Update for the week ending on Friday, Feb 2, 2024

TinyPilot

Management

• Prepared TinyPilot financial reports
• Worked with teammate on designing an RMA process for our manufacturer to work with us on
• Improved order process for Raspberry Pi
• Unsubscribed
• Gathered data for 2023 taxes
• 1:1 with teammate
• Did inventory planning

Software development

• Documented how to upgrade TinyPilot’s PicoShare instance.
• Weighed in on a PR about how to prevent open redirects

Customer support

• Updated documentation about how to handle

Sales

• Made more progress toward switching from EmailOctopus to Buttondown for TinyPilot’s mailing list
• Offered TinyPilot to a blogger
• Launched TinyPilot on EthicalAds
  • Too early to make meaningful inferences, but it’s currently underperforming Google by about 50% and has had no successful conversions
• Contracted with our marketing specialist for a review of our Google Ads account
• Checked affiliate payments for December (none)

mtlynch.io

• Continued working on year 6 in review post

ScreenJournal

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

• Added support for changing your password
• Simplified some unit tests and some other unit tests

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 a .env.example file
  • I always forget how to populate it when I have to blow away a server and repopulate it
• Fixed a bug that blocked me from sending replies when the sender sent to an email address not associated with Stan
• Refactored code to make it easier to test

Exploding Servers

• Updated Scaleway implementation to use the new CoParm instances instead of the retired AMP2 instances

Asset Rebalancer

This was a project I worked on briefly after I shelved WanderJest in 2020 after the COVID outbreak but before I switched my focus to TinyPilot.

• Gave up on renewing the domain name and moved it to a subdomain under mtlynch.io.

Dusty VCR

• Continued editing Air Bud episode

Misc

• Upgraded my VM server from Proxmox 6 to Proxmox 8
  • The only notable difference I see is that Proxmox 8 now lets me sort the VMs alphabetically, which sounds like a dumb feature, but is almost worth the upgrade in itself.
• Planned out different options for financing a home purchase
• Updated my ZFS backup scripts
  • Removed the .sh suffix from bash scripts
  • Integrated Cronitor URLs into the script to alert me if the scripts don’t run on time
• Set up a new water filter
  • I accidentally knocked over my Brita filter and cracked it
  • We instead bought a glass ZeroWater filter
  • So far, it seems fine. Larger than the Brita, but I’m more scared of knocking it over.
  • Filter is much slower (like filters a cup every 3 mins or so), but that’s fine
  • One of the puzzling parts of the design is that the spigot is 2" above the bottom of the tank, so there’s about 3 cups of water that sit at the bottom that you can never actually drink