Update for the week ending on Friday, Jul 29, 2022

TinyPilot

Management

• Led monthly TinyPilot dev team meeting
• Continued planning for next TinyPilot release
• Two 1:1s
• Improved our process for paying duties
• Re-bundled our USB-C power plug back into the product
  • Not all customers want an USB-C power plug because they either have one already, live in a country with an incompatible socket, or plan to use power over Ethernet
  • For a couple of months, we tried unbundling USB-C power plugs from the product and making it a separate add-on
  • The problem is that 80% of customers choose it anyway, and now that we’re selling on Amazon (where we include it by default because it’s harder to offer add-ons), it’s too confusing to different processes depending on the sales channel.
• Filed TinyPilot LLC annual report
  • Basically, I pay $500 to confirm my address
• Placed new inventory orders

Sales

• Lowered pricing on TinyPilot products
  • Standard version: $389 -> $349
  • PoE version: $448 -> $398
  • The numbers are just gut feel, and they feel natural at ~$50 boundaries
  • My ideal is to sell 150-200 units/month, and we’re currently only at 140 units/month.
  • We’re accruing too much of an inventory backlog, so I’m curious to see if the price reduction increases sales velocity.
• Arranged a new TinyPilot review with a YouTube creator

Software development

• Made some fixes to our Shopify checkout domain
  • We host the website on tinypilotkvm.com but we have a Shopify checkout domain that customers only see when
  • The problem is that Shopify doesn’t expect that setup, so if customers visited the base of the checkout domain, they’d see a confusing message about having to enter a password
  • Updated robots.txt to disable search engines from indexing the checkout domain
  • Updated the Shopify theme to redirect to the real TinyPilot site if the customer accidentally visits the checkout domain directly
• Moved app settings file out of the TinyPilot source directory
• Made some performance fixes to website
  • Thanks to a blog reader for suggesting them
• Started working on new install script for TinyPilot Pro

mtlynch.io

• Appeared as a guest on the Ditching Hourly podcast to talk about my experience with the website redesign
  • And apparently inspired his latest cartoon
• Published a new blog post, “Back Up Encrypted ZFS Data without Unlocking It”
  • I was trying a new thing where I can write down rough notes into a separate section of my blog
  • But I got too carried away and polished it to the point where I felt like it was the same quality as my normal blog posts, so I just published it to the regular “posts” category

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.

• Tried to debug a RAM exhaustion bug through live tweeting
  • PicoShare exhausts memory and dies if you run it on a Fly.io VM
  • Happens easiest with 256 MB of RAM, but I’ve seen it happen on up to 1 GB
  • I was most suspicious of SQLite because that’s the most unique thing about my app. I’m storing upload data in SQLite and using Litestream to replicate it to the cloud.
  • The RAM exhaustion happens when I upload a file from the browser, so I tried generating and storing random data from the server: no crash. Suggests SQLite isn’t the problem.
  • Ben Johnson found that reducing the RAM in r.ParseMultipartForm reduced memory usage, but in my later tests in production reproduced the same bug
• I tried calling just r.ParseMultipartForm with a 1 MB RAM limit, and it still exhausted memory
• It sounds like the answer might be that you just can’t be memory efficient with ParseMultipartForm when uploading large files

Talk to Stan

Talk to Stan 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.

• Added some new automatic responses

Dusty VCR

• Podcast meeting with our newest co-host
• Started arranging our next guest

Misc

• Worked with my fiance to create the MVP of our wedding website
• Video chat with another hardware founder
• Set up scheduled backups for my TrueNAS encrypted volume
  • Thus the new blog post