For years I have lauded Dropbox as my one-stop shop for all of my limited backup, file organization and access, and even podcast hosting needs. But for the first time since 2009, Dropbox made a decision that I did not like at all. 

Dropbox announced earlier this year that they would be ending support for the Public folder in favor of shareable links. The Public folder inside of your Dropbox was originally the place to share public links - files that you wanted anyone with that link to have access to - such as MP3 files for podcasts. 

I've written about it before, but being the cheap person I am, I opted to host all of my podcast files for Ministry Bits inside of the Public folder in 2014 when I got started. Making the files Public enabled me to be able to have them in a podcast feed on my Squarespace site, but also allowed for direct streaming of those MP3 files without having to download them. 

Now, this is mostly my fault for not being on top of this, but I guess I missed the email from Dropbox saying that support would end on September 1. When it did end, my podcast no longer functioned. People couldn't download or stream episodes in any podcast app nor could they even listen directly at the feed here on my Squarespace site. 

I'm angry for two reasons: 1) Because I wasn't paying attention, people can no longer access my podcast until I fix it, and 2) Why would Dropbox end support for a feature that's so widely used? Look on any of the Dropbox forums and you'll hundreds of people who aren't happy about this. 

But all that being said - it's happened, it's done, and it's time to move on. 

I've looked into lots of Podcast hosting services this week, and none are as cost effective as Dropbox. For $9.99 a month, I get 1TB of storage, more than I will ever use or need (currently only using about 49GB). But now with the Public folder gone, a lot of the functionality that I relied on is gone. 

If I was starting a new podcast, I would happily pay for Fireside.fm. It's an excellent all-in-one management system for your podcast. However, the way I wanted to integrate my files with my Squarespace account simply wasn't going to work. 

There's other services like the popular LibSyn and PodBean, but both have pretty small storage caps per month (LibSyn is 50MB per month for $5). So importing all 58 episodes of Ministry Bits would not be possible. 

So I turned to Amazon S3. S3 stands for super simple storage, and it does a pretty good job. I've hosted files there before - like the AIM Series videos for the Apple TV app. But never really did think about it for my podcast. 

The best thing about S3 is that it's very cheap, and you only pay for what you use. Right now I'm paying about 24 cents a month to host 6-8GB of files and pay for the bandwidth when those files are streamed/downloaded. So since audio files are much smaller (about 30-40MB each) and the bandwidth to stream them is much lower, I expect I won't be paying more than 50-60 cents each month when all is said and done. 

If you have an Amazon account, you can sign into S3. It's a little less user-friendly than Dropbox or Google Drive, but it's cheap, it hosts and streams my files, and I don't have to worry about them sunsetting a feature that will disable my podcast. 

I'll continue to host text files and other small files on Dropbox, but for all my public files with audio and video, I'll be using S3 from now on. 

Star Trek turns 50 today. The original series episode "The Man Trap" premiered on NBC television on September 8, 1966. It's been around for 50 years, and for half of that, I have been a diehard fan.

Few things have influenced me as much as Star Trek.

I can remember being ten years old and sitting and watching my first bit of Trek: 1991's feature film The Undiscovered Country. Arguably one of the top three films in the franchise, I saw it and I was hooked. 

I jumped on episodes of Next Generation and watched reruns with my dad. I asked him all sorts of questions. A casual Trekkie himself, he was not prepared for the barrage of inquires about the show, nor was he prepared for the pandoras box which he had opened up by showing me the world of Trek.

Of course the real fanaticism didn't hit until Deep Space Nine and Voyager. As a teenager, I watched those shows with fascination. As a young adult and United States Marine later on, I watched with all new eyes. The episodes concerning the War with the Dominion on Deep Space Nine really hit home as I caught up on the series when I came back from Afghanistan and Iraq. Issues that faced the Voyager crew every day about being 70,000 light years from home resonated with me as I struggled and missed my own family across the globe. 

The tech side of me loved the show, but it was the characters that drew me in. The stories were captivating and still amaze me when watching reruns to this day. 

As so many other Trekkies will say: Star Trek is more than just a TV show. It's a vision of the future filled with adventure that we can all be optimistic that will one day come true. 

As the new show, Discovery, hits the airwaves (and the internet) in January, I hope a whole new generation can enjoy and be impacted as much as I was from this franchise. 

Live long and prosper. 

In a microcosm, this video is everything that is wrong with how we view ourselves in this world today. 

What kills me about this video is the staggering postmodern view that young adults have these days. A postmodern view says, "You do you, and as long as you don't harm me or get in my way, everything is fine. We're all fine by believing whatever we want, and everyone is fine."

In the video, the 5-foot-9 white male asks the students if he is a woman, a Chinese woman, a first-grader, or substantially taller than he appears. The students can't seem to give a straight answer to any of those questions, for fear of not being politically correct. 

That's the problem. We have gone so far off the radar of politically correct that we can't even tell a 5-foot-9 white guy that he's not a 1st Grade Asian Woman who is well over 6 feet tall. 

There's a point when this has gotten ridiculous, and I think we've reached it. 

A luxury once tried becomes a neccessity.

In the case of the mobile web and its status in 2015, we have forgotten what it was like just a decade ago.

In 2005, Windows Mobile, Motorola and Blackberry ruled the mobile browsing world with horrible WAP (Web Access Protocol) browsers, or what they liked to call browsers. The web experience, for the most part, was terrible and confusing. Which is why no one used it.

So this week when The Verge published their article attesting to how bad the mobile web is, I had to take a look back.

How quickly we forget.

It all changed with the iPhone. Suddenly you could view entire websites on Safari, and pinch to zoom on those sites to see in greater detail. Then, years later, circa 2012-ish, the mobile web started to take form. No longer did you have to build different websites for mobile and the desktop (even though, to this day, many websites still do just that), but you could build once and deploy everywhere. Squarespace is a great example of this - the very website you're reading right now was built on Squarespace, and I didn't have to write one bit of code for my mobile website, which always looks fantastic.

So for a blogger on a prominent internet tech website to write an article criticizing the mobile web when their very own site is part of the problem greatly irritates me.

The problem is not the mobile web. The problem is monetizing the mobile web. The Verge loads no less than twenty ads, trackers, and services that no doubt make them money for every page view but slow down the web experience on mobile terribly. iMore dealt with this criticisim a week or two ago.

And all this comes into the discussion because of one thing: Safari Content Blockers.

You see, in iOS 9, Apple is providing users a way to block all those ads and trackers (which take the form of various scripts in the webpages that you don't see), and that's not making some many websites who depend on these trackers for revenue very happy. I couldn't put it better than Marco Arment:

I’m interested in running a content blocker not because I don’t want to see ads, but because I feel the need to fight back against being opted in, without my knowledge or consent, to third-party collecting, tracking, and selling of my personal data just by following a link.

And if such blocking becomes a big problem for publishers, it’s up to them to switch to ad delivery methods without these privacy invasions.

And there's your big concern. Have you ever been browsing websites and then see ads on Facebook or Amazon for something you looked at recently? That's an invasion of your internet privacy. While some websites argue that just you visiting their site allows them to legally track you and catalog your data, that doesn't mean it's right.

Websites and the companies that monetize them are going to have to get better at the experience and better at not invading your internet privacy. Up until this point, it hasn't been an issue because people have largely ignored it.

Having just gotten an Apple Watch, I disagree with about 75% of this article, especially this:

Don’t buy the Apple Watch (yet) unless you are a developer/designer who needs to develop for it. I’ve tasked myself to fully integrate the Apple Watch into my every day in order to understand it’s full potential. To my surprise, the process of doing so felt a little bit like a burden since I had to constantly remind myself to actually USE it in order to form my opinion.

Read Tobias van Schneider's entire article over at Medium.