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…
Following-up on my previous post about using Drafts to create new GitHub issues, here’s another action I built and use all the time. This allows you to create multiple tasks in OmniFocus with defer dates, due dates, and tags in one step. It does this by parsing a compact, easy-to-write syntax that I’ve adopted from other OmniFocus actions and tweaked…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 of your projects is the…
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 iPhone app to help me…