mostly nonsense
Back in June I wrote a detailed post describing how I backup my data. One of the key components of my backup strategy was using Backblaze for continuous, offsite recovery in the event of a disaster. Well, disaster struck. Last week, the hard drive in my father’s MacBook died. In the past, I’d setup a … Read more
I’m totally obsessed with web site performance. It’s one of those nerd niches that really appeal to me. I’ve blogged a few times previously on the topic. Two years ago, (has it really been that long?) I talked about my experiences rebuilding this site following the best practices of YSlow. A few days later I … Read more
I’ve noticed a resurgence on the web of people talking about OmniFocus and how they use the app to manage their task lists. Despite being a user for nearly three years — since the first public beta — for some reason I’ve never gotten around to writing about why I find it so useful and … Read more
For an upcoming project, I needed a quick PHP function that would generate strong passwords. It’s an easy problem on the surface, but it has some quirky nuances that appear if you spend any length of time thinking about it. For example, it’s not enough to merely pick characters at random — you have to … Read more
Four years ago, on another blog, I wrote about my file backup strategy — everything I use to keep my data safe. A lot has changed since then. CD’s and DVD’s have fallen by the wayside, raw hard disk space has gotten insanely cheap, and online storage has finally taken off in a big way. … Read more
On this lazy Sunday afternoon I thought I’d take the opportunity to mention a few open source projects I’ve recently updated. GitHub makes sharing code so ridiculously easy, it’s a shame not to call attention to it occasionally in case other people might find something useful. Sosumi 2.0 First up is Sosumi 2.0. Last year, … Read more
A year and a half ago I wrote about OpenFeedback, an open source Cocoa framework for gathering feedback from your users. Initially, it was a sister project to Appcaster, my indie dashboard web app. Since then, Appcaster has grown up and morphed into Shine, but OpenFeedback remained unchanged. Tonight, though, I took a few hours … Read more
I’ve been wanting to switch my online store away from PayPal for quite a while now. Although there are a bunch of PayPal horror stories floating around the web (here’s a recent one), my main reason is to make my life simpler. As much as I like rolling my own solutions, it’s too complicated to … Read more
Two years ago, shortly after I released VirtualHostX 1.0, I wrote about Appcaster – a web dashboard for Mac developers I built that manages my application updates, payment processing, etc. With the release of VHX 2.0 and Incoming!, I decided it was time to rewrite Appcaster as the original code was hurried and hastily patched … Read more
Sosumi is a PHP script that scrapes MobileMe and exposes Apple’s Find My iPhone functionality to the command line or your own web application. This lets you pull your phone’s current location and push messages and alarms to the device. Like my previous blog post that dealt with AT&T’s Family Map service, my goal was … Read more