I made this because I adopted a puppy and realized that, if I got hit by a bus on a Friday, he could be stuck in his crate for days before anyone realized. Morbid, but useful.
It texts you every X days and asks, "u ded?" -- if you don't click "naw" before X days pass, it'll notify your contacts.
Wow, going through that was a bit emotional. You've got to set up an email that gets sent to your contacts when you've been inactive for >3months. That'll only happen if I'm dead or imprisoned so, yuck. Did not enjoy typing that one up.
Wow, what a frighteningly effective deadman switch. Normally I'd be worried about forgetting to reset it but in this case it's hard /not/ to use a Google product in a normal day.
I don't know, getting that as a final joke from the right friend or younger family member might be my favorite way to be informed, and then I'd go walk their dog. I'd still be sad, of course, but there's really no good way to be informed of this. In all likely hood, I'd already be informed, and then I'd get this half-assed reminder and be all "oh my god, it's so like them!"
Actually when considering likelihood, they're probably on vacation and forgot to pause the program. A better message might be along the lines of: "Hi this is Sean's personal assistant script: I can't confirm that his puppy has been getting walked would you check into that for me? Spare key is..."
After the final one hour warning, it should call you and if you pick up, the alarm cancels. So a final step that's not passive and only requires picking up the phone instead of opening the texting app and clicking a link. Also helps if you're somewhere where you have SMS/calling but no data. Although in that case, being able to reply "I no ded" would be more reliable.
I have migrated my wife's (then girlfriend) computer to Linux and sometimes I had to configure something on her computer (e.g. a printer). This ended up generating lots of back and forth on the phone with me telling her commands to write in the terminal, and she reading the output out loud. I wanted an easy way to see her terminal. So shellshare was born.
Shellshare allows you to run a single command line and share your terminal online (read-only)
Please don't tell people to do this. This is an idiom called "curl pipe sh"; you're asking people to run whatever code someone on their network decides to send them.
As an absolute minimum, you should change that http to https, so that they're merely running whatever code YOU decide to send them; but even that doesn't quite fit with the "share your terminal (read-only)" philosophy...
I agree with the HTTPS part, but aside from that I can't really see how it's less safe than saying "here, install this .deb (which gets to run scripts as root) and then run the binary inside".
Wow, that's pretty cool. I've thought about moving my parents to Linux; my mom only uses the internet, and while my dad needs his computer for work, the software he uses supports Linux. I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to support Windows for them for much longer. I use Linux full time, and Windows is slowly changing. I can still talk them through most problems over the phone, but little changes here and there have made walking them through an issue really time consuming, which is frustrating for all of us.
My chief concern with installing Linux was having to teach them how to communicate what is happening over the phone all over again. Outside of that, I'm pretty confident Linux is a good choice for my parents. My dad actually worked for Digital Electronics for years, and he's been interested in Linux for as long as I've been using it, but I think Linux would actually be better for my mom, because she literally doesn't care about her computer as long as it works. Her computer issues are generally the "the computer keeps telling me something and I want it to go away" type. Fixing those problems on the phone with Windows is a mess, but are basically trivial in Linux. My dad's issues are generally "I broke the internet," so this wouldn't be as helpful for him.
I'm really excited about this. I might honestly go buy an SSD to install Linux on my Mom's computer today. That way I could just drop it in her computer next time I'm at her house. My hope is that the boost in speed from Windows---> Linux, and the boost in speed from a 5400 rpm drive --> SSD would keep her happy long enough to get used to Linux. She's been complaining a lot about speed recently, and last time I was there I discovered she managed to her default user folder from the internal drive to an external USB backup drive. I have no idea how she did this, but it means she keeps running out of space because the backup process now backs up the backup drive recursively.
This is another great option, with much more features than shellshare. At the time I started working on shellshare, it only allowed read/write sessions, so I wrote it anyway.
I am very, very proud of the (very simple) platform that we've built there. It's a basic tool that "just works" - and just works exactly like you'd expect it to.
If I were a consumer of cloud storage, this is what I would want it to look like.
It pleases me so greatly to know that, right now, someone is doing something like this:
pg_dump -U postgres db | ssh user@rsync.net "dd of=db_dump"
... while simultaneously, someone else is doing this:
It's been 15 years now since we started providing this service - almost 11 since we branded it rsync.net - and the first warrant canary is now 10 years old. This appears to be, for now, my lifes work.
I've used rsync.net personally and commercially. Thanks so much for building a great, simple tool and also caring about user privacy with the warrant canary and stuff.
Aaah, what happened to your old site? It literally takes 10 seconds minimum from the screwed up JavaScript scrolling to reach the bottom of the site.
I'm sure this converts better, but at the same time the site design and stock photos screams newish SaaS service that could disappear on me tomorrow. (I know better, it's just the impression I get)
I've only heard good things about rsync.net (though never had the chance to use it). Thanks.
Is there a blog posting or use case description for using it as a personal photos and videos backup solution? Something along the lines of best practices, approximate cost, any additional desktop tooling, etc.?
Can I use rsync.net to backup my (selected) laptop files to my local-network linux server? (I'm currently doing this with CrashPlan but I don't like that the backup destination has the files in some proprietary format).
I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
rsync.net is a cloud service that provides a remote filesystem and ssh access. How do you envision using a remote storage provider to backup your laptop to your local server?
At 14 Cents Per GB / Month, rsync.net costs me ~$1720 per year for 1TB (14 * 1024 * 12 / 100).
S3 at 3 Cents Per GB / Month clocks in at ~$368 per year for 1TB (3 * 1024 * 12 / 100). Let's say I'm using a lot of transfer, so I'm going to double the price to ~$720 per year.
Still, rsync.net costs me $1000 more per year. Convince me :).
Am I missing it or is there no Company/About page on your website? There's an obvious difference between rsync'ing to Chinese/Russian and US/European clouds, so knowing where the company is and who's behind it is pretty much a must.
I created this favicon generator a few weeks ago to generate minimal favicons for my side projects. I'm not good with design tools so it saves me time when I start a new project and want a simple favicon in ICO format.
I'm proud of it because it's server-less. I generate the multi-BMP ICO file in binary using ArrayBuffers and Typed Arrays in JavaScript. I use a <canvas> element to create the images/design.
It's not very polished and I'm sure there are bugs, but feedback would be appreciated!
Right now I'm adding many different image sizes in the ICO file to cover many types of browsers and devices, but it's probably not a good default. I will expose sizing options or default to fewer sizes in the future.
Two years ago I created a CLI tool called pgcli (http://pgcli.com). A postgres client with auto-completion. It became ridiculously successful. I got a few requests to support mysql. So I launched a kickstarter to write mycli (http://mycli.net). This also became quite successful.
There is a thriving community of core devs and a ton of users. I'm happy with both creations and made a lot of online friends.
These projects also led me to create a standalone python library for doing fuzzy matching. I'm quite proud of this one since the resulting code ended up being ridiculously small but produced really good results. https://github.com/amjith/fuzzyfinder/
I work in security and have a paranoia of shortened links (bit.ly, t.co). I got frustrated with the options out there that forced me to right click every shortened link or paste it into a site so I made this Chrome extension / web app. It is pretty simple and keeps a list of 300+ shortened link services to check against. If your browser ever visits one it redirects you to the site to expand the link. It will also hit the Google Safebrowsing API to see if it is known to be malware plus will strip out tracking cookies.
It's been fun and rewarding watching my little extension grow to global use of over 4k users.
It'll expand a goo.gl link which would then display the Grabify link. The extension does not support Grabify but will certainly be adding it. I'm not a fan at all of these IP trackers.
* A python library and cli utility for controlling YeeLight RGB LED bulbs (a cheaper and nicer version of Hue bulbs) that I wrote this weekend: https://yeelight.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
I like expounder, definitely haven't seen something like that before. I'd like it if there was an option to have the expanded text highligted in some way, just so I can keep track of everything mentally.
Spamnesty is really amusing! It would be even better if your bot had a wider variety of responses.
I foresee that sooner or later, your bot will get stuck in an endless conversation with a spambot which keeps replying, leading to another round of replies and then another...
Haha, this already happened, I think the 22 response one was a bot. I have a ~8 hour delay before I stop it, so luckily I noticed it and deleted one of my responses.
I hope you'll also distribute the code so hopefully anyone not necessary trusting your service to not harvest email addresses or resell them (or get hacked) would be able to deploy that on a custom server.
that Dead mans switch type of project is only funny when you want others to use it.
That idea alone should make us reflect if we had lived a life being true to ourselves and told everyone what we wanted them to hear.
OK, next its my turn:
Ill create a dating bot that contacts users on Valentines day, and invites them to restaurant if they will still be single next year.
How does it feel ?
I made it as a simple joke, but for some reason it rapidly gained popularity among Emacs users, and now I sometimes find it or hear about it in unexpected places.
(Also I fear that on my deathbed I'll look back and realize that the most used thing I've ever made in my life was an animated cat for a text editor... sigh)
I have been using this for years and all my work colleagues always ask me "what is that nyan cat on your text editor? that must be super annoying!" and I always have to tell them I just really like it.
Readit News
(i.e., "iz u ded?")
I made this because I adopted a puppy and realized that, if I got hit by a bus on a Friday, he could be stuck in his crate for days before anyone realized. Morbid, but useful.
It texts you every X days and asks, "u ded?" -- if you don't click "naw" before X days pass, it'll notify your contacts.
It's a portfolio project to show what I've learned in the realm of "serverless" architecture. Details about its construction here: https://medium.com/@marclar/iz-u-ded-713594fd80e9
Could be an attack vector when you know someone's google usage will be sparse.
Man, that's not how I would want to find out that a friend or family member has passed away.
:-|
Actually when considering likelihood, they're probably on vacation and forgot to pause the program. A better message might be along the lines of: "Hi this is Sean's personal assistant script: I can't confirm that his puppy has been getting walked would you check into that for me? Spare key is..."
P.S: Yes I'm thirty. Y'all don't know Indian moms.
5 minutes later..
"- I arrived. No assassins encountered."
> the market of dying
is there something about your mortality that you'd like to tell us?
Great article and nice project. Do you upload an "event" to a queue type folder on S3? what triggers the Lambda function after the file upload?
As @jdale27 said, there's built-in functionality with AWS that lets you subscribe to various events, e.g. S3 uploads, CloudWatch logs, etc.
http://semantic-ui.com/
Wouldn't solve the changing-your-number thing, but I'm guessing you don't do that too often.
I have migrated my wife's (then girlfriend) computer to Linux and sometimes I had to configure something on her computer (e.g. a printer). This ended up generating lots of back and forth on the phone with me telling her commands to write in the terminal, and she reading the output out loud. I wanted an easy way to see her terminal. So shellshare was born.
Shellshare allows you to run a single command line and share your terminal online (read-only)
That'll give you an URL others can join and watch your terminal live. No sessions, no recordings, and the data is deleted every day.There aren't many users, but I use it almost every week.
Please don't tell people to do this. This is an idiom called "curl pipe sh"; you're asking people to run whatever code someone on their network decides to send them.
As an absolute minimum, you should change that http to https, so that they're merely running whatever code YOU decide to send them; but even that doesn't quite fit with the "share your terminal (read-only)" philosophy...
I also agree on the bad sides of the "curl pipe sh" pattern. Ideally, that command would be "apt-get install shellshare && shellshare", but haven't been able to write packages for it yet. There're 2 open issues about this: https://github.com/vitorbaptista/shellshare/issues/28 and https://github.com/vitorbaptista/shellshare/issues/31, if you or anyone else have some time to contribute.
My chief concern with installing Linux was having to teach them how to communicate what is happening over the phone all over again. Outside of that, I'm pretty confident Linux is a good choice for my parents. My dad actually worked for Digital Electronics for years, and he's been interested in Linux for as long as I've been using it, but I think Linux would actually be better for my mom, because she literally doesn't care about her computer as long as it works. Her computer issues are generally the "the computer keeps telling me something and I want it to go away" type. Fixing those problems on the phone with Windows is a mess, but are basically trivial in Linux. My dad's issues are generally "I broke the internet," so this wouldn't be as helpful for him.
I'm really excited about this. I might honestly go buy an SSD to install Linux on my Mom's computer today. That way I could just drop it in her computer next time I'm at her house. My hope is that the boost in speed from Windows---> Linux, and the boost in speed from a 5400 rpm drive --> SSD would keep her happy long enough to get used to Linux. She's been complaining a lot about speed recently, and last time I was there I discovered she managed to her default user folder from the internal drive to an external USB backup drive. I have no idea how she did this, but it means she keeps running out of space because the backup process now backs up the backup drive recursively.
I am very, very proud of the (very simple) platform that we've built there. It's a basic tool that "just works" - and just works exactly like you'd expect it to.
If I were a consumer of cloud storage, this is what I would want it to look like.
It pleases me so greatly to know that, right now, someone is doing something like this:
... while simultaneously, someone else is doing this: It's been 15 years now since we started providing this service - almost 11 since we branded it rsync.net - and the first warrant canary is now 10 years old. This appears to be, for now, my lifes work.On the other hand, we need a word about that scrolljacking on your homepage...
Started with http://rsync.net/products/aws.html but all of them linked at the top are unreadable
https://youtu.be/4sz5_XsNDaQ
I'm sure this converts better, but at the same time the site design and stock photos screams newish SaaS service that could disappear on me tomorrow. (I know better, it's just the impression I get)
Is there a blog posting or use case description for using it as a personal photos and videos backup solution? Something along the lines of best practices, approximate cost, any additional desktop tooling, etc.?
If so, I would love to be a customer.
Thanks!
rsync.net is a cloud service that provides a remote filesystem and ssh access. How do you envision using a remote storage provider to backup your laptop to your local server?
At 14 Cents Per GB / Month, rsync.net costs me ~$1720 per year for 1TB (14 * 1024 * 12 / 100).
S3 at 3 Cents Per GB / Month clocks in at ~$368 per year for 1TB (3 * 1024 * 12 / 100). Let's say I'm using a lot of transfer, so I'm going to double the price to ~$720 per year.
Still, rsync.net costs me $1000 more per year. Convince me :).
This is already addressed on the site.
[1] info@rsync.net
Apart from latency, is there a difference? Would you upload your unencrypted data for long term storage to anyone?
I created this favicon generator a few weeks ago to generate minimal favicons for my side projects. I'm not good with design tools so it saves me time when I start a new project and want a simple favicon in ICO format.
I'm proud of it because it's server-less. I generate the multi-BMP ICO file in binary using ArrayBuffers and Typed Arrays in JavaScript. I use a <canvas> element to create the images/design.
It's not very polished and I'm sure there are bugs, but feedback would be appreciated!
I'm thinking about adding some of the Google web fonts.
I solved a similar problem--- I was tired of websites that didn't provide favicons. So I have a chrome extension that hashes the domain and fetches a gravatar icon for it. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/replace-missing-fa...
Thanks for feedback!
<input type=color>
to make color selection more flexible.
There is a thriving community of core devs and a ton of users. I'm happy with both creations and made a lot of online friends.
These projects also led me to create a standalone python library for doing fuzzy matching. I'm quite proud of this one since the resulting code ended up being ridiculously small but produced really good results. https://github.com/amjith/fuzzyfinder/
I can't remember who turned me onto pgcli, but I've been telling everyone I can about it for a long time now. It's wonderful.
Thank you!
The initial surge of users came from HN when I originally posted it at launch, but since then most of the users were through word of mouth.
I work in security and have a paranoia of shortened links (bit.ly, t.co). I got frustrated with the options out there that forced me to right click every shortened link or paste it into a site so I made this Chrome extension / web app. It is pretty simple and keeps a list of 300+ shortened link services to check against. If your browser ever visits one it redirects you to the site to expand the link. It will also hit the Google Safebrowsing API to see if it is known to be malware plus will strip out tracking cookies.
It's been fun and rewarding watching my little extension grow to global use of over 4k users.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-...
http://goo.gl/zxcvb2+ (toy link, doesn't work)
Note the + at the end: it gives you a detailed statistics page that also tells you what the URL points to.
(NB, the stats come from JSON that seems easy to fetch; ratelimiting/"that's not a browser"-checking untested.)
* I converted a rotary phone into a cellphone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSkdWQswpc8
* I wrote a personal bookmark search engine: http://historio.us/
* A site that talks to spammers so you don't have to: https://spa.mnesty.com/
* A pastebin: http://pastery.net/
* A remote-controlled GSM irrigation controller for farmers: https://gitlab.com/stavros/irrigation-controller
* A button that orders food when pressed: https://www.stavros.io/posts/emergency-food-button/
* A python library and cli utility for controlling YeeLight RGB LED bulbs (a cheaper and nicer version of Hue bulbs) that I wrote this weekend: https://yeelight.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
* A secure communications library for IoT devices: http://stringphone.readthedocs.org/
* I took some non-terrible photos and made a site for them: http://portfolio.stavros.io/
* A hardware library for the A6 GSM modem: https://github.com/skorokithakis/A6lib
* Expounder, a better way to explain things in text: http://skorokithakis.github.io/expounder
* Dead man's switch, a website to email people after you die: https://www.deadmansswitch.net/
* I can't even remember the rest.
I foresee that sooner or later, your bot will get stuck in an endless conversation with a spambot which keeps replying, leading to another round of replies and then another...
I hope you'll also distribute the code so hopefully anyone not necessary trusting your service to not harvest email addresses or resell them (or get hacked) would be able to deploy that on a custom server.
In any case, was very fun to read.
Whats your thoughts and learnings on this one... it seems dark to me.. but i might be completely wrong..
That idea alone should make us reflect if we had lived a life being true to ourselves and told everyone what we wanted them to hear.
OK, next its my turn: Ill create a dating bot that contacts users on Valentines day, and invites them to restaurant if they will still be single next year. How does it feel ?
And how exactly does your dating example work? It invites them only if they agree to stay single for a year?
https://github.com/TeMPOraL/nyan-mode
I made it as a simple joke, but for some reason it rapidly gained popularity among Emacs users, and now I sometimes find it or hear about it in unexpected places.
(Also I fear that on my deathbed I'll look back and realize that the most used thing I've ever made in my life was an animated cat for a text editor... sigh)
Thank you for building this, it's awesome!