Update for the week ending on Friday, Jan 6, 2023

TinyPilot

Management

• Led monthly dev meeting
• Coordinated manufacturing for next TinyPilot Voyager product
• One 1:1

Software development

• Finished implementing uStreamer launcher
• Moved user creation from Ansible role to Debian package
  • Part of my ongoing War on Ansible Installer
• Added a convenience script for installing TinyPilot bundles
  • TinyPilot bundles are zip files that contain all the TinyPilot code to install TinyPilot on a device.
  • Our existing scripts install bundles directly from the update server, but it’s useful during development to be able to install arbitrary bundles
• Added a convenience script for installing TinyPilot from source
  • Just handy if you’re editing code on the device and want to install that version.
• Verified working directory in create-bundle script
  • Most of our scripts run successfully regardless of the current working directory when they’re run, but create-bundle didn’t establish its own working directory.
• Reviewed changes to our update server to enforce checkpoint versions
  • e.g., if you’re on version 2.2.0 and 2.6.0 is out, update server points client to 2.5.0 because 2.5.0 made major changes, so we assume all clients have gone through that update.
• Reviewed check during install to make sure read-only filesystem isn’t on

Customer support

• Reviewed a troubleshooting article about fixing a scrambled screen image
• Reviewed a troubleshooting article about what resolutions TinyPilot supports

Misc

• Cycled CircleCI secrets in response to the CircleCI breach
  • And accidentally broke logins on WhatGotDone. Sorry about that! That’s why this is going up on a delay.
• Debugged audio issues on next gen TinyPilot hardware

ScreenJournal

ScreenJournal is a new project I just started. The idea is basically Goodreads, but for TV and movies. Or letterboxd, but focused on small communities.

• Finished implementing signup invitations
  • Got my first user (my fiance)
• Added an About page
• Add a My ratings link to the navbar
• Prevent users from editing each other’s ratings
• Elide long reviews
• Switch to the mtlynch fork of the jeff library
• Pre-populate the DB with dummy data during end-to-end tests
• Set server time to America/New_York
• Fixed tab order on a form
  • By default, tabbing focused on “Cancel” instead of “Submit” because the “Cancel button appeared first”
  • I thought the solution was to use tabindex but apparently that’s poor practice
  • What I ended up doing was reordering the DOM so that the “Submit” button appeared first but then I used flex reverse ordering to reverse it back to “Cancel” appearing first visually.
    • I think what I did is actually the recommended practice.

mtlynch.io

• Published book report of Go Programming Blueprints by Mat Ryer

Dusty VCR

• Continued editing So I Married an Axe Murderer episode

Misc

• Cycled CircleCI secrets for all my non-TinyPilot stuff.
  • And accidentally broke a bunch of services in the process, including What Got Done for about 26 hours (until just now - sorry!)
• Started planning next Indie Hackers meetup.
• Reviewed a PR to replace a deprecated flag in resticpy
• Tweaked my nightly backups
  • Added a cronitor alert when they don’t run
• Purchased a Kagi subscription
  • It’s an indie search engine
  • I’ve been impressed so far
  • Results are on par with Google, and they let me customize results (e.g., blacklisting spammy domains)
• Cleaned my pellet stove