Month: April 2019

I’ve been hosting my company’s email with FastMail since 2008. They’re amazing. But my personal email had been with Gmail since the service was in beta in 2004. (And everything before Gmail lost to time and bit rot. Sigh.) Around five years ago, I started getting nervous with so much of my online identity tied to an address that I was essentially borrowing and had no real control over. I was never worried about Google losing any of my data, but I had heard countless horror stories of Google’s AI flagging an account for some type of violation and locking …

Read more

A couple weeks ago I wrote about how I was automatically capturing the photos and videos my kids’ daycare emails to me and importing them into Photos.app. The major pieces of that script worked fine – parsing the emails, downloading the images, and then rsync’ing them down to my Mac every hour. But what was failing was the Finder Folder Action I setup that was supposed to import the files into Photos.app whenever new ones were added to that folder. For some reason, the Folder Action would only occasionally fire. Maybe for one out of every ten items. Sometimes, if …

Read more

Just a quick note for my future self and anyone else who might be running into this problem. Last week I migrated all of my backups off of Amazon S3 and rsync.net to Backblaze B2. The cost savings are enormous – especially for a small business like myself. And the server-to-server transfer speeds using their b2 Python script, while not as fast as using a raw rsync connection, are quite a bit quicker than using S3. Before committing to B2, I gave it a really thorough test by seeding it with 350,000 files totaling 450GB. The whole process took about …

Read more

After last week’s post about how to create a GitHub issue with image attachments from an email, I thought I’d try and speed up how quickly / easily I’m able to create new issues that don’t come from customer emails – i.e., the ones that just randomly occur to me. Drafts is my preferred way of capturing text and ideas on Mac and iOS and then doing something with it. It has tons of scripts (actions) to do just about anything, and you can write your own if you need something custom. So, after a quick look through GitHub’s API …

Read more

In my quest to backup ALL THE THINGS, I turned my attention earlier this week to the shared iCloud Photo Albums my friends and family use to pass around photos and videos of our kids. All of the items in my iCloud library (and my wife’s library) are combined and backed up to Google Photos automatically. For better or worse, Google Photos is the “source of truth” that contains all of our archives and is sorted into albums. It’s the backup I’d use to restore if iCloud ever goes belly-up. (And I have a redundant backup of Google Photos itself …

Read more

I’m very meticulous about logging all of the feedback I receive from my customers. Whether it’s a bug report or a feature request, I want all of that information captured in a single place where I can plan and act on it. For me, that place is the Issues section in my app’s GitHub repo. Normally, when I get a customer email, my workflow is to reply back to them with any clarification I need, and then once we’ve finished with any back and forth, create a new GitHub issue with the relevant info from their email and a note …

Read more