March 2024 Work Log (Patreon)

Hey everyone! This is everything I worked on during the month of March, exclusively for patrons.

Nexus Tools

Nexus Tools is my installer for ADB, Fastboot, and other Android tools for Linux, macOS, Chrome OS, and Windows. I released version 5.6 in March, with some bug fixes and improvements to the underlying code.

The most important improvement here is that Nexus Tools can finally be uninstalled on Windows when running from the regular install directory, instead of crashing with an error message. Unlike macOS and Linux, Windows doesn't allow executables to delete themselves or their parent directory while they are running, and I didn't catch that because I was usually testing Nexus Tools from a separate installation folder. Lesson learned! The uninstall command on Windows now creates and runs a temporary batch script that deletes everything, and then the batch file is automatically cleaned up later by Windows.

Nexus Tools still creates an entry in the "Installed apps" list in the Windows Settings app, and with that bug fixed, clicking Uninstall from Settings actually works! I added a command line icon to the list entry in this update (the cmd.exe icon, to be specific), so it doesn't just use the generic program icon.

Nexus Tools 5.6 also fixed a bug where a running ADB server could stop the uninstall process, and the codebase is now compiled with Dart 3.3.1. There are more improvements for ARM Windows and Apple Silicon computers that I want to implement in the future, but for now, the project works on all supported platforms with zero reported bugs.

Alt Text Creator

I released the Alt Text Creator browser extension for Chrome and Firefox in March. You can read the full post for all the details, but I did get some bug reports after other people tried it. Most notably, the extension silently fails if your OpenAI account doesn't have access to the GPT-4 Vision API. Those bugs need to be fixed at some point.

Wii Shop Channel Music Extension

Updating the Wii Shop Music browser extension to the Manifest V3 standard is now my top development priority. The hard part is that the background code needs to be rewritten and split between a service worker and an offscreen document. The extra hard part is that Firefox's implementation of Manifest V3 does not yet have the offscreen document API.

The good news is that I'm pretty sure Firefox support can be retained in the new extension update. My previous plan was to keep Firefox users on the current version (the site list is now a separate component that is refreshed automatically), and only update when Mozilla implements the offscreen API. Alt Text Creator ended up being a good learning experience for the offscreen API, and I was able to create a single version of that extension for both browsers.

The Spacebar

I published two articles on The Spacebar in March:

• Across the Metaverse: My trip though VR social platforms

• Apple is building a moat

The VR article was a lot of fun to write! I have another article in progress about the original iPod, and I also want to convert more Tech Tales episodes into written articles in the future.

Tech Tales

I didn't work on new Tech Tales episodes in March, but I did make some improvements to the production and publishing workflow that will make future episodes even better. The big change is that Tech Tales episodes will finally have chapters that appear in both the audio file and the YouTube version. The most recent episode (Google AMP) has been edited to include chapters, and all episodes going forward will have them. I might also go back and add them to more older episodes.

You might think that chapters is pretty basic for a podcast, but you would be wrong! Podcast audio players are supposed to read chapter information encoded in the MP3 file, but YouTube only recognizes them in timestamp format pasted into the video description. I also found out during testing that Spotify doesn't recognize the MP3 chapter data—only the same timestamp format as YouTube, written into the episode description.

I also created a new video animation loop, which will play in future Tech Tales episodes on YouTube instead of the current static image. It's not as advanced as the setup I've seen for some other audio-only podcasts on YouTube, especially the ones with per-speaker audio indicators, but it's an improvement that won't add additional time to my editing and publishing workflow. It already takes long enough to make these episodes!

I now have a bash script that takes the finished episode audio and performs three actions: it creates the final MP3 audio file with chapter data, it creates the looping video, and it converts the chapter data to timestamp format so I can easily paste it into the show descriptions on all platforms. After I test this whole workflow on more episodes, I'll write a more detailed blog post and share the scripts.