Update for the week ending on Friday, Mar 25, 2022

TinyPilot

Management

• Lunch with local staff
• Two 1:1s

Software development

• Cut releases of TinyPilot Pro 2.4.0 and TinyPilot Community 1.7.0
  • Published security advisories for issues fixed in 2.4.0.
• Changed logic on website for add-on products.
  • Previously, add-ons were first-class products that you could buy on their own.
  • Once you added a product and add-on to the cart, there was no relationship between them any longer.
  • The new site design calls for add-ons to be associated with a parent product in the UI, so I refactored the code to make that easier, but I’m leaving the design polish to the design agency.
  • Screenshots
    • Before
    • After
• Upgraded a bunch of npm packages on the TinyPilot sales site
  • I was seeing random runtime failures that seemed to be based on undefined behavior in the build, so I blindly started upgrading a lot of old packages in desperate hopes that they’d magically fix it.
  • My fixes didn’t work, but a dev on the design agency spotted the root cause and submitted a 5-line fix.
• Reviewed two small PRs for TinyPilot website.
• Submitted a minor patch to an upstream Ansible role repo
  • Just a feeler to see if it’s worth bothering to upstream more of our work
• Fixed whitespace issues in our ansible-role-janus-gateway fork.

Customer support

• Reviewed a tutorial for setting up Tailscale with TinyPilot.
• Simplified the FAQ answer to How do I disable virtual media on my TinyPilot?
  • This article used to explain a workaround for a bug, but the bug is now gone.

Sales

• Call with large customer

mtlynch.io

• Started my long-paused blog post about building my budget NAS server.
• Updated away from deprecated CircleCI convenience images.

PicoShare

PicoShare is a minimalist web-based file sharing tool I’m working on. I’m often frustrated that I can’t just send someone a link directly to a file because every file-sharing service tries to re-encode images/video or wrap their own viewer around other files, so I’m making a simple self-hostable tool that lets you upload files and share them with other people.

• Published the v1 release of PicoShare and posted it on /r/selfhosted
  • David Burgess made a YouTube video about it, which was neat.
• Created a live demo site for people who want to play with it before spinning up their own server.
• Finished my multi-week effort to store file data in chunks in SQLite
  • I was initially storing all file data in a single SQLite database row as a BLOB, but that meant that the server always had to read the entire file’s contents into memory.
  • Splitting the file into chunks allows the server to read the data incrementally without loading everything into memory at once.
• Added a contributor licensing agreement (CLA) and configured the cla-assistant app.
  • This was a few hours of work, which surprised me because it seems like it should be such a simple process.
  • But it works: two users have signed so far.
• Created a demo GIF to show PicoShare’s basic functionality.
• Reviewed four third-party PRs:
  • Stop loading Google fonts from an external source
  • Add an option for uploading files without an expiration time
  • Format file sizes in human readable units
  • Vertically center content in table rows
• Added CI checks to enforce frontend style conventions and lint rules
• Added a CONTRIBUTING.md file
• Changed link URLs to include the file’s filename
• Switched to a constant-time string comparison for password verification
  • After publishing it, I started to remember a lot of little security shortcuts I took when I was thinking of it as just a simple pet project…
• Fixed integration with Litestream under Docker
• Improved usage documentation
• Recorded Content-Type for uploaded files so that they stay the same content type on download
• Refactored code to generate expiration time options on the backend instead of the frontend
• Created library functions for generating file links.

Lenny

Lenny is a tool I’m working on that will respond to templated emails I get from spammy marketers and recruiters with a sequence of templated responses to ask the spammers an endless series of dumb questions.

• Improved CI checks for frontend code based on what I learned from PicoShare.
• Migrated away from deprecated CircleCI convenience images.

What Got Done

• Added some new Github activity badges to the README

Misc

• Scheduled the Western Mass Indie Hacker April meetup
• Repaired a broken wheel on my WalkingPad R2 treadmill with a 3D printed wheel.
  • I bought a foldable treadmill a few months ago, and it arrived with one of the wheels shattered.
  • The company sent a replacement wheel, but the treadmill’s design makes it impossible to replace the wheel without disassembling the entire treadmill and disconnecting all the electronics (a 90-minute process that risks breaking the machine)
  • I reached out to a 3D printing designer I’d worked with in the past, and he designed a wheel that screws together so I could attach it without dismantling everything.
  • It works!
• Ordered another set of free COVID rapid tests
  • They arrived within days this time.
• Got a haircut.