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I work for The Internet now

joeyh.name

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Congrats Joey, I love git-annex[1]!

Let's make it a two year position and throw in Tahoe-LAFS/git-annex integration;)

[1] and etckeeper, and mr, and moreutils...

Edit:

It occured to me that some people may not be familiar with the other projects I mentioned:

etckeeper: git/bzr/hg for /etc and apt firendly (http://joeyh.name/code/etckeeper/)

mr: easily manage a lot of repositories from multiple DRCSs git/bzr/hg/et al (http://joeyh.name/code/mr/)

moreutils: an expansion pack for coreutils. (http://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/)

Tahoe-LAFS: Cloud Storage for cypherpunks (https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs)

Integration with Tahoe is not that hard... http://git-annex.branchable.com/forum/tips:_special__95__rem...

That could be improved as described here http://git-annex.branchable.com/todo/tahoe_lfs_for_reals/ ... probably only a day or so's work.

Alright, if I get to dream big: pandoc[1] as a first class citizen in ikiwiki.

[1] Speaking of jgm have you seen his cloudlib project?

moreutils is awesome. I use vidir all the time to edit file names en masse with vim (using macros / regexes). So useful. I think it also works with emacs (you can specify any editor).

Sponge is also pretty cool.

so...is it just me or is the internet a pretty cheap employer at $20k/year?

It's also an employer that lets me live in a place where rent+utilities is $1.5k/year.

Economically, I look at work I do on Free/Open Source software as an investment in reputation capital. In this case past such investments paid off with yet more work on FLOSS, which is a nice virtuous cycle to be in.

Do you have a blog post or something I can read about your living situation? How do you manage to keep costs so low?

I have not gone into details about my living situation online. Being happy to live in the middle of nowhere helps; solar power and power efficient home design helps too. :)

Can you at least give us some idea of whether you're in the first world or not?

I'd love to know how you went about this.

Based on LinkedIn it looks like he's in Tennessee.

(This info is available publicly, you don't even need to be logged into LinkedIn to see it, so hopefully I'm not viewed as violating anyone's privacy :)

His blog (http://joeyh.name/blog/) has several posts about how he lives, spread across the past few years. You'll have to search through them yourself, sorry, but he's not a prolific writer so just browsing through the archives should be easy enough.

I'm trying to recall the context I heard this in, believe it may have been the radio program To the Best of Our Knowledge. Farmers talking about dealing with Monsanto and their GMO seed. One mentioned that for many farmers, the main concern wasn't so much revenue maximization as cost minimization.

It's struck me for a long time that Free Software offers a bit of both. It minimizes business costs (both direct license expense and licensing-derived limitations on use), while maximizing functional capabilities.

It doesn't entirely surprise me that someone as familiar with the concept as Joey Hess would extend this to his personal life. A $1.5k/year nut buys a hell of a lot of F-U freedom.

Consider this begging for a rundown on how you're pulling this off, 10k a year is about the floor in my experience and I've ranged far and worldwide. Have no problem living in the middle of nowhere.

Brilliant stuff!

You mention not making a Mac version - perfectly understandable - but will it be usable on Mac in any way? Would be nice to sync files across computers!

He said no to iOS. I think git-annex already exists for Mac OS X, and the new webapp, file watches, etc, probably will as well, though joeyh may rely on other people for the packaging.

Oh I see - I read iOS as 'all Mac devices' for some reason. I'm sure it won't be a huge big deal.

For a moment I thought he meant he worked for ICANN.

It's too bad Windows support is not a priority. Half the point of Dropbox is to keep files synced across all computers.

Of the year funded by the Kickstarter project, Joey explicitly said he plans to spend a month making it work on Windows. Much more of a priority than I would have guessed at the beginning of the project.

I love the low tech video and hope this project takes off. However the biggest issue I see is that git is terrible at handling binary data.

When checking out a repo, git pulls down the entire history. That means binary files added and then later removed sit around forever bloating the repository.

You should read more about how git-annex actually works. It doesn't track the files in git; it tracks the presence and location of the files, and their hashes. git-annex transfers the actual files around separately, tracks what repositories have them, and ensures that enough redundant copies of those files exist.

Yes that's how git works. However joey has made git annex, that uses git for versioning, but doesn't store all binary data in git, hence avoiding the exact problem you point out.

Very interesting.

Reading this stuff kind of makes my heart swell up. For anyone who reads cypherpunk stuff knows, this is the techno nomadic dream.

No big corp, no real worry about money, just sharing with the community.

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