For the last eight years, I’ve carried around this box of videotapes through four different apartments and one house. They’re family home videos from my childhood.

After 600+ hours of work, I finally digitized and organized them well enough to throw away the original tapes. Here’s what the footage looks like now:

Goal

This tutorial shows you how to edit digitized video captures into smaller clips that you can publish on your own password-protected MediaGoblin server. You’ll use a free Heroku dyno, so your only ongoing cost for running this private media server is the cost of storage on Google Cloud Storage, which is 2.3 cents per GB.

I used this workflow to edit and share my family’s home videos at a cost of only $0.77 per month. For the detailed backstory, check out the blog post, “My Eight-Year Quest to Digitize 45 Videotapes.” You can use this workflow for any kind of video file that contains lots of subclips that you’d like to chop out and share.

Nonviolent Communication describes a communication style centered around sharing vulnerability and offering empathy. One of its biggest strengths is in how it highlights common patterns of lazy communication that exclude personal feelings or critical thinking. I also found its discussion of empathy illuminating, as it made me realize ways that I could improve my skills at listening empathetically.

Highlights

• Two of my blog posts reached the front page of Hacker News.
• I may have finally discovered a way to scale my keto site profitably.
• I’m putting Portfolio Rebalancer on the backburner due to lack of traction.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

Conduct five customer interviews for the portfolio rebalancer

• Result: Conducted zero customer interviews.
• Grade: F

I deprioritized the portfolio rebalancer in favor of Is It Keto. I’ll explain why below.

Last week, I published a blog post describing how Stripe recorded visitor behavior on their customers’ websites. In short, Stripe’s JavaScript library collected information about URLs users visited and telemetry about their mouse movements, even when the site never displayed any Stripe payment forms. I suspected that most Stripe customers were unaware of this and argued that Stripe should disclose their data gathering practices more prominently and in greater detail.

The post generated a lively discussion on Hacker News, including several comments from Patrick Collison, Stripe’s co-founder and CEO. In his top comment, he said: