Update for the week ending on Friday, Mar 31, 2023

TinyPilot

Management

Met with three companies about improving TinyPilot’s assembly process
Continued coordinating TinyPilot’s transition to our 3PL
Talked to large customer about potentially sponsoring software work
Continued working on 2022 taxes with accountant, R&D tax study firm

Software development

Onboarded a new developer for an end-to-end testing project
Reviewed a fix to a bug in TinyPilot’s unit tests that affected MacOS
Updated uStreamer target version to v5.38

Customer support

Pitched in on support tickets to free up time for the local staff to build up enough inventory to shift to the 3PL vendor

Sales

Stopped advertising trade-ins for TinyPilot Voyager 2a on the TinyPilot website
- They’re pretty time-consuming, and we’re overloaded at the moment

Misc

Sold TinyPilot’s 3D printer
- We bought it in December when we weren’t sure if we’d have enough cases before we received our metal cases
- Paid $5,250 for it sold it for $3,100 (minus $200 for shipping)
- Glad to have it off my hands and get a decent amount of the value back
- Definitely glad to no longer be in possession of a giant, heavy, expensive thing

mtlynch.io

Started working on March retrospective
- I think the earliest I’ve ever started a retrospective since starting TinyPilot
Published my notes for Jason Cohen’s 2013 Microconf talk, “Designing the Ideal Boostrapped Business.”
Upgraded to htmlproofer 5.0.6
- This was surprisingly hard!
- I forgot that I host my own custom Docker image for htmlproofer because I haven’t found a reliable third-party version
- And I was hosting it on Docker Cloud, but that’s no longer free for open-source repos, so I couldn’t publish there anymore
- I tried building on CircleCI, but I kept getting an error about not having write permissions to a directory, and when I’d check, I did have write permissions, and I was running as root in the container
- It was hard to debug because I don’t know anything about Ruby packages
- Eventually, I switched to a more recent CircleCI machine image, and that fixed the permissions issue for some reason
- But the new version runs in 50s, and the old one took 1m45s, so a nice speedup
Excluded more sites from htmlproofer’s dead link checks
- It seems like more and more sites are IP blocking whatever cloud AWS is on, so I can’t run a checker for dead links
- I’ve considered running a dedicated HTTP proxy on Fly.io just to avoid having to always add exceptions
Fixed a bug in the mailing list signup for posts in the “notes” category
Upgraded Prettier npm packages
Format the partials folder using Prettier
- It was excluded before, and I don’t remember why. I guess just because it was too much noise when I transitioned to Prettier.

ScreenJournal

ScreenJournal is basically Goodreads, but for TV and movies. Or letterboxd, but focused on small communities.

Aggregate reviews by movie
- Originally, each review was independent and had its own page
- I realized that if I’m reading a review, I want to read everyone’s review for that movie in the same place
Fix relative watch date so that it says “1 month ago” instead of “1 months ago”

WhatGotDone

Fixed a bug that was preventing users from uploading images

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.

Filed a bug that resets the default expiration time on Firefox
- The fix is easy, but I’m having a harder time setting up end-to-end tests to prove the fix
- I didn’t have end-to-end tests running on Firefox at all, and then it turns out that I had a lot of implicit state in the tests that didn’t matter when we ran everything once, but when we run twice, the implicit state matters

Misc

Did a disaster recovery exercise for recovering my digital identities
- I got a new laptop, so before signing into anything from my home IP, I took it to my library where I know I’ve never signed in to any account
  - Simulating what would happen if my house burns down, floods, etc. and I can’t access Internet from my home or on any previously used devices
- I tried to regain access to my email and banking accounts and my restic backups using only my off-site emergency keys
- Overall, it went pretty well, but two of my banks wouldn’t let me sign in even though I had my correct credentials and my backup Yubikey
Continued tinkering with separate VLANs on my opnsense router
- It’s fun when it works, but the UI for some things is really counter-intuitive
Purchased $9k worth of CDs
- As in certificates of deposit
- It’s interesting. It’s a type of investment I’ve never purchased before.
- I have cash earmarked for expenses five months in the future, so I figured I might as well buy bonds, since interest rates are 5% on even 1-month CDs.
Swapped snow tires on my car for summer tires