Update for the week ending on Friday, Nov 13, 2026

Refactoring English

• Finished sending out books to early Kickstarter premium backers in US
• Added a survey to the post-purchase email asking how readers discovered the book

Book

• Switched to Courier Prime for inline and block code
• Replaced almost-black colors wth pure black
• Added support to compare-with-version to compare the non-PDF version
• Added support to compare-with-version to show minor color differences
• Added a build check to detect code wrapping on fenced code
• Removed figure-number prefixes from image captions
• Reorganized files so that book content is in its own folder
  • Previously, the Asciidoc to Markdown compiler was in the same directory
• Fixed a bug in page break detection
• Modify the Markdown to Asciidoc compiler to look for paragraphs ending with a colon and keep the subsequent element on the next page
• Fixed pages where I linked to the same URLs twice on the same page
  • It looks weird in footnotes
• Made tables more compact and give them figure-style spacing
• Fixed vertical spacing for code blocks

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.

• Worked on a PR to prevent malicious guests from exceeding guest link limits (open)
• Fixed error reporting on upload persistence failures
• Applied “Parse, Don’t Validate” to ExpirationTime type
• Refactored code for creating expiration times in tests
• Adjusted the AGENTS.md rule to keep struct methods adjacent to their definitions

Weekly Snippets

• Fix HTTP logging diagnostics to stop redacting information
  • I didn’t review the AI code closely enough and it had this whole complicated query param redaction logic even though we don’t deal with any sensitive query params
• Improved retries on transient forge API errors
• Increased timeouts on forge API requests from 30s to 5m

NixOS Config

• Upgraded my laptop to NixOS 26.05
• Tried Fluux Messenger XMPP web client (my favorite so far)
• Configured nixbuild bot’s SSH key correctly in my sandbox
• Took a bunch of AI suggestions on simplifying my NixOS setup
• Added a dashboard to track opencode tool use failures
  • I want to get better at tracking efficiency of OpenCode sessions, and this seemed like the simplest start
• Trimmed wakatime backup to not hammer full dump API every day
  • They sent me an angry email

AI sandbox

• Tried using a Hetzner bare metal server as my primary AI sandbox
  • It works pretty well and doesn’t exhaust my CPU/RAM locally
  • I’m probably going to switch to a cheaper OVH Cloud option with SSD instead of spinning disks
  • Improved Nix flakes for setting up Hetzner server
• Simplified my local sandbox so that there’s a single, permanently mounted directory instead of dynamically adding mounts to the sandbox VM
  • Got rid of a few convenience features that were more complexity than they were worth
• Fixed a race condition in sandbox start
• Updated the Forgejo PR skill to keep PRs WIP until all queued work is complete
• Improved the commit message skill to use headings and log the AI models used
• Added skills for different agent reviews, such as Claude Opus, GLM 5.3 flash, Astra
• Fixed a bug in my wakatime backups
• Improved skill injection so it doesn’t restart the sandbox VM
• Tried to prevent the unattended agent from doing busywork tasks while waiting on background jobs
  • It was running a bunch of nonsense commands “to pass the time”

Misc

• Posted a thread on Hacker News about converting your family and friends to XMPP/Matrix
• Did monthly bookkeeping
• Added support for real-time transfers to beancount-chase-bank