Update for the week ending on Friday, Sep 8, 2023

TinyPilot

Management

Worked on getting a shipment to our contract manufacturer unstuck from customs
Had two 1:1s
Did monthly bookkeeping
- Fixed code for parsing service fee lines in my Chase statement importer

Software development

Released TinyPilot Pro 2.6.1
- Wrote the blog post
- Completed final testing
- Shared the release image with partners
- Published the changelog
Upgrade the website to build with Node.js 18.x
Reviewed a refactor of our timeout logic
- This has cleaner semantics and uncouples timeout logic from HID logic.
Reviewed progress on paste API endpoint
Reviewed consolidation of TinyPilot’s CI logic

Customer support

Reviewed internal docs about reading TinyPilot logs

Sales

Reviewed affiliate sales for July

mtlynch.io

Published "Aardvark’d: The Fog Creek Documentary, 18 Years Later"
- It briefly reached #1 on Hacker News

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 a file info page.
- Screenshot
- Really, what I’m building towards is a download counter, but I didn’t think the download count was important enough to list in the main view, so this adds a page where extra information can live.
Refactored parsing for guest link labels and added unit tests
Removed the unnamed <slot> elements from the instances of my <upload-links> custom element
- It took me so long to figure out why the page was behaving strangely, and I finally realized that I wasn’t supposed to have <slot> elements in the client unless they were named.
Deleted the pico-purpose="..." attributes from the page HTML.
- I originally used these to help me locate elements from production JavaScript or in e2e tests, but I realized that they’re kind of a hack, and there are more robust ways of locating these elements.
Added an e2e test for canceling an edit to a file’s metadata
Refactored CSS to take advantage of nested selectors
- They’re cool! Definitely more elegant to write CSS this way.
Added aria-label attribute to buttons that didn’t have text labels
Added role=button to the Delete button so that it’s more obvious to assistive technologies
Added a Nix flake and updated dependencies
Updated my convenience script for creating new pages

Disaster recovery

I had a chicken and egg problem with my Keepass database. I used to keep it synced to a cloud service that I memorized the password to, but I decided to sync it with SyncThing instead to my own cloud server. The problem was that I don’t memorize the credentials to the server hosting platform, and I definitely don’t memorize my private SSH key. So I had to figure out a way for me to download my Keepass database from my SyncThing server.

I wrote a bash script that embedded credentials for SSH’ing into the cloud VM server and downloading
I encrypted the bash script with portable-secret to generate a static website that could decrypt the bash script.
I published the portable-secret file to a URL I can memorize

I also submitted a small UX improvement to portable-secret

Home maintenance

Discovered that we had a bat colony living in our attic
- We had to put painter’s tape over all the places they could potentially get into our living spaces through our walls
- A wildlife control company came today to do a “bat exclusion” and seal off all the tiny gaps between walls/shingles and they added a one-way exit tube that will allow the bats to leave but not get back in.

Misc

Co-hosted Indie Founders Western Mass meetup
Tried to experiment with Oracle Cloud and ended up never wanting to touch it again.
- I’m interested because the free tier includes 4 ARM VMs
- The first time I tried to signup, it rejected my signup and wouldn’t let me try again.
- I emailed support and they responded the next day telling me to try again.
- Tried again, and it worked.
- I tried launching a VM, and got “out of capacity”
- It turns out everyone gets this error, and the solution is to write a cronjob that repeatedly requests an instance
- At that point, it’s not worth bothering with, so I deleted my Oracle Cloud account.
Gave away old USB microphone I never use
Tried git worktree
- I don’t get it.
- I keep seeing so many people say how it’s an amazing feature, and I couldn’t figure out when I’d want to use it over branches.
Cleaned up my drawer full of spare cables.