Hacker News: rhoopr

New comment by rhoopr in "A Tiny E Reader"

rhoopr — Sat, 16 May 2026 16:49:56 +0000

Love to see Crosspoint get a callout here, loving it on my X4 - and a tiny bugfix PR of mine made it into latest :)

New comment by rhoopr in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)"

rhoopr — Sat, 16 May 2026 16:43:03 +0000

Not as I see it - this is a generally undocumented API surface not meant to be called programmatically like this, unfortunately. Every iCloud photos sync tool does/will hit this same restriction (icloudpd, rclone, etc).

The only possible unproven alternative is adopting the one-hour token generated by Apple which goes through ADP, but assuming that even works, that defeats the purpose of the app being more than a one-shot.

New comment by rhoopr in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)"

rhoopr — Mon, 11 May 2026 00:50:43 +0000

I continue to be working on kei, my cloud->local photo/video sync engine.

iCloud Photos is fully baked along with implementing their completely undocumented SyncToken. I’m doing some QoL work in the next few weeks, tightening up some early architecture decisions, and then adding more providers (Immich, NextCloud, Google Takeout… else TBD).

Since last time I posted this, two other people contributed and I’m almost at 100 stars! That’s some dopamine.

https://github.com/rhoopr/kei

New comment by rhoopr in "The text mode lie: why modern TUIs are a nightmare for accessibility"

rhoopr — Sun, 03 May 2026 19:08:05 +0000

This is an interesting perspective on something I haven’t considered at all for applications I’ve built, honestly. I’m going to take it in and make changes wherever possible.

New comment by rhoopr in "Ask HN: What are you building that's not AI related?"

rhoopr — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:27:40 +0000

iCloud-photos-downloader is unmaintained and starting to crack due to Apple API changes so I’m working on my own fork/rewrite/take on iCloud sync, with ambitions to add Google Takeout, Immich, and other services too.

https://github.com/rhoopr/kei

Named after my ‘96 Subaru Sambar kei truck, small and mighty. The other thing I’m constantly tinkering with :)

New comment by rhoopr in "Hemingway's 4 Fast Rules for Effective Writing"

rhoopr — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 22:23:50 +0000

Hemingway’s Rule 5: don’t blatantly use LLM output in an article about writing.

New comment by rhoopr in "What happens when a destructor throws"

rhoopr — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 03:20:57 +0000

“The camera is the least important element in photography.”

New comment by rhoopr in "After 20 years I turned off Google Adsense for my websites"

rhoopr — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:36:19 +0000

There’s an interesting conversation to be had about ad sponsorship on web content when the share of people just getting summarized results from {LLM chatbot of choice} is increasing and siphoning actual views.

New comment by rhoopr in "Update on the eBay Scam"

rhoopr — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 20:21:56 +0000

This site features one of the worst fonts I’ve ever seen.

New comment by rhoopr in "Hydration Narc – A keyboard-locking water reminder for macOS"

rhoopr — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 23:35:11 +0000

This is chaotic. I love it.

New comment by rhoopr in "I Regret the Blood Pact I Have Made with iCloud Photos"

rhoopr — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 15:27:54 +0000

Unfortunately, icloudpd is now unmaintained -- alternatives are around, though

New comment by rhoopr in "I Regret the Blood Pact I Have Made with iCloud Photos"

rhoopr — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:12:19 +0000

Live photos are just .mov sidecar files. There are a variety of iCloud export tools you can use to move to self hosting, including mine (shameless plug) - http://www.github.com/rhoopr/icloudpd-rs

New comment by rhoopr in "Stop microphones from recording your voice"

rhoopr — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:21:53 +0000

Let me tell you about my rock that keeps tigers away…

New comment by rhoopr in "The 100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product"

rhoopr — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 14:12:27 +0000

This seems more like he is bad at describing what he wants and is prompting for “a UI” and then iterating “no, not like that” for 99 hours.

New comment by rhoopr in "You can turn Claude's most annoying feature off"

rhoopr — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:46:17 +0000

Reticulating Splines…

New comment by rhoopr in "Malus – Clean Room as a Service"

rhoopr — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 14:55:10 +0000

> You have been so generous, so unreasonably, almost suspiciously generous, that you have made it possible for an entire global economy to run on software that nobody technically owns, maintained by people that nobody technically employs, governed by licenses that nobody technically reads. It is a miracle of human cooperation. It is also, from a fiduciary standpoint, completely insane.

Funny but true.

New comment by rhoopr in "Suburban school district uses license plate readers to verify student residency"

rhoopr — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 14:50:27 +0000

A surveillance tech company asserting that they know better, based on 'big data'. Shocking.

The family has proof of residence (which is its own absurdity we won't discuss), and this third party can arbitrarily override that based on a black box argument.

10 Years Later, I Reverse-Engineered iCloud's SyncToken by Brute Force

rhoopr — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 01:50:52 +0000

Article URL: https://robhooper.xyz/blog-synctoken.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47345273

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by rhoopr in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)"

rhoopr — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 14:58:46 +0000

Fair enough! It's an extremely hard problem to solve.

New comment by rhoopr in "I made a programming language with M&Ms"

rhoopr — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 12:27:17 +0000

Looking forward to the first LLM&M coding agent