2020
Analyzing scented candles Amazon reviews.
...through the eyes of Asimov's Foundation.
Comparing Trump's and Xi's speaches at the UN General Assembly
Best Internet advice ever.
Converting tweets to blog posts started as an experiment, but I'll probably stick to it.
I'm working on a tool that converts a twitter thread to a blog post. This is an example post.
HEY.com is a new email service. After spending 14 days with it, here is my take on it.
Monitor Unifi Dream Machine traffic with a Raspberry Pi and UnicornHAT HD.
The iPod nano 2nd gen was released in September 2006.
How does a paid offering makes sense in a market that is niche, over-saturated with free services and not sexy at all?
2016
If you miss the freedom RSS used to give us before we started relying on Facebook, read on.
Let’s use technology to limit -or even eliminate- distracted driving.
A social experiment that may offer an explanation about the recent political developments in the world.
Step by step instructions to create a ASN.1 parser using asn1c.
I find blog post titles restrictive. Here is how I got rid of them.
How I'm using a github repo as a notebook, and the first steps towards hosting my blog on github.
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.
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.
Give your users feedback for their actions. Especially if you are the one who asked them to do something.
First impressions of the keybase.io filesystem, and a small bash script to implement a secure, encrypted chat service over it.
Privacy and identity are hard to separate.
So, after all, it seems like the recent Netflix VPN ban can be bypassed —at least for now.
How Netflix and the content industry is blocking users who are paying 60% more than the rest to access content legitimately.
Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere with ifttt.com
It seems that the people I follow can express more interesting things using photos than words.
I’d like to see something that would make “subscribe” a verb of the Internet, like "go” and “contact”.
Follow up to a reply I got for recommending Audible in my last Letter.
2015
Why not take a backup of all your tweets every now and then?
Why not make a tradition out of archiving your Gmail at the end of the year? See how easy it is.
I'm proud and I had to share. :-)
The results of a small experiment at getting new subscribers to my newsletter using Twitter lead generation ads and MailChimp form integrations.
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
Why your startup's blog (at least the first one) should be on Medium.
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.
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.
On Dave Winer's nodeStorage
The first experience of using my prepaid VISA card from e-coin.io.
Using the Bitcoin ATM at The Cube Athens to buy Bitcoin with cash.
How capital controls in Greece affected my on-line presence and why I'm giving bitcoin a serious try.
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.
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".
A little mantis on the lemon tree in the back yard of our house.
They want to unbundle search.
How I created a very simple email template for Mailchimp that resembles a lot plain text emails, to send my daily digest.
jekyll-post-via-web is a simple HTML page that lets you update your GitHub-hosted Jekyll blog using your browser.
Automatically organise your Camera Uploads, get notified about changes in your Dropbox via email or Slack, and many bug fixes.
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.
This is a test post to try my own webmentions endpoint at www.listnr.net.
I used to love the few extra days of staying at home, when it snows in Athens, but this year, it's different :-)
2014
An amazing documentary about music's capacity to reawaken our souls and uncover the deepest parts of our humanity.
This was probably the best event I've ever been to.
How I used CloudFlare's (free) Universal SSL to enable HTTPS for my S3-hosted static-HTML blog, and a few extra notes.
Secrets are part of human nature.
My theory behind the heart rate sensor built in Apple Watch
But the truth may be even more amazing, from a different point of view.
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.
DVD is a dying medium, at least for me. Here's how I deal with it.
OK, I know it's not the one vs the other. But still.
Browser-based push notifications is an exciting feature for web publishers. Use Roost to easily enable it in your website.
It’s not how they use the enormous power they have. It’s who controls it.
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 Spotlight challenge Google’s dominant position?
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.
Could it be that Google Search has reached its limit to scale?
Because that's all we have left.
What if we didn't care to make old blog posts easy to navigate to?
A short video showing how Longaccess works. It's really easy to preserve your important files for decades!
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.
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.
They have a social graph even if we didn’t notice.
A cool idea that allows us to link directly to any text fragmet inside web pages.
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.
How to remotely SSH to your Macs by taking advantage of Back to My Mac.
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...
I decided to make new tabs open the HackerNews "newest" section, to help new posts I like get an initial traction.
2013
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.
Two reasons why I'll stick to my unfriendly, long, Google+ URL.
vcsh is a version control system for $HOME. This is how I've set it up.
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.
How to use OS X Finder color labels from the command line.
It could be a software architecture pattern.
I'm finally happy with my blog. Not the content. The engine that hosts it.
a dummy post used as testbed for webmentions.
One of the tools we use most at longaccess is HipChat. Here is why.
Weekend project: How to show under each static blog engine post the tweets that mentioned it.
Our experience with BitTorrent Sync at longaccess has been great.
Microsoft is in a tough place, but they may have the chance to disrupt the ecosystem.
Embracing limitations by design.
Privacy is not dead, it may very well be the next big thing.
It's not as complicated as you think.
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.
How did we come up with the idea of longaccess? Here is the true story.
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 dominant business model for online consumer services leaves little room for privacy.
I find it amusing when other parents brag that their kids can use the iPad.
A worried tech entrepreneur’s thoughts after PRISM-related news.
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, 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.”
How I moved from feature rich iPhoto to future proof Dropbox.
One of my posts got to HackerNews #1 for hours. Here is what I’ve learned and some interesting data.
