Update for the week ending on Friday, Jul 25, 2025

mtlynch.io

• Published a new post, “Migrating a ZFS pool from RAIDZ1 to RAIDZ2”
  • Added an update based on reader feedback
• Converted post cover images to webp
  • I realized that my 200px thumbnails were downloading full-size images, bloating my homepage.
  • Added srcset attributes to the thumbnails so they scale down better.
• Simplified CI so that the deploy step only depends on the build step
  • In theory, merging could cause me to deploy a site that failed other checks, but that’s so rare.
• Converted my CircleCI YAML to use underscores instead of dashes in CI job names.

Michael’s weekly updates

• Added a CI job to check all images for sensitive exif data
• Refactored CircleCI YAML config to use underscores instead of dashes in names

Refactoring English

• Gave blog feedback to a 1:1 editing customer.
• Made minor edits to some chapters.
• Fixed curly quotes
  • Apparently, Asciidoc uses straight quotes by default, and you can’t just change settings to make them curly.
  • The only way I found to do it is to put backticks in every quote, which is ugly.
  • I added a CI job to make sure all quotes have backticks.
• Add more whitespace in page margins
  • Before
  • After
  • This gets paragraph width to about 70 characters per line, which is my general preference.
• Moved ebook files to Bunny rather than baking them into git
  • The two formats reached about 8 MB each, so each new version was bloating the git repo.

ScreenJournal

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

• Got most of the way through a feature to let admins create password reset links
• Fixed the dev serve script so that it exports the right variable
  • I don’t know how this worked before.
• Fixed some typescript warnings/errors
• Update upload-prod-db script to match the new flyctl binary.

HN Observer

HN Observer is a tool I’m working on to predict the outcome of submissions to Hacker News based on past historical data.

• Tried to figure out why I couldn’t view history for one of the links I submitted
  • Started by adding better log output when I query the Hacker News API to print more about what the API returned.
  • Rewrote the API for querying story metadata to work on one item at a time rather than on slices
    • I only need single item at a time, and the slices make the SQL query construction super complex.
  • It turned out that the code had a bug where it couldn’t display a story if it wasn’t updated in the last refresh, so I fixed that bug.
    • Fortunately, the app was still collecting the data. It was just failing to surface it at the right time.
• Removed the deploy step from CI config.
  • I’ve decided to just run it on my dev machine for now.

Zestful

• Investigated replacing CRF++ with spaCy as my NLP engine.
  • CRF++ is pretty old and unmaintained, and I have to run it in a special Docker container.
  • spaCy would be nice because I can skip the custom Docker setup and do a much simpler setup.
  • I messed around for 20 minutes with an LLM and made progress, but it seems complicated enough that it’s not worth doing since Zestful is purely in maintenance mode.
• Switched my bash scripts to use a more portable shell shebang
  • #!/usr/bin/env bash instead of #!/bin/bash

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.

• Finished a feature that gives guests expiration options
  • The admin can already set a max expiration on guest uploads, but guests don’t know that their files expire, so this gives visibility to the fact that they expire and gives the guests a bit more control over when they expire.
• Did minor variable name refactoring in an end-to-end test

Misc

• Had a 1:1 call with a former teammate.
• Debugged networking issue with my virt-manager VMs.
  • They suddenly stopped being able to access the network.
  • It turned
• Fixed printing on my home network.
  • The issue turned out to be a firewall rule I screwed up.
  • I also somehow managed to break Internet for my whole network for about an hour in the process.
• Cleaned up my bike chain.
  • It had gotten hard to ride because the chain was rusty and dry.
  • I went over it with a soapy rag, then re-applied chain lube.
  • The chain’s still kinda rusty, but it feels pleasant to ride again.
• Bought a Blu-ray reader.
  • I got a LG BP50NB40, which was one of the recommended ones on the MakeMKV forums.
  • I want to be able to flash the firmware to do UHD rips, so hopefully it works.