Aaron Parecki

Back in the early days of Twitter, I noticed that several tweets I was seeing showed "via _____" next to the date, which linked to the application that was used to post the tweet. I thought "hey that's a clever way to give credit to applications" and thought it would be a good way to get people to discover the Twitter app I was creating at the time.

twitter.com/anomalily/status/528297903618420736

twitter.com/the_Zieger/status/523020728325902336

If I could design Blackmagic's next product, here is what I would make.

When running nginx as the front-end web service for your API, you may need to put up a "maintenance" page and send back "HTTP 503 Service Unavailable" for all incoming HTTP requests. For some reason, all the existing docs I found online were either too complicated or did not handle this properly. Here is a simple configuration block that will set the HTTP header, content type, and return a custom JSON file as the response.

twitter.com/cienvaras/status/505492623277432832

aaronparecki.com/notes/2014/08/10/1/bridgepedal

The humans are away, it's time to party!

This is a summary of this week's IndieWeb events! Two talks at Open Source Bridge, an indieweb breakfast, pre-party happy hour, and the flagship IndieWebCamp event this weekend!

In iOS 8, Wi-Fi scanning will use random MAC addresses, making it impossible to passively track a device using its MAC address. This also ensures the only way to track devices indoors is by using iBeacon technology.

No, Chirpify did not acquire Urban Airship. Goes to show just how important the browser's address bar is.

Since the launch of iOS 7, your iPhone has been collecting a list of "frequent locations" as you move around. If you don't already know about this, you can check out your list in the Settings app.

I have been continuously logging GPS data for 6 years now, and thinking a lot about how I want to archive the data long-term. Currently I have the data in a MySQL database, which is not a good long-term solution.

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.