Update for the week ending on Friday, Dec 22, 2023

TinyPilot

Management

Continued working with manufacturer on shipping for a critical part
Collected W9s from vendors

Software development

Offered suggestions for getting network boot to work in our dev workflow
Helped debug issues around new static IP feature

Customer support

Reviewed a new FAQ about hosting a Wi-Fi AP from TinyPilot
- We’re going to tidy up the commands into built-in scripts so it’s not a big wall of code

Sales

Started a first draft of a promotion to give away TinyPilot Voyager 2a devices to bloggers

mtlynch.io

Published Using Zig to Unit Test a C Application
- Reached #9 on Hacker News
- Reached #1 on Lobsters
Continued working on giant blog post on my homelab server rack
Added a Nix flake to my scripts for generating monthly project stats

ScreenJournal

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

Upgraded to go 1.21.1

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 a Nix flake
Refactored the types package to have a more conventional Go name

Dusty VCR

Recorded an episode about Air Bud

Misc

Recovered from a disk failure on my VM server
- It’s unfortunate because it seemed to come out of nowhere, but I realized later that I’d been receiving SMART warnings for months, but they were getting filtered to spam.
- I don’t think there was any data loss because I reflexively push all my work to git at the end of each session, but it’s just a pain tracking down all the little system configurations that I’d long forgotten
- It’s been a good reminder to create Nix workspaces for everything because that reduces the amount of hidden configuration I have on any system
Did monthly bookkeeping
Got my fingerprints taken for an FBI background check
- USPS has a terrible process for this. It was a 40-min wait for a single person in front of me, and then it took about 20 tries to get my fingerprints.
- It’s shocking that USPS is using hardware that seems to work about 5% of the time.
- But in the end, they got a clean capture, and I got my FBI background check (not a criminal)
Finally labeled the patch panel ports on my homelab server rack