things using photos than words.

The annoying state of Internet subscriptions #en #rant #ideas #internet #web #medium.com
I’d like to see something that would make “subscribe” a verb of the Internet, like "go” and “contact”.

(Re: Audible) DRM is a defect #en #audible #drm
Follow up to a reply I got for recommending Audible in my last Letter.

2015 28

December

How to archive your tweets #en #howto #twitter #archiving
Why not take a backup of all your tweets every now and then?

How to archive your Gmail #en #howto
Why not make a tradition out of archiving your Gmail at the end of the year? See how easy it is.

My post is a required reading for Yale's MGT656 #en #diary
I'm proud and I had to share. :-)

Testing Twitter ads #en #howto #twitter #mailchimp
The results of a small experiment at getting new subscribers to my newsletter using Twitter lead generation ads and MailChimp form integrations.

November

Support Matthew Ebel on patreon #en
Matthew Ebel is an American musician, voice actor, and author whose sci-fi performances have made him Guest of Honor at geek conventions nationwide. —matthewebel.com

October

Your startup’s blog should be on Medium. #en #blogging #howto #medium.com
Why your startup's blog (at least the first one) should be on Medium.

A newsletter that turned into something more personal. #en #newsletter #thoughts
Overtime, The Letter has turned from a newsletter to a medium of sharing parts of my life I wouldn't share on my blog any more.

September

A rainy day #diary #en

Athens on a rainy day #en #gr #photo

How I keep my twitter feed healthy #en #social media #twitter
If you sometimes check your twitter feed and think there's nothing interesting going on, you are probably doing something wrong: Somewhere, something interesting IS going on for sure, you are just not following the right people.

August

nodeStorage brings simple S3-based storage to applications written in JS that run in the browser. #en #open web
On Dave Winer's nodeStorage

Using Bitcoin to buy anything #bitcoin #en
The first experience of using my prepaid VISA card from e-coin.io.

July

Bitcoin ATM at The Cube Athens #en #bitcoin
Using the Bitcoin ATM at The Cube Athens to buy Bitcoin with cash.

A geek, capital controls in Greece and bitcoin. #en #bitcoin
How capital controls in Greece affected my on-line presence and why I'm giving bitcoin a serious try.

Shutting down longaccess #en #longaccess
Longaccess is shutting down. This is not where I planned to be when I started Longaccess, 2.5 years ago. The plan was world domination, yet here I am, having to say goodbye to everything I've worked for in the last 2.5 years. Do I regret it? No! The destination is crappy, but the journey was totally worth it.

June

I'm shutting down tlbx.io. #en #tlbx.io

Social networking services have failed me. I'm going back to my web 2.0 roots. #en #howto #blogging
For the last couple of years, I've been increasingly relying on social networking services to curate, share, discover and even publish content. Looking back, it think they have failed me and that's why I'm looking for ways to reconnect with my web 2.0 "roots".

I like this little guy #en #diary
A little mantis on the lemon tree in the back yard of our house.

AngelHack Athens 2015 #en #hackathlons #startups

Does Apple have a Search Strategy? I think so. #en #apple #search #google
They want to unbundle search.

A super-minimal, almost "plain-text" email template for Mailchimp. #en #howto
How I created a very simple email template for Mailchimp that resembles a lot plain text emails, to send my daily digest.

May

Post to your GitHub-hosted blog using a simple bookmarklet. #en #howto #jekyll #github
jekyll-post-via-web is a simple HTML page that lets you update your GitHub-hosted Jekyll blog using your browser.

April

A major tlbx.io update #en #tlbx.io
Automatically organise your Camera Uploads, get notified about changes in your Dropbox via email or Slack, and many bug fixes.

March

So I setup this thing, to analyse my Dropbox #en #tlbx.io

Will heartbeat sharing be the new social gesture? #en #ideas #social
Aggregating heartbeats can be an interesting social gesture. And subscribing to the aggregate heartbeat of a group can be an interesting new way of connecting with it.

February

Saturday morning with my daughter #en #photo #christina #diary

January

testing my webmentions server #en #howto #indieweb
This is a test post to try my own webmentions endpoint at www.listnr.net.

I'm so excited about our BigStash launch! #en #longaccess #bigstash
I used to love the few extra days of staying at home, when it snows in Athens, but this year, it's different :-)

2014 37

December

Why I stopped podcasting #en #medium.com

ALIVE INSIDE #en
An amazing documentary about music's capacity to reawaken our souls and uncover the deepest parts of our humanity.

November

Openfund Founders Meetup II #en

Coyote and Roadrunner #en #christina

October

Stream 2014 was amazing #en #diary #wppstream
This was probably the best event I've ever been to.

I enabled SSL for my S3-hosted static blog #en #howto #cloudflare #encryption
How I used CloudFlare's (free) Universal SSL to enable HTTPS for my S3-hosted static-HTML blog, and a few extra notes.

My little daughter’s first secret. #en #diary #privacy
Secrets are part of human nature.

September

Apple Pay and the heartbeat sensor on Apple Watch. #en #ideas #apple
My theory behind the heart rate sensor built in Apple Watch

Will printed newspapers become luxury items? #en #ideas #print
And if so, how?

I don't think that's Why Starbucks Spells Your Name Wrong. #en #marketing
But the truth may be even more amazing, from a different point of view.

August

How we use Intercom to engage with our users on Twitter. #en #deepfreeze.io #intercom.io #howto
Intercom.io is full of nice little features and "social profiles" is one of them. Not part of the core product, but at Deepfreeze.io we've found it to be extremely valuable.

July

Retiring my DVDs. #en #howto #deepfreeze.io
DVD is a dying medium, at least for me. Here's how I deal with it.

The right to be forgotten vs. Copyrights. #copyrights #en
OK, I know it's not the one vs the other. But still.

the easter egg design #en

browser-based notifications for my blog using Roost #en #howto
Browser-based push notifications is an exciting feature for web publishers. Use Roost to easily enable it in your website.

Google, Facebook, monarchy and democracy. #en #google #facebook #web #thoughts #medium.com
It’s not how they use the enormous power they have. It’s who controls it.

June

How we use Intercom in the deepfreeze.io registration workflow. #en #howto #deepfreeze.io #intercom.io
I will describe here how we integrated Intercom with our invitation and registration workflow at deepfreeze.io to send user notifications, and how this helps us deliver better services.

Could Apple disrupt Search? #en #apple #search #google #medium.com
Could Spotlight challenge Google’s dominant position?

Offloading unused Dropbox files to deepfreeze.io #en #dropbox #deepfreeze.io
How moving unused or rarely used files from Dropbox's hot storage to deepfreeze.io's cold storage reduced my storage costs and made my Dropbox account more manageable.

May

Google and “the right to be forgotten”. #en #web #thoughts
Could it be that Google Search has reached its limit to scale?

Brandenburger Tor #photo #en

Fuck. I'm starting a newsletter. #en #thoughts #newsletter #rss
Because that's all we have left.

Old blog post URLs as a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. #en #ideas
What if we didn't care to make old blog posts easy to navigate to?

Using Longaccess [video] #en #longaccess
A short video showing how Longaccess works. It's really easy to preserve your important files for decades!

why blog pagination URL structure needs restructuring #en #ideas
Blogs are read in reverse chronological order, but their archive should be numbered like a diary, in chronological order. Your /page/1 should show the oldest posts, not the newer ones.

Why and how we put our terms of service on github. #en #howto #github
It's nice to say that you are customer-centric, customer-first, etc, but what really matters is how much of this you are willing to put down on paper. Your Terms of Service are the actual contract between you and your clients, not your keynote presentations, or your posts on Facebook and twitter.

Longaccess registered users map. #en #longaccess

This morning, all her toy friends were waiting for her. It’s her birthday! #en #christina #diary

April

Social networks with a purpose. #en #medium.com #social
They have a social graph even if we didn’t notice.

"fragmentions" is a cool idea. #en #howto #fragmentions
A cool idea that allows us to link directly to any text fragmet inside web pages.

March

my little daughter's scrapbook and digital content. #en #ideas #longaccess
It's probably the most valuable thing we will carry with us for the years to come -and something we would definately want to pass on to her when she's old enough to understand.

SSH Back to My Mac #en #howto #osx
How to remotely SSH to your Macs by taking advantage of Back to My Mac.

January

Berg’s Little Printer #wishlist #en

just an idea: the kindergarten art archive #en #ideas #longaccess
What if kindergarten had a long term archive of kids drawings? A public one. Imagine the things you could study if you had access to kids drawings over the years...

Hyde Park in the morning (sunny) #en #gr #photo

Hyde Park in the morning (cloudy) #en #gr #photo

Setting HackerNews "new" page as my browser default page #en #hackernews
I decided to make new tabs open the HackerNews "newest" section, to help new posts I like get an initial traction.

2013 57

December

Presenting at OpenCoffee Athens LXI #en #longaccess #diary

November

python one-liners #howto #en

Why you can't comment here. #en #blogging
It's been a year I removed comments from my blog, and I've done a lot of thinking on it since. Here is why it worked for me.

Why I won't get a Google+ Custom URL #en #google #rant
Two reasons why I'll stick to my unfriendly, long, Google+ URL.

October

my vcsh setup #en #howto #commandline
vcsh is a version control system for $HOME. This is how I've set it up.

When it comes to privacy, proof is better than promise -and it helps us sleep better at night. #privacy #en #medium.com #longaccess
As a young tech startup planning to offer cloud storage services, we at Longaccess decided to treat our own service the same way we treat any service we use to store our data: with extreme suspicion.

Monastiraki #longaccess #photo #en

OS X Finder file color labels #en #howto #osx
How to use OS X Finder color labels from the command line.

Best comment I've heard so far about longaccess. #en #longaccess

Athens #photo #en

procrastination routine #en

Idea for rechargeable keyboard/mouse #ideas #en

negative number of messages! #en

Rain boots #en #diary

Blogging with DayOne and bucket3 #bucket3 #howto #dayone #en

September

preparing for an exciting week. #en #longaccess

Test post from DayOne #en #dayone

urlparse.urljoin() #en #howto #python

DLI: Distribution, Logic, Interfaces #en #thoughts
It could be a software architecture pattern.

Setting ambitious goals. #en #open-source #gnu

Crafting a blog #en #bucket3 #blogging
I'm finally happy with my blog. Not the content. The engine that hosts it.

webmention tests #en #test
a dummy post used as testbed for webmentions.

tools we use at longaccess: HipChat #en #howto #longaccess
One of the tools we use most at longaccess is HipChat. Here is why.

Showing twitter references in a static blog #en #howto #bucket3
Weekend project: How to show under each static blog engine post the tweets that mentioned it.

BitTorent Sync is a great tool for startups. #en #longaccess #howto
Our experience with BitTorrent Sync at longaccess has been great.

Don't write off Microsoft in mobile #en #mobile #microsoft
Microsoft is in a tough place, but they may have the chance to disrupt the ecosystem.

Designing a cloud storage service: pen or pencil? #en #longaccess #medium.com
Embracing limitations by design.

August

Privacy is not dead #en #privacy #medium.com
Privacy is not dead, it may very well be the next big thing.

public-key cryptography for non-geeks #en #howto #medium.com
It's not as complicated as you think.

replacing the search engine: a distributed query system. #en #search-engines #ideas #dqs
Would it be possible to replace centralized search engines like Google, by creating a "smart" p2p search network? I think so, and in some cases, it shouldn't be so hard to.

July

Why we started longaccess. #en #longaccess
How did we come up with the idea of longaccess? Here is the true story.

They are social places, not networks #en #social #medium.com
Even though the connections of each individual user are his social network, these sites (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc.) are not social networks. They are social networking places.

The carriage return (CR) #en #history #geek

June

Privacy, Marketing and the NSA #en #privacy #marketing
The dominant business model for online consumer services leaves little room for privacy.

Your 2-year old can use the iPad. So what. #en #being-a-parent #medium.com
I find it amusing when other parents brag that their kids can use the iPad.

our little apricot tree #en #photo #diary

on PRISM and US data hosting #en #digital rights #medium.com
A worried tech entrepreneur’s thoughts after PRISM-related news.

May

My daughter changed my perception of time. #en #being-a-parent #medium.com
My daughter turned two a couple of weeks ago. Being a parent is an amazing experience, the kind of experience that makes one think of the world and oneself in a different way.

“future-proof” is a feature I want to see more services offer #en #thoughts #longdata
“Future-proof is a feature, and an important one, when it comes to hosting my digital life, like my photos, my videos, my thoughts, my on- and off-line activity.”

I just added SubToMe to my blog. #en #open web #howto

migrating from iPhoto to Dropbox, from feature rich to future proof. #en #howto #iphoto #dropbox
How I moved from feature rich iPhoto to future proof Dropbox.

April

chrome asks for facebook password on... google.com??? #en #privacy #google #facebook

BitTorrent Sync: this is huge (and it’s not about dropbox) #bittorrent #en

we need a new kind of web storage #ideas #en #open web

VSRE: very short reply expected (netiquette) #en #ideas #netiquette

my post got 63k visits thanks to HN: the aftermath. #en #hackernews
One of my posts got to HackerNews #1 for hours. Here is what I’ve learned and some interesting data.

You know, Google, the web already had this feature. #google #en