Seven years ago, I quit my job as a developer at Google to create my own bootstrapped software company. Every year, I post an update about how that’s going and what my life is like as an indie founder. I sold my company My most significant professional development of the last year is that I sold TinyPilot, the company I founded in 2020. TinyPilot is a device that lets users control their computers remotely. It started as a rudimentary prototype that I built with a $35 Raspberry Pi mini-computer and a $15 HDMI capture dongle.

My router runs OPNSense Business. I like having an open-source router, but I have a few gripes with it. My biggest issue is that, by default, OPNsense can’t resolve hostnames on my local network. Why can’t OPNsense resolve local hostnames? For every other router I’ve owned in my life, if there’s a computer on my network named foo123 and I run ping foo123, then everything just works, and my computer successfully pings foo123.

The term “cold email” refers to emailing someone who you’ve never spoken to before. There are lots of guides on writing cold emails. This one is a bit niche, as it’s about cold emailing a particular person: me. But I guarantee you that it’s the best guide you can find on this hyperspecific topic. I’m publishing my guidelines under the Creative Commons BY-4.0 license, so you’re welcome to reuse or adapt them to guide people in emailing you.

I have a few Samsung SSDs, and I always have trouble remembering the process of secure erasing them, as Samsung Magician software is terrible. Here are my notes for overcoming Samsung Magician’s gotchas in the process of secure erasing a Samsung SSD. You need a Windows or MacOS system with a Samsung SSD attached This requirement drives me crazy, as Samsung Magician is creating a bootable USB disk, so it shouldn’t care what’s on your current system, but it does. And Samsung Magician only exists for Windows, MacOS, and Android, so if you’re on Linux, you can’t use it.