pqvst

Probably the closest I've ever been to getting a heart attack. Normally <$1 per month, and now suddenly $284,006,266,443.74. Whatever the bug is on their end, this is unforgivable.

Sphere looks quite promising, and I haven't come across them before. Their coverage looks pretty good as well, and pricing sounds reasonable. It looks like they have a Stripe integration. Is that something you're using?

I run a B2C SaaS business. We're an EU company. We use Stripe for all billing, and we use Stripe Checkout and Stripe Tax for all of our tax calculations. We've built our own tools to generate monthly/quarterly tax summary reports from our Stripe payments data.

Luckily most of our business is in the EU, so as an EU company, filing our EU VAT is easy.

We used Avalara for 1 year in order to setup VAT registration in Norway. We chose Avalara because they do in fact provide full service solutions for VAT (registration, filing, and remittance). However, they are expensive and were AWFUL to work with: poor communication/support, no integration with Stripe, and we had to manually generate carefully structured Excel files in order to import our sales data. We cancelled our contract with them after 1 year, but were able to take over the filing account from them and now our in-house accountant does the filing and remittance (which is quick, easy, and MUCH cheaper).

We have considered something like Paddle, but it is difficult to justify the increased fees as our business grows. For the amount of money we'd be spending on Paddle in extra fees vs Stripe, we may as well just use a service provider or hire our own staff.

With Stripe Tax we can easily monitor our thresholds in other countries. There are some countries that technically require registration for even a single transaction in that country, which is ridiculous. I imagine for most companies it is definitely not feasible to register, file, and remit in all of those countries.

From Q1 2024, Gmail and Yahoo will require senders to have SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Also, spam complaints must be kept below 0.3%.

I recently added DMARC monitoring to some of my domains through CloudFlare.

Yes. That is a good point. I'll update the post and recommend using a local tool instead.

Huh. What browser?

Thanks :)

Thanks! I didn't realize web-push had a way to generate the keys until later. Also it was just easier to use the vapidkeys site.

Started AwardFares (https://awardfares.com) back in 2018. It's a search engine for finding flights to book using your airline miles. Started as a side-project, completely bootstrapped and self-funded.

We hit $2k monthly revenue after about 1.5 years. Growth completely stopped during COVID, but is now growing very well (more than 10x that).

I shared my insane MBP repair history on HN last year (including 5 top-case replacements and 2 complete laptop replacements): https://pqvst.com/2021/08/24/my-macbook-pro/

Kind of funny, I'm still on my most recent replacement/repaired unit, and it's still working great since my AppleCare Protection Plan expired (knock on wood). But I guess it's only a matter of time until I'll have to buy a new one.

Glad to hear! Appreciate the kind words :)

Glad to see Unified Remote mentioned! I created it 12 years ago, back in 2010 when Android and smartphones were basically brand new. I still maintain it, although less frequent feature updates these days.

I've been using Grafana Cloud (free tier) for over a year now. Still very happy with it. I did a comparison with Influx Cloud:

https://pqvst.com/2021/06/22/hosted-monitoring-evaluating-in...

I also recently started using Logtail for one of my projects. They also have a good free-tier and it comes with a Grafana instance embedded, so that you can visualize metrics computed from your logs. Seems quite useful but haven't had a chance to really test it fully yet.

We first started getting bounce notifications around 7 hours ago, I'm surprised it took this long for Postmark to announce the service issue.

We're seeing responses like this in our logs:

smtp;550 5.7.1 Service unavailable, Client host [<ip>] blocked using Spamhaus. To request removal from this list see https://www.spamhaus.org/query/ip/<ip> (AS3130). [DM6NAM04FT060.eop-NAM04.prod.protection.outlook.com]

Historical "Time to Inbox" available further down on this page: https://status.postmarkapp.com/

Update: I received a response from Apple now:

"You were sent an email today noting that your banking information in iTunes Connect is invalid and needs to be corrected. This email was sent in error and you do not need to update banking information. We apologize for the error."

Well. I receive monthly payments from Apple for App Store revenue. I guess this used to be from "iTunes Connect" but is now called "App Store Connect", hence the confusion on my part.

Same, couldn't find any warnings. Glad to hear I'm not the only one at least!

Indeed. The first thing I did was close the email and log into my account, but couldn't find any warnings there. I've sent a support message to Apple as well asking what's up with this email.

The maximum execution duration of 5 seconds seems incredibly short!

The only time I've used "cloud functions" in the past has been for executing complex jobs that may take up to several minutes. For this, cloud functions has been very useful and easy to scale.

I hope DO can consider increasing this limit.

I found this script years ago, and it is one I use all the time. Every once in a while when I'm doing some cleaning/organizing on my computer, I'll run it in my main git repo folder and check for any "loose ends". It's a great way to make sure you haven't forgotten to push/commit something.

I came across this site recently and found it to be very useful for monitoring websites for changes. Rather than setting reminders for myself to check a page once in a while I now use this instead. Free tier is pretty generous: 1 hourly, 20 daily, and 20 weekly.

Unable to access the website from Taiwan (Error 16 Access Denied). VPN via other countries works. Why block Taiwan?

Reminds me of TransitScreen (rebranded to Actionfigure). I remember seeing one at friend's building in NYC, showing time to the next subway, train, Uber, citibike availability, etc. I loved the look of it and always thought about building something similar for my home.

https://actionfigure.ai/

I've slowly been migrating everything to self-hosted Umami, and wrote this overview and setup guide a while back: https://pqvst.com/2021/07/26/self-hosted-analytics-with-umam...

Rabies had never really been on my radar until I got bit by a dog in central Bangkok just over 2 years ago. After calling my travel insurance I rushed to a hospital for Rabies post-exposure treatment (although there were no clear signs that the dog was Rabid, I didn't want to take any chances).

I was given a booster shot of anti-tetanus. I was given a Human Rabies Immune Globulin injection straight into the wound on my hand between my finger joints (this was extremely painful). Then I received my first dose of Rabies post-exposure vaccinations (Day 0, Day 3, Day 7, Day 14, and Day 28). The following injections were in my arm. All of the costs were covered by my travel insurance and my home healthcare system.

The entire experience was traumatic. Even though I knew the circumstances were definitely in my favor (I knew the chance of the dog actually being rabid was probably quite low and I had received treatment within a couple of hours) I was still really freaked out for a couple of months.

To make matters worse, just a few days after my incident, there was a Norwegian girl that died from rabies after getting bit by a dog. That definitely didn't help calm my nerves.

Ever since then I am extremely cautious of any animals around me.

Thanks, that's definitely useful for speed performance. But also looking for something that can check other "SEO" stuff, like checking/validating meta tags, and other best practices.

Unfortunately this is only available in a very small subset of countries.

The only thing keeping me on a Mac is some of my work which is iOS/macOS development. Unfortunately I haven't found a good workaround for this.

The USB port fried while I was staying at a hotel. Might have been something fishy there...

Only in the US afaik...