Update for the week ending on Friday, Dec 19, 2025

mtlynch.io

• Asked on reddit about how MeshCore’s settings can be legal in the US when the FCC guidelines seem to say they’re not
  • I got downvoted to zero, and a bunch of people gave me reasons why I’m misunderstanding the law, and they’d give nonsensical explanations and then refuse to address questions.
  • I asked again in the Meshtastic sub and got similar responses.
• Tested range of MeshCore at legal settings
  • Fortunately, I’m able to achieve similar range with the legal settings, but latency is worse and battery performance is worse. Latency doesn’t matter because it’s fine if a text arrives in 500ms vs. 250ms, but battery life might be an issue.
• Bought an RTL-SDR dongle to understand better what LoRa signals look like
  • This is what I recorded when I set my WisMesh Pocket v2 to 500 kHz

Refactoring English

• Added support for regional pricing / PPP support
  • Like all Stripe things, this was annoyingly complicated. Why don’t they just offer PPP? It seems super easy for them.
  • My initial implementation was a script that generated region-specific prices in advance, let the user select their country, and then a Go cloud function created a Stripe checkout with that price.
  • I realized after that I could eliminate the cloud function and precompute everything in advance if I generated payment links for each country.
  • The solution is a little dirty because I have to generate a new price object and payment link object every time a country’s price changes, but it’s automated, so it’s not so much that it’s work as much as it just fills my Stripe account with clutter, as you can never delete Payment Links (even unused) and you can’t delete Price objects after they’re used in a transaction. But it’s only 35 countries, and I don’t think prices will change frequently enough for me to need to generate more than 100 payment links total.
• Worked on chapter on motivation
• Fixed block quotes for consistency
• Fixed the excerpt generation script to exclude a dead link to the table of contents at the footer of each page
• Re-do the intro to the choosing topics chapter
• Tweaked wording in the brevity chapter
• Published a minor revision to the changelog

Will it Hit the Front Page?

This is a game where you predict whether new HN stories will reach the front page or not.

• Added the ability to view other users’ predictions in a way where you can’t just piggyback them

Little Moments

Little Moments is an open-source web app I’m working on to replace the current family photo sharing app (TinyBeans) I used (which I strongly dislike).

• Continued working on an initial design doc

ScreenJournal

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

• Added support for emoji reactions
  • Screenshot
• Fixed a break in deployment that the new version of flyctl caused
• Got rid of hacky HTML attributes that only existed to faciliate E2E tests
• Made the comment button smaller
• Refactored the reviews object I pass to the HTML template renderer to simplify template logic

Misc

• Gave sideline feedback on a MeshCore PR
• Fixed the Nix flake for the Nix CLI
• Upgraded my main machine to NixOS 25.11
• Complained to HN mods about Yale spamming HN