Fixing Broken Backblaze B2 Scripts when Run From cron

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 … Read more

Creating New GitHub Issues From Drafts.app

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 … Read more

Backing Up Shared iCloud Photo Albums and Where to Find Them on Disk

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 … Read more

Creating GitHub Issues (with image attachments!) From an Email

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. … Read more

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 … 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 … 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 … Read more

Moving Projects Forward

One of my favorite benefits of following a GTD workflow is that it eliminates a lot of the decision making for you. When it’s time to get work done, just fire up your task manager of choice, switch to your list of available next actions, and pick one. Having defined, physical next actions for each … Read more

Switching to Google Photos from a Dropbox Photo Library

Five years ago I went all-in and migrated my ancient iPhoto library to generic files and folders on disk inside of Dropbox. I wanted something I could access from anywhere, and – perhaps more importantly – was future-proof. I liked this solution so much I started writing a book about it and even made an … Read more