Drafted high-level requirements doc for TinyPilot Cloud
Set up a process to allow local staff to manually test new TinyPilot releases
I’ve been doing this for each release, but there are enough features now that it takes a long time
Started planning for the next dev sprint
Bought and provisioned a new test laptop
Ordered microSD cards with TinyPilot logo
Software development
Wrote a simple geolocation service
It only took two hours!
With the new EU distributor, I want to pop up a notice telling EU customers they can buy from Europe instead, so I needed a way to determine if the user is visiting the site from Europe
I thought I could approximate it with JavaScript, but it turns out you can’t get the user’s installed language with only JS
AppEngine adds HTTP headers to every inbound request with geolocation information
My geolocation service just checks the country and matches it to a whitelist of countries that my EU distributor supports
I haven’t published the source because it contains TinyPilot-specific logic, but someone else has published a Java version
Reviewed a PR to add Pro upgrade paths into the free version of TinyPilot
Initially, I thought I could automate it with face detection, but even 95% accuracy isn’t good enough because nobody wants part of their face automatically cut off
I started rolling my own JS cropping tool and quickly realized I was out of my depth
I ended up using cropper-js, which is great, but I had a tough time integrating it and understanding all the gotchas
When I finally got everything working, it failed under my Cypress tests, and only under Docker, so it was a big pain to debug.
It turned out that it caught a legitimate issue that for some reason was more severe in Docker, but I was loading a cross-origin image without properly declaring the image as cross-origin, which confused cropper-js.
Spent a long time debugging why the old version of cypress-file-upload worked, but upgrading to the latest version failed
In desperation, I tried updating to the latest version of bootstrap-vue 2.21.2, and that ended up fixing it.
This turned out to be one of my most contentious freelancer hires ever
He did a good job initially, but I found him hard to communicate with.
I figured it wouldn’t be that big a deal because he’d eventually understand what I want and keep doing that same thing every recording, so there wouldn’t be much communication required
When I gave him notes about where his edits diverged from what I wanted, he didn’t seem to get what I was asking
e.g., I asked him to remove filler words like “um” and “uhh,” and instead he started removing whole stretches of dialog across multiple people that he found uninteresting
When I asked why he was diverging from the directions, he got upset and said I have to give him exact timestamps of where I want each cut, which would be absurd and defeat the purpose of outsourcing the work
I ended the contract and requested a refund on the last week of work (four hours), since the results are unusable, but he didn’t respond
I disputed the payment with Upwork, so I’m waiting to see what Upwork mediation says
Misc
Optimized my git setup
git config --global push.default : Now I can just type git push instead of git push origin [mybranchname]
alias gp='git push' : Even shorter than git push (I just have to remember it’s not git pull)
alias gwip='git commit --all --no-verify --message "work in progress"' : Easily save work in progress commits, credit to Adam Gordon Bell
Got off the waitlist for Beeper (signed up back in April)
I don’t have a big use for it yet, but I want to support the project because I like the idea of having a local archive of all my SMS/Hangouts/Facebook/Twitter messages
The unified client doesn’t make much of a difference for me at this point since I don’t instant message much
Migrated from Google Authenticator to Aegis
I’m liking Aegis
Migration was pretty easy
Aegis supports a lot of things that I realized I wanted all along from Google Authenticator, such as re-sorting the list, searching the list, and exporting password-encrypted backups of my seeds.
Replaced my headphone cups
Was surprisingly easy. I just watched YouTube videos and ordered third-party replacements for $15
Got a post-travel COVID test
Negative!
Tested at CVS, which was okay overall. Signup was a pain, process took about 45 mins including waiting, but the part where I actually participated was only about 3 minutes.
