Update for the week ending on Friday, Nov 22, 2019

New project research

• Met with a metal shop about potentially automating some of their manual workflows
• Researched existing metal shop software (it’s almost all horrendous)
• Scouted other metal shops in the area to contact next week
• Started making a dummy, proof-of-concept product

Is It Keto

• Had a monthly meeting with the site’s writer
• Edited and published a new article:
  • Red Bull
• Edited another article that’s not yet ready to publish
• Fixed my AdSense ads, which I accidentally broke through my tinkering last week
• Experimented with removing price from meal plan pages
  • Doesn’t seem to make much of a difference, people don’t click the button to download them
• Fixed fuzzy name matching for “mango”, “mangos”, and “mangoes” (and foods that match a similar pattern)

mtlynch.io

• Started writing about home video digitization project
• Fixed a break in my deployment configuration (#472)

What Got Done

• Added prettier to my CI build and VS Code configuration to enforce consistent JavaScript formatting throughout my repo (#372)
  • Hat tip to Gleb Bahmutov’s easy-to-follow guide: “How to configure Prettier and VSCode”
• Submitted What Got Done to /r/bujo and /r/bulletjournal

Zestful

• Responded to an inquiry from a Zestful customer

Misc

• Hosted the November Indie Hackers Western Mass meetup with dtq.
• Attended RVI’s monthly angel investor meeting.
• Met a local designer for lunch.
• Submitted another talk proposal for PyCon 2020
• Attended a cryptocurrency meetup.
• Wrote rough instructions for the process of creating a new Go AppEngine app
  • I forget the little gotchas every time
• Responded to an mtlynch.io reader’s request for advice about hiring freelancers
• Purchased tickets for MicroConf Starter Edition

Home Maintenance

• Continued my war on mice

Home Video Digitization

Last year, I digitized about 40 hours of my family’s old home videos and put them on a private media server for my family. I’m in the process of cleaning up my tools so I can publish a guide about this.

• Published my scripts for processing home videos
• Added an e2e test for render_scenes.py, the script that chops large videos into sets of clips (#9)
• Started an e2e test for publish_to_mediagoblin.py, the script that programmatically adds clips to MediaGoblin (#11)
  • I’m stuck on some weird Docker permissions issues
• Refactored out the last few bits that had my personal information baked into the source code:
  • Refactored the logic for calculating everyone’s ages / age ranges based on video dates and added unit tests
  • Refactored configuration options into a configuration file
• Created a Github repository for free usage videos
  • I need a public domain / Creative Commons video for my e2e tests, and this was the best way I could think of to host it at a permanent, reliable URL for free

Beekeeping

• Put the honey supers back on the hives to help bees have enough food storage until winter
  • I took them off to treat the hives for mites, but honey supers can’t be there while oxalic acid is in the hives

Dusty VCR Podcast

• Held a podcast planning meeting
• Booked a guest for episode #15
• Scouted a potential guest for episode #16
• Fixed a bug on the website where it would forever show an old version of the page to users who have previously visited the site
  • It turned out that my previous GatsbyJS template implemented a ServiceWorker that would load the page from offline storage and never check for an update until the user force-refreshed.
  • If you came back to the page later (even after force-reloading) it would show the old, offline version again
  • I’m not sure what this ServiceWorker was supposed to do, but I switched from GatsbyJS to Hugo a few weeks ago (for unrelated reasons), so the ServiceWorker had no way of updating itself.
  • I replaced the old ServiceWorker JS path with a new one that unregistered the service worker
  • The fix seems to work, but users have to visit the page, then navigate away from dustyvcr.com, then navigate back in order to kill off the old service worker and get the latest page (pain in the neck, but hopefully it’s a one-time annoyance)
• Added a page for reviewing the podcast on iTunes
• Added support for generating Twitter / Facebook cards when sharing Dusty VCR links on social media
• Started republishing podcast episodes to our YouTube channel