Update for the week ending on Friday, Apr 8, 2022

TinyPilot

Management

• Gave feedback to design agency about issues in March.
• Met with EE partner to discuss manufacturing strategy.
• Met with advisor from FORGE.

Software development

• Reviewed design agency’s refactoring work on TinyPilot website
• Reviewed documentation for H264 support
• Fixed code comments in e2e website tests for consistency.

Customer support

• Fixed a bug in the instructions for a factory reset.
• Set up TinyPilot’s support engineer with HelpScout.

Sales

• Reached out to two reviewers about reviewing TinyPilot Voyager 2
• Updated TinyPilot ads on mtlynch.io to Voyager 2 and use fancy 3D renderings
  • Before
  • After

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.

• Added support for multiarch Docker builds
  • This should be really easy but it took a few hours because the instructions are all scattered and out of date.
  • Now, I have automatic builds on each release for amd64, arm, and arm64.
  • I can run PicoShare on a Raspberry Pi!
  • I mean, I always could have run it on a Pi because it’s just Go, but now it’s very easy to do it.
• Implemented a strategy for database migrations
• Switched to PBKDF2 to hash the shared secret
  • I was previously storing it in plaintext, which didn’t matter so much because users run PicoShare on their own hardware and access it from their own browser.
  • But because I was storing it in a cookie unencoded, some passphrase characters would break the HTTP spec, so now they’re hashed and base64-encoded.
• Fixed Content-Type header for text uploaded to PicoShare from the clipboard.
• Improved filename for pasted images.
• Added a SQL linter for SQL files.
• Increased max filename size to 255 characters.
  • Previous limit was 100 characters for no good reason, and a user complained that it was rejecting one of their files.

mtlynch.io

• Published my March retrospective
• Got rid of the external theme repo and just inlined all the templates
  • At this point, I’ve overridden so many defaults from my Hugo theme that it was always confusing to make changes because I wasn’t sure if logic was in the theme or my local overrides.
  • Plus the theme includes a bunch of stuff I don’t use that adds complexity like multi-language support, dark mode, advanced mathematical notation rendering.
• Refactored the list of ignored lint-html URLs to be more maintainable
  • lint-html looks for dead links, but some sites give back a 403 when they get requests from CircleCI (which probably runs in AWS)
  • I switched the list from a simple string to a bash array, which is easier to adjust over time
• Dropped lint-html as a deploy requirement
  • This essentially allows me to override failures in lint-html and deploy anyway.
  • Sometimes lint-html failures are just ephemeral and not worth fixing.
  • Sometimes I just want to deploy and I don’t care if there’s a dead link in a post from 4 years ago.
• Added previous and next links to retrospectives
  • Example
• Fixed vertical alignment on my author photo relative to the navbar elements
  • Before
  • After
• Got rid of the on-by-default in Hugo category page that I never use

Deliberate Programming

• Recorded a new deliberate programming video about working on PicoShare.

Misc

• Continued working on my taxes
• Set up a SEP IRA
  • Apparently as a small business owner, I get a better IRA option? One of the rare times where tax rules seem to benefit small business.
• Bought a new bike
  • I bought my old bike used for $50 three years ago
  • It’s worked well, but it was falling apart
  • The bike shop estimated it would cost $200-250 to fix all the issues.
  • They also pointed out that the frame was too small for me and I had the saddle raised dangerously high.
    • Apparently, you’re supposed to have at least three inches of the saddle pole inside below the clamp, and I had less than an inch.
  • The bike shop convinced me to just recycle my old bike and buy a new one, so I’m glad to have a bike without so many issues.
• Tweeted about “software homesteading” themes in the CoRecursive podcast.