blog.vrypan.net
Tag: en
It’s time for "the opposite of doomscrolling” — a new Linkfest, in which I sort through the planet-wide digital rummage-sale of the Internet to locate the finest items of culture, science and technology, just for you.
I really enjoy The Linkfest. I suggest you subscribe too.
Open Tab: Kevin Kelly The radical optimist on starting Wired, stories from the early internet, originating 1,000 True Fans, and why the only way to steer technology is to use it https://on.substack.com/p/open-tab-kevin-kelly
Some people are worth listening to. I'm tired of overnight influencers, and people who somehow are considered deep thinkers because they made a lot of money.
I updated my homepage: People evolve and change, the homepage should stay in sync with the owner. In the process I digged into some of the older posts and pages (I've been maintaining this domain for decades) and took the opportunity to fix some broken links, and resurface some long lost pages :-)
bubbles.town is a beautiful way to dicover blogs and posts. It's social, but there's some friction here and there, the community is large enough, but not massive, and the blogs are hand-selected (as far as I can tell). The result is something close to a cozy corner, which I enjoy a lot.
We have to go back!
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What if Farcaster went back to a hub-based architecture: simple, peer-to-peer, truly decentralized, where it’s easy to run a peer and easy to build a client?
We are in the mainframe era of AI: A few centralized compute providers and millions of "dumb" clients connected to them.
Football may be the last mass spectacle that still resists instant gratification.
A forgotten terminal trick: the host-writable status line.
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VT320 allowed programs to write to a special “status line” using DECSSDT/DECSASD. Can we bring it back?
Pet project: smart clock
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This is a personal project that will take a lot of time and a lot of love.
shg, the SHell Guard
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A small and fast cli tool that warns you of secrets saved in shell history and env variables.
Playing with Turmites: better than crypto/rand?
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Can a totally predictable pattern show more entropy than a randomly generated one?
Farcaster Links Babel
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We’re in the fortunate position of having multiple Farcaster clients — from Merkle Manufactory, Base, Zapper, and even independent developers.
The year 2049
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The year is 2049. Farcaster has become the internet’s dominant conversational protocol.
Credible Neutrality Matters
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Today we live in a highly interconnected yet increasingly fractured landscape. Trust is scarce.
Social attacks with monetary value
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How tipping and marketing miniapps could be exploited by attackers for financial gain.
The Case for Snapchain Minimalism
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Store as little content as possible on snapchain, and design the standards that will allow Farcaster content to be stored externally.
Farcaster in Coinbase Wallet
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Coinbase Wallet will integrate with Farcaster. Here's why I find it exciting.
Ethereum as a Neutral Economic Zone
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Ethereum, as the largest, neutral, economic activity zone is our hedge against a fragmented and hostile world that is starting to treat prosperity as a zero-sum game.
Farcaster L2s
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What could a Farcaster Layer 2 look like? How could we implement them? Is it a good idea?
The Moore-Nakamoto plain
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A great tool to map and compare projects, and to analyze how advances in compute and crypto will affect them in the future.
Farcaster account recovery
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If you lost your secret Farcaster phrase, you are in luck! Farcaster (the protocol) has an account recovery feature built-in. This is how Warpcast (the most popular client) has implemented it. But there’s a lot more to it.
VisionPro's EyeSight may be a killer feature.
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The outward display that reveals your eyes while wearing Vision Pro may be a killer feature.
The dangerous path of OpenSea's blacklisting tool
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OpenSea's tool that enforces fees, is much more than this and we are about to make the same mistakes all over again.
Implementing tokenURI as a separate contract
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The cost is minimal, and the advantages are significant.
What's the utility of a pfp NFT collection? Signalling.
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Why do users spend money to buy a PFP NFT?
Putting an old iMac to use
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Configuring an old iMac to run pihole, homebridge, and ipfs, using Siri to turn the brightness on/off and using it as a... "LED panel" light.
The rise of the activist trader (?)
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An activist trader is an individual or group that uses trading of public stocks or other financial instruments in order to achieve a cause other than financial profit.
The GameSpot backstory
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@endtwist explains the backstory and the technical details of the GameSpot stock.
Crypto, blockchains and the next computing paradigm
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How blockchains and crypto bring a new paradigm in computing, what this means and how to identify the areas it could disrupt.
My first take on NFC tags
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I recently purchased my first NFC tags. Here are my first impressions and my first experiments.
Scented candles: An unexpected victim of the COVID-19 pandemic
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Analyzing scented candles Amazon reviews.
I like this twitter-to-blogpost format more and more
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Converting tweets to blog posts started as an experiment, but I'll probably stick to it.
Creating a blog post out of a twitter thread.
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I'm working on a tool that converts a twitter thread to a blog post. This is an example post.
HEY does not support IMAP and that's its most important feature.
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HEY.com is a new email service. After spending 14 days with it, here is my take on it.
Weekend project: Unifi UDM + RaspberryPi + UnicornHAT HD
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Monitor Unifi Dream Machine traffic with a Raspberry Pi and UnicornHAT HD.
etc-hosts.com is a dynamic DNS crafted with care.
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How does a paid offering makes sense in a market that is niche, over-saturated with free services and not sexy at all?
iOS 13 Books app and parental controls
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Is iOS 13 Books a parent's nightmare, or am I missing something?
Thoughts on turtlecoin public nodes
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Changes to trtl.nodes.pub, API results and a possible attack vector.
A "dual" SIM setup with older iPhones (not X+).
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You can use two iPhones (one can be a quite old one) and carry only one with you.
How to create an ad hoc, private Instagram with iCloud
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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.
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Your blog has a feature that Facebook does not: discoverability.
“Social Networks” don’t scale socially
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Monolithic, centralised social networking sites do not scale socially.
My Synology DS916+: a year later.
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How I set it up, how I use it and my overall impressions after a bit more than a year with it.
Print vs online magazines.
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Why do I enjoy reading print magazines when I can find the same articles online?
Where is social for podcasts?
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Why isn't there a service where I can show the podcasts I'm subscribed too and the episodes I liked most?
Cryptocurrencies and the Labor of Computers.
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Crypto is to CPU cycles what money is to human labor.
Digital currency Industries and Indexes
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I think we should create some digital currency indexes based on capitalisation, sector etc.
A kill switch to countermeasure border controls?
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Creating a kill switch that will wipe sensitive data from my computer if asked to unlock it.
My feed reading setup.
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If you miss the freedom RSS used to give us before we started relying on Facebook, read on.
A Driver Mode for smartphones.
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Let’s use technology to limit -or even eliminate- distracted driving.
The Ultimatum Game
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A social experiment that may offer an explanation about the recent political developments in the world.
How to create a simple ASN.1 parser
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Step by step instructions to create a ASN.1 parser using asn1c.
Making GitHub part of my publishing workflow
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How I'm using a github repo as a notebook, and the first steps towards hosting my blog on github.
Dear Qatar Airways, you know nothing about customer care.
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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 instant articles first thoughts
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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.
UX tip: Users need your feedback too.
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Give your users feedback for their actions. Especially if you are the one who asked them to do something.
Simple bash script for encrypted chat over keybase fs (kbfs)
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First impressions of the keybase.io filesystem, and a small bash script to implement a secure, encrypted chat service over it.
How to bypass the Netflix VPN ban
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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.
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How Netflix and the content industry is blocking users who are paying 60% more than the rest to access content legitimately.
Comparing my Facebook to my Instagram feed
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It seems that the people I follow can express more interesting things using photos than words.
The annoying state of Internet subscriptions
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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
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Follow up to a reply I got for recommending Audible in my last Letter.
How to archive your Gmail
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Why not make a tradition out of archiving your Gmail at the end of the year? See how easy it is.
Testing Twitter ads
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The results of a small experiment at getting new subscribers to my newsletter using Twitter lead generation ads and MailChimp form integrations.
Support Matthew Ebel on patreon
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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
Your startup’s blog should be on Medium.
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Why your startup's blog (at least the first one) should be on Medium.
A newsletter that turned into something more personal.
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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.
How I keep my twitter feed healthy
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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.
nodeStorage brings simple S3-based storage to applications written in JS that run in the browser.
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On Dave Winer's nodeStorage
A geek, capital controls in Greece and bitcoin.
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How capital controls in Greece affected my on-line presence and why I'm giving bitcoin a serious try.
Shutting down longaccess
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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.
Social networking services have failed me. I'm going back to my web 2.0 roots.
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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 super-minimal, almost "plain-text" email template for Mailchimp.
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How I created a very simple email template for Mailchimp that resembles a lot plain text emails, to send my daily digest.
Post to your GitHub-hosted blog using a simple bookmarklet.
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jekyll-post-via-web is a simple HTML page that lets you update your GitHub-hosted Jekyll blog using your browser.
A major tlbx.io update
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Automatically organise your Camera Uploads, get notified about changes in your Dropbox via email or Slack, and many bug fixes.
Will heartbeat sharing be the new social gesture?
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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.
testing my webmentions server
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This is a test post to try my own webmentions endpoint at www.listnr.net.
I'm so excited about our BigStash launch!
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I used to love the few extra days of staying at home, when it snows in Athens, but this year, it's different :-)
ALIVE INSIDE
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An amazing documentary about music's capacity to reawaken our souls and uncover the deepest parts of our humanity.
I enabled SSL for my S3-hosted static blog
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How I used CloudFlare's (free) Universal SSL to enable HTTPS for my S3-hosted static-HTML blog, and a few extra notes.
Apple Pay and the heartbeat sensor on Apple Watch.
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My theory behind the heart rate sensor built in Apple Watch
I don't think that's Why Starbucks Spells Your Name Wrong.
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But the truth may be even more amazing, from a different point of view.
How we use Intercom to engage with our users on Twitter.
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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.
browser-based notifications for my blog using Roost
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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.
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It’s not how they use the enormous power they have. It’s who controls it.
How we use Intercom in the deepfreeze.io registration workflow.
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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.
Offloading unused Dropbox files to deepfreeze.io
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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.
Google and “the right to be forgotten”.
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Could it be that Google Search has reached its limit to scale?
Old blog post URLs as a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
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What if we didn't care to make old blog posts easy to navigate to?
Using Longaccess [video]
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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
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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.
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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.
"fragmentions" is a cool idea.
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A cool idea that allows us to link directly to any text fragmet inside web pages.
my little daughter's scrapbook and digital content.
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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.
just an idea: the kindergarten art archive
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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...
Setting HackerNews "new" page as my browser default page
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I decided to make new tabs open the HackerNews "newest" section, to help new posts I like get an initial traction.
Why you can't comment here.
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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
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Two reasons why I'll stick to my unfriendly, long, Google+ URL.
When it comes to privacy, proof is better than promise -and it helps us sleep better at night.
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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.
tools we use at longaccess: HipChat
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One of the tools we use most at longaccess is HipChat. Here is why.
Showing twitter references in a static blog
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Weekend project: How to show under each static blog engine post the tweets that mentioned it.
BitTorent Sync is a great tool for startups.
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Our experience with BitTorrent Sync at longaccess has been great.
Don't write off Microsoft in mobile
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Microsoft is in a tough place, but they may have the chance to disrupt the ecosystem.
replacing the search engine: a distributed query system.
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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.
Why we started longaccess.
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How did we come up with the idea of longaccess? Here is the true story.
They are social places, not networks
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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.
Privacy, Marketing and the NSA
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The dominant business model for online consumer services leaves little room for privacy.
Your 2-year old can use the iPad. So what.
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I find it amusing when other parents brag that their kids can use the iPad.
My daughter changed my perception of time.
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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
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“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.”
migrating from iPhoto to Dropbox, from feature rich to future proof.
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How I moved from feature rich iPhoto to future proof Dropbox.
my post got 63k visits thanks to HN: the aftermath.
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One of my posts got to HackerNews #1 for hours. Here is what I’ve learned and some interesting data.