Update for the week ending on Friday, Aug 29, 2025

mtlynch.io

• Published “Give Your Spouse the Gift of a Couple’s Email Domain”
• Published a tutorial on flashing an AirGradient air quality monitor from the command line.

Refactoring English

• Continued working on “Get to the Point” chapter.
• Reviewed survey results and published “Reader Feedback about my Chapter List”
  • Decided to move/rename chapters based on the feedback.
• Removed numbering from non-chapter headings
  • Before
  • After
• Added a changelog to the book download page
  • Screenshot
• Worked on editing my interview
  • Struggled to find a video editor that worked for me.
    • Shotcut
      • What I’d been using so far, but I find it really unintuitive.
      • The thing that sent me looking for alternatives is that every time I made a split in the video, there would be two “pop” sounds in the audio, even if I didn’t change anything about the video itself, just added a logical split in the clip.
      • I found a Github issue saying it’s not a bug in Shotcut, and it’s just how audio editing works, which seemed suspect, as I’ve never seen this in any other software.
    • Flowblade
      • First issue was that it wouldn’t load at all, and I had to apply a workaround with environment variables I found in the README.
      • Next issue was that it was exporting videos with a red tint.
      • I used an LLM to find a fix by manually setting export flags.
      • Then, Flowblade started having the issue of pops at clip splits, too!
      • The source videos both had audio at 44.1 kHz, so I converted them beforehand to 48 kHz (at the suggestion of an LLM), and that seems to have fixed it.
      • I theoretically could go back to Shotcut now, as 48 kHz would probably work there too, but I prefer flowblade at this point.
    • Kdenlive
      • I don’t remember why I ended up giving up on this, but I think it just kept crashing.

Hacker News Popularity Contest

• Added metadata for ericmigi.com

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.

• Removed the “package binaries” CI job
  • It was an artifact of previous Go project templates, but I don’t really need it for a project where I’m not distributing binaries.
  • Also it was breaking because of some dependency not being available on ARM.
• Started experimenting with graphing the rate of story submissions.

AirGradient

AirGradient is an open-source air quality monitor that I was initially excited about but have felt frustrated actually using. I’m trying to improve the software side.

• Remove trailing whitespace from source

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.

• Cut release 1.5.0
  • The first tagged release since December 2024.
  • I kept putting it off because it changed a lot of the database, but I decided to finally bite the bullet
• Fix a database migrations
  • Users reported this issue after upgrading to 1.5.0
  • Fortunately, the fix worked, and users upgraded to 1.5.1 successfully.

Gleam Chat Log Parser

A toy project to teach myself Gleam. I’m trying to write parsers for my old AIM chat logs.

• Add support for conversations that include “away” messages
• Added a formatting check to CI

Misc

• Struggled to get my water filters working
  • They’re fancy Boroux filters that cost like a million dollars, but they’re supposed to be great and last for years.
  • Unfortunately, they require a “priming” step where you’re supposed to run water through them to get them started, but mine seem not to accept priming.
• Bought a new NAS CPU
  • Now that I stream 4K videos from Jellyfin, the NAS struggles and causes videos to stutter, and I notice the system seems CPU-bound.
  • I went with a AMD Ryzen 7 5700G
• Updated the firmware on my Samsung G9 monitor
  • Had to jump through all sorts of hoops I can’t even remember
  • I had to download from the Canadian site because the main US Samsung site directed me to a firmware update that didn’t actually match my monitor
  • I tried using a 4 GB USB drive and formatting it with Windows as FAT32
  • I powered off my monitor after inserting the USB drive
  • One of these worked, but I’m not sure which.