Beto

Staying true to the centuries-old library concept, only one patron at a time can rent a digital copy of a physical book for a limited period.

So sad that we solved the problem of knowledge scarcity, and because of greed we need to add it back artificially.

There’s was a scanner app that I loved, for Android. Turned into a subscription, even though most people use it less than once a month and even though the app was basically complete and never got updates.

Inflammable means flammable? What a country!

There’s a big conflict of interest in dating apps: if you’re successful you stop using the app, and of course the company doesn’t want that.

I worked for a startup that had as main investor a company called InterTrust. Our office was inside their building.

InterTrust was a patent portfolio that belonged to Sony and Philips. All they did was sue people. One day they were able to sue Apple on some stupid patent, and there was much rejoicing at the office.

It depends on what you mean by better. Faster? More user friendly? More versatile?

ffmpeg is written by Fabrice Bellard, who’s one of the most underrated programmers in the world (he also wrote QEMU). It’s probably the best tool out there, still actively maintained, and most commercial apps are probably using it under the hood for any kind of conversion.

I like supporting small business. 🙂

Also, depending on the VPS provider, you might get a lot of sites blocked. When I ran a VPN on Digital Ocean I couldn’t access USPS, OpenAI, imgur, and couldn’t leave comments on YouTube. I assume because of too many bots running on DO.

They do that upstream, so there’s nothing you can do on your router to change that.

One solution I’ve used in the past is run hoppy.network to get a public IP (it’s basically a VPN). Then your home computer has all ports open on that IP, since everything goes through an encrypted tunnel.