Update for the week ending on Friday, Jan 31, 2025

mtlynch.io

• Continued working on year 7 indie founder blog post.
• Started a post about my Zig + VS Code + Nix development setup.

Refactoring English

• Published Passive Voice Considered Harmful chapter
• Published Can You Spot the Passive Voice? exercise
• Cleaned up CSS so that I’m just using vanilla bootstrap and no theme
• Added Use unambiguous example values to the tutorials chapter
• Started chapter on verbs

wordword

wordword is a utility for finding repeated duplicate words in markdown files. Like, “Let’s go to the the store!” I used this as a test project to experiment with Cline and was pretty blown away.

• Got basic functionality working
  • It turned out that I repeated this error a lot on my blog
• Added a nix package that I can import to other repos

Streamablize

Streamablize is a mini-utility I use to convert videos to web-streamable format.

• Support drag ’n drop in the web interface
• Prevent the conversion from failing due to non-fatal errors
• Added direnv to the repo
• Log ffmpeg errors on the backend

ScreenJournal

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

• Switched to the ncruces implementation of sqlite
  • I decided it would be helpful to do it here before PicoShare.
  • It seems like the ncruces defaults are more rigorous than the mattn/sqlite implementation, but when I told ncruces, he said that they’re not that different from what’s available in the others
• Added better logging for account handler errors
• Combine the valid and invalid tests into a single function in reviews_test
• Upgraded to sqlfluff 3.30
• Improved handler tests
• Fix mismatch in Go version between Nix and Docker
• Added a SQL lint step to the pre-commit hook
• Tell prettier to ignore .direnv directory
• Switched from npm scripts to direct command-line commands

PicoShare

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.

• Fix mismatch in Go version between Nix and Docker
• Continued experimenting with a migration to the ncruces/sqlite implementation

Misc

• Installed my new Crucial T705 SSD and migrated NixOS to it
  • Somehow, this still went bumpy even though it’s my third time.
  • I’m not sure how, but certain folders are missing directories. It’s fine because they’re git repos, so I can just re-clone, but I’m not sure what I did wrong.
• Sent letters to two merchants for violating MA privacy laws
  • Continued working on my letter generator to simplify the process
• Switched from KeePass on Linux to KeePassXC
  • I don’t know why I waited so long. KeePassXC is so much better.
  • It feels modern and more Linux-native
  • In my short experience, it seems to be better at recognizing login fields in the browser and syncing back and forth
• Bought a baby cam
  • I got the Reolink E1 Zoom
  • I need to set up a dedicated network for it that prohibits internet access
  • I’m probably going to use Zoneminder as the interface
• Moved a heavy chair upstairs with my wife
• Joined Codeberg as a member
  • I don’t know much about it yet, but it’s cool to be a member of a source forge and contribute financially
  • I like that they run a Go-based FOSS web app for git