Self-hosting is a big hobby for me (and a big source of content for my website). Not only is it a great source of entertainment and fun, but I find it incredibly interesting, vaguely relevant to my job, and a good way to regain a little privacy. Over the last…
I've never been a huge fan of cameras inside my house. The idea of a network-connected camera lens pointing around my house doesn't fill me with very warm feelings. However, as time goes on, the value of being able to be nosy on my own home when I'm not there…
Today is world backup day, a day to highlight the importance of backups, protecting data, and keeping systems secure (at least that's what Wikipedia says). I'm taking this day as a chance to review my backup strategy, and make sure I'm happy with the coverage I'm getting. I mentioned a…
It's that time of year again, time to steal some of Cortex's search rankings to talk about my own "State of the Apps" - the applications and setups I use to make my life what it is. Since my last post, and in fact in just the last few weeks,…
I love RSS, and I love that it exists. RSS is an open standard for “content syndication”, which basically means you can scrape a list of content from a website and then read it wherever and however you want. Because it’s an open standard, and a fairly simple one at…
YouTube is the largest video hosting platform on the planet, serving well over 1 billion videos a day to its over 30 million daily active users. People have had issues with YouTube’s subscription service for years, and for a service so large and so widely used it seems crazy that…
Around 10 years ago, Facebook was everything. No matter your interests, you could find like-minded people on Facebook to share your passion with. But that communication came at a price: your personal data. In recent years, we’ve realized to what extent Facebook was selling our data and generally invading our…