Aaron Parecki

I've only had Foursquare's new "Swarm" app for a day, but I'm already super impressed. By trimming out all of the search/review features, they're able to focus the app on providing a great checkin experience and providing more ways to connect with your friends.

A quick guide to updating OpenSSL on Ubuntu 12.04 running Nginx and Ruby and verifying that your system is safe from the Heartbleed bug.

I've been wanting to publish my photo stream on my site for a while, but never had a good way to do so. I don't really want to build a photo posting UI in a web form, or write my own iOS app to take photos. And the last thing I want is to change the way I take and share photos from my phone. I've been using Instagram for a while, and it provides a very quick way to take, edit, annotate and share photos. I could hardly ask for a better experience!

I often know an EC2 instance ID and need to SSH to the server. In order to avoid manually looking up the IP address or hostname, I wrote a small script to let myself SSH to an EC2 given an instance ID.

As anybody who deals with multiple servers in multiple AWS accounts knows, it can be a real pain to maintain an up-to-date ~/.ssh/config file. Most solutions I've found for managing this assume you only have one AWS account. I've decided to share my setup for how I deal with managing my ssh config file that contains entries from 4 different AWS accounts, two Linode accounts, and some other random entries.

This post is a review about the syncing process of a number of popular self-tracking devices.

Today in the middle of the flight from Portland to Amsterdam, I was unsatisfied with merely knowing what time it was in Portland and in Amsterdam. Instead, I wanted to know what time it effectively was in the airplane as I was flying, taking in to account the stretching of time by flying. My theory is by looking at "airplane time" and ignoring the origin and destination times completely, it may be easier to adjust to a new timezone since you won't have to trick yourself into ignoring your other clocks.

I was sitting at the back of the API discussion at the Quantified Self Conference this Friday in San Francisco, and realized that there is something wrong with the current way these quantified self devices are built and marketed. I don't want to buy a device and be trapped in the company's ecosystem of apps and be stuck in yet another social network. I want to use these physical devices as inputs to my own data store, and have a completely separate set of companies handle the social and aggregation of data from the data that I own.

Now that I've been creating a list of events on my site using p3k, it would be great if I could get a more calendar-like view of that list.

You can now use <a href="https://indieauth.com">IndieAuth.com</a> as an OpenID delegate! This makes it super easy to move off of myopenid.com since it will be shutting down in a few months.

Aral Balkan makes some good points on his piece, Trickle‐down technology and why it doesn't work, but misses the mark in several cases. This post is an attempt to clarify many of the arguments made and provide more context on the goals of IndieWebCamp.

New problem: My notes do not have a "u-syndication" link to the app.net version like they do for the Twitter versions, because my code has no idea that app.net syndicated my post automatically using PourOver.

Here's a really simple trick for keeping an encrypted file for passwords and other sensitive information on OS X or Linux. I use this to keep some basic password hints and account numbers on my computer.

Last weekend Amber, Anima and I drove from San Diego to Palm Springs to YxYY. We were streaming music from Spotify on the whole drive, and Spotify was scrobbling to my Last.fm account. Of course I was also tracking my location like I always do. Then it dawned on me that I could put together a map showing all the songs we listened to and where we were for each! Below is the result!

IndieAuth is a way to use your own domain name to sign in to websites. To sign in, you enter your domain name, and IndieAuth looks for a supported authentication provider on your site and uses that to sign you in.

Part of our work at Esri is to build open-source projects that support people building fun and new mapping applications. We are happy to announce four open source Javascript projects we've been working on in the last few months! <a href="https://github.com/Esri/esri-leaflet">Esri-Leaflet</a> is a Javascript library to help developers build lightweight applications using the Leaflet Javascript mapping library. <a href="https://github.com/Esri/geoservices-js">Geoservices.js</a> is a Javascript client for accessing ArcGIS Online services from the browser or Node.js. <a href="https://github.com/esri/terraformer">Terraformer</a> is a geometry toolkit for working with different geometry formats and building geo databases. <a href="https://github.com/esri/pushlet">Pushlet</a> is a simple API for sending notifications through the Apple and Google push notification services.

As part of expanding the functionality of the software my site runs on, I thought it was about time to start showing inline content when I post links in notes.

After I posted my article, An Open Challenge to App.net, @po shared it on App.net. You can see the full thread here.

I am no longer publishing content to my App.net account until I can syndicate my content to their service without writing a single line of code.

Lately I've been doing a lot of development in Ruby, specifically with Sinatra and Sequel, and I've been liking that development stack a lot. So much so, that when I switch back to PHP for a project, I wish my PHP stack was more like my Ruby stack.