Update for the week ending on Friday, Feb 19, 2021

TinyPilot

Created a public FAQ
- Long overdue and needs more content, but it’s a start
Scrambled to find a new source of HDMI capture chips after I discovered that there’s currently a shortage, and the vendor I ordered from is telling me 3 weeks later that they can’t fill the order. : 0
Reviewed PRs to add the ability to change a TinyPilot’s hostname from the web UI
Allowed the TinyPilot update script to read parameters from a YAML file
- This should make the installation/update process a little more flexible so that it’s easier for the web app to communicate desired configuration changes to the privileged installer/updater.
Fixed a build break in the ustreamer Ansible role
- This issue is breaking me in like 7 different projects
- My fault for not pinning my dependencies properly, though.
Made a few other Ansible role fixes
- Upgraded to molecule 3.2.3, which produces much better debug output
- Found a better way of working around idempotence test failures
  - Still hacky, not as hacky.
- Added an apt-cache timeout so that it doesn’t update the apt cache on the idempotence test
Fixed a bug in upgrade where Ansible Galaxy wasn’t pulling down new versions of roles
- Ansible Galaxy has such bizarre behavior around upgrading.
- If you specify a requirement of a specific version of a role, Ansible will ignore it if the role is already installed with a different version number.
- The fix is to use --force, but that re-pulls every role regardless of whether the installed version is behind the required version.
Fixed some bugs in the internal image building scripts.
Fixed some shell scripts to better match the project’s official style guidelines
Reviewed a PR to make images on the TinyPilot website more pleasantly clickable
- They used to just link directly to the image and leave the current page.
Added support for customizable EDIDs
Did lots of paperwork for new hires (contracts, tax forms)
Adjusted keyboard input forwarding to improve compatibility with legacy KVMs
Cut a new release of TinyPilot Pro to apply a bugfix.

mtlynch.io

Continued working (slowly) on a retrospective about making Hit the Front Page of Hacker News
Continued migrating comments to TalkYard

Zestful

Fixed a small bug in unit parsing
- A customer wanted it to parse obscure unit abbreviations like mls and gms, which I hadn’t been supporting yet.
- Fix was a pretty easy 20 min change.

Misc

Attended peer mentorship group meeting
Played more with Beancount and got most of my personal and TinyPilot expenses automatically importing.