Update for the week ending on Friday, Jul 26, 2024

Hit the Front Page of Hacker News

Led the live lesson on submitting to HN and managing comments
- We ended up doing live teardowns of articles on HN that day, which was fun
Reached out to another potential interviewee
Watched some of Aaron Francis’ screencasting course
Recorded one of the lessons and decided to re-do it
- After watching some of Aaron Francis’ course, I’m won over to smaller, bite-sized videos
Bought a tripod for the camera
- I have a webcam that sits on top of my monitor
- The problem is that I normally keep my monitor centered at eye level, but to record, I want the camera to be at eye level
- This meant that every time I recorded, I had to lower my monitor to get the webcam to eye level
- This added friction to recording, and it was hard to get the camera in a consistent position on every recording
Started sharing Popularity Contest with friends

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

Integrated the response-targets htmx extension so that I can assign a different target when the server responds with an error
- I originally couldn’t figure out how to integrate with the existing one, and I made my own extension called hide-targets that was customized to me
- But I figured out how to extract the behavior I want to a custom htmx extension I wrote called clear-before-send, which works alongside the existing response-targets
- clear-before-send lets you specify element selectors, and htmx will empty the contents of those elements on the next request to the server.
- The idea is for forms that have an associated success or failure message, you want to clear the message on send so that you’re not still showing the error of the last request on the next form submit
Reimplemented the invites test using htmx
- About a 50% reduction in LOC, though it looks like it added code because of more tests. Subsequent PRs reduced code further.
Add a convenience script for running a single Go test by name
Refactor the e2e test to use labels instead of IDs
- Labels are much less brittle and match real users’ experiences
Simplify the mock user data in sessions test

Finished June bookkeeping
Added support for real-time fees in beancount-chase-bank
- Fixed a bug
Fixed a bug in family video app
Sold my window A/C unit
Fixed my wife’s laptop
- The RAM sticks died, so we just bought replacements. It wasn’t that hard to repair.
Installed a Brondell washlet (bidet)
- I thought I did a great job, but when I woke up in the morning, I saw that water was slowly leaking from one of the connections…
- Lessons for next time
  - Keep a disposable plastic dish / food container on hand to catch water
  - Go in with a rag / sponge to soak up water
  - After turning off the valve, flush the toilet to drain the tank, and then soak up all the water left in the tank with the rag and empty it in the toilet
Renewed my OPNsense license
- It turns out that when your license expires, they just ignore it and keep telling you that you’re up to date
- Also, purchasing a license is a bizarrely manual process, but I eventually got a new 1-year license
Redirected my Jellyfin donations
- They requested that people stop donating to the project
- I reached out to two of the maintainers of clients I use,
  - One accepted donations and the other didn’t