Fixing a Broken Service With a Tiny Bit of Automation

This post is a nice, unintentional follow-up to yesterday’s one about backing up all of my family’s photos and home videos. Anyway… My kids go to a fantastic daycare. My wife and I couldn’t be happier. The teachers are wonderful, they love our children, and our kids adore them, too. But, the third-party service the school uses to communicate with parents is absolute horseshit. I won’t say what the service is because I don’t want to give them free publicity or maybe even alert them to what I’m doing, but if you have daycare-aged children, you probably know it. All …

Read more

Backing Up Everything (Again)

This will take a while. Bear with me. I’m obsessive about backing up my data. I don’t want to take the chance of ever losing anything important. But that doesn’t mean I’m a data hoarder. I like to think I’m pragmatic about it. And I don’t trust anyone else to do it for me. From around 2006 to 2012, I kept a Mac mini attached to our TV with a Drobo hanging off the back. It had all our downloaded movies on it. And every night it would automatically download the latest releases of our favorite TV shows from Usenet …

Read more

A Simple, Open-Source URL Shortener

tl;dr One evening last week, I built pretty much the simplest URL shortening service possible. It’s simple, fast, opinionated, keeps track of click-thru stats, and does everything I need. It’s all self-contained in a single PHP script (and .htaccess file). No dependencies, no frameworks to install, etc. Just upload the file to your web server and you’re done. Maybe you’ll find it useful, too. Anyway… I run a small software company which sells macOS and iOS software. Part of my day-to-day in running the business is replying to customer support questions – over email and, sometimes, SMS/chat. I often need …

Read more