Ope, summer got busy and I didn’t post an August Meutch update. I made some good updates in July, then got pulled away by vacation (good) and illness (bad). Now school is back in session and work on Meutch is steaming along!
Work on the application: Meutch gained many new features since my last post. The CHANGELOG has the details but here are some highlights from July:
The messages inbox looks nice and you can archive messages and mark them read
There’s now a “Contact Us” form so that users can report ideas or bugs to the admins without needing a GitHub account
Claimed giveaways are hidden from the feed by default
There’s no more “I want this” button, simplifying the process of assigning a giveaway to anyone who messaged
Plus some bug fixes and backend work. I’ve done a lot in September, but that’s for the October update.
Usage: activity on the app got a little quieter, dropping to 41 active users in July, then rebounding to 48 in August. I am still donating a dollar for each active user in each month, this time that went to Fed Up Ministries and the Mutual Aid Network of Ypsilanti (MANY). Go list an item or post or answer a request to keep these donations growing!
Between long weekends, vacations, and spending time outside, I’ve had less time for working on the site and for using it. I’m hopeful that’s the case for other people too and that usage will pick back up now that fall is underway. Let’s share Halloween costume accessories! I just posted a request for some Thor accessories for my 6th grader.
I continue to personally benefit from using Meutch. One highlight: In August borrowed tubes from two different people who responded to my Meutch request and took my boys tubing on the Argo Cascades. I lived here when the Cascades opened in 2012, how had I never been?! It’s definitely a top-things-to-do-in-Ann-Arbor attraction.
Our second trip was near sunset, it was much less crowded!
These two loans were not tracked on Meutch (I’ve since added an “I have this item” button in replies to requests to make it easier to get these items into the site). This illustrates how the Meutch activity numbers I see are under-counts. The public canoe livery charges $14 for a 2-hour tube rental; the Meutch loans saved me $84 that weekend.
Outreach: At this point the site itself is thoroughly ready for use. It needs one thing: more users. To that end I’m looking at more ways to make people aware of it:
I had a MEUTCH summer game code on my bike
I will be tabling at the Ann Arbor Zero Waste Festival on September 27th, 12-3pm at Kiwanis. It’s the only time all year you can shop Kiwanis resale on a Sunday! Come say hi.
The Meutch Outreach Committee made these sweet flyers to hand out at events:
I’ll carry a few with me for impromptu conversations, I’m bad at plugging my own stuff in person but want to get better.
I have logged over 10,000 miles (!) riding a Yuba Spicy Curry cargo bike. Big shout-out to this 2016 blog post “Joys of the Yuba Spicy Curry”, from an early adopter in Wisconsin who rode 2,000 miles on his 1st-gen model. It helped convince me to take the plunge on mine in 2017.
I rode the 1st-generation model until I wore it out, borrowed my neighbor’s 2nd-gen for a few hundred miles while I weighed my options, then bought my 3rd-gen and now have 5,400 miles on it and counting. Over that time Yuba has improved the design in ways big (that blogger notes how the rear wheel could loosen on the 1st-gen, now there are terrific thru-axles) and small (the frame lock location, the chain guard). I think for my needs the Spicy Curry is still the best bike out there, though I’d like to hear if you think there’s a better one. I haven’t ridden the 4th-gen yet.
Over the years I’ve developed some tricks for getting the most out of this specific model of bike. One I shared already is the DIY Upholstered Seat Cushion that I made. I have at least three more good ones. The DIY bike carrier I designed is the best but it will take me the longest to write.
This one is simple and works for any Yuba bike where the Monkey Bars are mounted. Just remove the inner rail on each side. That leaves more room for larger passengers, which is why I did it. But it comes with a bonus: it leaves the inner bar’s mounting sockets exposed. These are perfect attachment points to hang stuff of of!
If your kid’s backpack has a sturdy hanging strap at the top – most do – it’ll hang neatly off the back. A friend with a Spicy Curry who saw me doing this said that hanging two backpacks off the back of the Monkey Bars was a game-changer for their school commute.
I hang reusable grocery bags off the back of my Monkey Bars. When the handles are long and the bag would hang too low, I wrap the handles around the rear bar once, then hook it on. This lets me transport two additional full bags of groceries home the store.
On a typical commute to work, I have just a single canvas bag, which would fit in the 2-Go Bags on the sides of the bike. Even then I hang it. Suspending the bags in the air protects them against bumps. This lets me transport items that might not survive banging over potholes on the streets of Ann Arbor, like a glass jar of soup or a potted plant.
Disclaimer: if I recall correctly, the Monkey Bars manual advises against removing this inner rail. They suggest that kids’ hands are safer from impacts if they hold the inner rail and that passengers could strike the exposed socket of the inner rail during a crash. I am using two curved end plugs that come with the Monkey Bars to make the front socket pieces less pokey in case of an impact; you could also use old tennis balls.
I realize this is a niche post with a very small audience but if I reach a few Spicy Curry owners, it will have been worth it!
A few years ago I was given a belt made out of old bike inner tubes (specifically, the Ballard Belt from Alchemy Goods). It worked great! A little stretchy and a nice repurposed object.
Things fall apart. Eventually the belt hole that fits me got torn out:
I asked around and no one local had a grommet tool to lend me. So I bought my own from Sail Rite (after going down a rabbit hole and looking for vintage setter dies on eBay). With the right tool for the job, it was a ten-minute repair and the belt once again holds my trousers up. The only thing I’d change would be to get a smaller size of grommet. I used #1 size, 5/16″ in, and for a belt I think #0 (1/4″) would be better. Here’s the fix, step by step.
First I hammered a cutter tool (in the background of this photo) to make a clean hole for the grommet, over where the old hole had failed:
Then I inserted the top and bottom pieces of a grommet into the setting die and got ready to whack it with a mallet:
And voila! The hole was reinforced and usable again:
It does look a little distorted, not that I think anyone ever looks closely at my belt. Maybe if I had cut a bigger hole there would be less material to bunch up? I have two sizes of cutter and can’t remember which one I used.
A smaller grommet might help as well. But regardless, my fix mates with the other part of the buckle perfectly:
Of course, one of the holes now looks different from the others, but I like that – the belt is now sized precisely for me. This repair technique also offers the opportunity to install a hole at any point, in case the user of the belt wants to wear it a little tighter or looser than the old hole allowed.
The grommet would grip tightly anywhere, it doesn’t have to go where the old hole went. So you could buy a belt that doesn’t fit at a thrift store, or get a belt from a loved one, and create a strong hole exactly where it will fit you.
Was it silly that I spent $70 on tools to fix a $40 belt? Well, I wanted to fix the dang belt and didn’t have another option. But (if you know me, you know what’s coming next) now I can lend the tool to people! And it will cost them $0. Maybe we can get more belts fixed.
Here’s the grommet tool’s listing on Meutch, the peer-to-peer sharing site. Since that link will expire in 30 days, I’ll throw in a screenshot here to illustrate:
If you live in Ann Arbor, feel free to request the grommet setting kit from me on Meutch. Maybe you can repair your belt, or shower curtain, or make something attachable with a carabiner, or …
I’m looking out for other uses for this tool. For instance, I installed a grommet on the safety clip for my bike carrier, a device I invented to tow bikes around town and that I intend to write up in its own post.
That’s all. I hope this helps someone who believes their belt has more life in it even after a hole tears out!
In 2020, I migrated this blog to A2Hosting – I know that because I wrote about it at the time. I’ve just migrated again and am writing this brief post in part to check that everything is working (including sending via email to subscribers).
I was up for renewal again this year at A2Hosting (now Hosting.com), looking at $450 for the next three years. I have gotten both more skilled at and more interested in self-hosted web stuff in recent years, so I took the plunge and started renting a little DigitalOcean Droplet virtual machine. I installed a little Docker Compose stack of these containers:
WordPress
MariaDB backend
Caddy frontend for SSL (and to lay the way for hosting other projects on this box)
Then I exported my WordPress blog from my old admin panel, imported it on the new site, and it scraped all the media files from the old site. That’s all I had over on the old host. You’re now reading this page served from the DigitalOcean Droplet!
I took the occasion to choose a new theme, Twenty Twenty-Five. I hadn’t realized that my old theme, Twenty Twenty, was not 100% compatible with the “new” Gutenberg block style that WordPress uses these days. This is a nice quality of life upgrade.
Unfortunately I still have a lousy sense of style, including web design. I cycled through different layouts and color schemes, loving none of them. This was the best I could do but I don’t love the main font or the colors. If something is hard to read, let me know, especially if you have an idea for a better set of choices!
EDIT: I’ve worked on this and am much happier with the aesthetics!
The Droplet is about half the price of the hosted solution, but that’s not the only advantage. I can now also host family members’ WordPress blogs at no additional cost to myself using the shared infrastructure, including backups I’m piping to a separate cloud provider (Hetzner, in Germany). And I can host any other web projects that need a home. I have tinkered a little with a tool that will help me mealplan, basically suggesting to me what I should cook each week. If I ever get it running, I’ll host it on this droplet too.
Just need to remember to do my maintenance on this VM and install upgrades. I have calendar reminders for that.
I started this blog in 2015 which means I lasted five years at the first host and six at the second. I hope I can keep the self-hosting going indefinitely!
Kintsugi is a Japanese technique for visibly repairing pottery. It’s aligned with the aesthetic of wabi-sabi (I still don’t fully understand wabi-sabi despite having enjoyed reading this book about it to my kids). Kintsugi is right up my alley and is similar to sashiko, a visible mending style I’ve come to love.
Traditional Kintsugi is done with ingredients that are hard to work with (urushiol, think poison ivy sap turned into resin) or acquire (gold leaf). And it takes a long time to cure. I looked for a modern equivalent that would provide a shortcut. And I found this comment on Reddit from the appropriately named user Zentactics:
I’ve done it on a few plates and bowls. If the chip is deep, I’ve used painter’s tape to support the JB weld while it cures. Afterwards, I’ll remove it and sand it down to the shape I want it to be. Depending on the chip, it may be easier to layer it, both methods work. Once the JB weld is built up and cured, I’ll put a super thin layer of JB Weld and dust it with gold Alumidust (Alumilite). A brush can be used if needed. I’ll then gently pat it down with my fingertip to embed it. All of the items I’ve fixed have been in the dishwasher and microwave dozens of times and seem to be holding up well.
I followed that approach and it worked great! I’ve repaired a few things but my biggest and favorite repair has been on a large, one-of-a-kind handmade ceramic bowl I’d received as a gift. Here’s the story of that repair and what I learned, with pictures.
The break: with the bowl sitting on the counter, I reached way up on my tippy-toes to get the hot sauce and bang! The hot sauce toppled off the shelf and crashed into the rim of the bowl:
The fresh chip
Notes on materials:
Some people seem to use the JB Weld SteelStik product but I used the classic two-part epoxy and it worked great.
Amazingly, from what I can read, both original two-part JB Weld and mica dust seem to be non-toxic when cured.
That said, I have been hesitant to use JB Weld on a part of a coffee cup that gets submerged under hot liquid. But I feel confident repairing chips in handles and rims that hardly ever come in contact with food.
For my Michiganders: Alumilite, who manufactures the mica dust I use, is headquartered in Kalamazoo!
Warning: mica dust gets everywhere! It’s worse than glitter. I work outside when possible.
Okay, onto the repair. I don’t typically have the foresight to take photos but this time I did so I’ll mostly let them speak for themselves.
Meutch had a great June, with more people using the platform than ever. More activity is making Meutch more fun for me to use! Here are a few of my personal highlights from last month.
Borrowing: I have this electric leaf shredder. Its blade broke 3 years ago and it’s been useless. I ordered a replacement set but when I went to finally perform the fix, I couldn’t loosen the bolt securing the blades. I contacted support and they told me I just needed to use more force – but I couldn’t get enough torque with my ratcheting socket wrench. So I posted a Meutch request to borrow a breaker bar. My friend Jonathan dropped his off on his way to church and I had the bolt loose in seconds. The rest of my repair was easy and I promptly shredded some leaves to use as mulch in my raised beds!
Lending: I gave away some seeds for a little free library and a spirograph toy. A couple of moms in my neighborhood showed up to pick them up, with kids in tow; I was sitting on my front porch and got to hear about their projects. It was delightful how Meutch led to chats with neighbors I’d never met before.
My seeds are in the seed box below!
Our family also lent out our backpacking packs. They went to Nordhouse Dunes for Juneteenth weekend, came home, and are now heading to Canada!
By the numbers: it was our biggest month yet, with 56 users taking an action on the site. That means I have made a charitable donation of $56, this month to All Hands Active, the hackerspace/makerspace community in downtown Ann Arbor.
Features: Meutch gained new features in June including regional circles. These are designated by a site administrator (me, for now) and if a new user registers and their location is inside that circles radius, it is recommended to them as the main circle to join. I made a regional Ypsilanti circle, in addition to designating a regional Ann Arbor circle.
One nice feature came from a new contributor: thanks to @terhorst, one’s own activities now show in the home feed by default, though you can filter them out. He is also almost done with a feature to let users reply to messages directly via email.
Lastly, I added official terms and conditions and a privacy policy. So far everyone on the site has behaved themselves well but that won’t last forever if the service keeps growing. This starts to get ahead of that by explicitly stating expectations for conduct.
Room for improvement: there are two major related features I want to work on soon. I want to give users the ability to reply to a request by offering an item – multiple people have requested this. And I’d like users to be able to control which circles an item of theirs is visible to.
These would go hand in hand; you could mark an item visible to no circles at all, if you wanted, but use the share link to give only the requester access. That would allow people to lend valuable items that they might not feel comfortable making available to everyone on Meutch.
Thanks to everyone who has used Meutch, keep spreading the word! It feels like we’re nearing a self-sustaining level of activity.
I launched Meutch in May! Thanks to friends who told me to stop fiddling with it and get it out into the world.
We ended the month with over a hundred people on Meutch. And 35 people joined a circle and took an action, which means I donated $35 dollars to a local sharing-oriented organization. This month it’s MakerWorks, where people share space, tools, and skills. As a reminder, I will donate to charity for every user who is active in a given month through all of 2026, so continue to borrow, loan, request, or giveaway!
It seems like anecdotally the platform is working. My garden now is full of plants that I got in response to my Meutch request – the tomatoes came from a friend while the green onions were especially magical as I got them from someone I didn’t already know!
Yesterday I borrowed a Sawzall via Meutch and used it to chop up some long scrap boards that were too big to fit in my garbage can. It was nice to use a high-quality tool without having to pay for it and store it – or even decide what model I wanted to buy.
The fruits of my labor and the tool I borrowed: this stack plus a bunch more in a garbage can.
And I heard from friends who borrowed a Pack N Play crib to host visiting family and a folding table and chairs for a party. Plus I lent a ton of camping gear to a work colleague who is trying backpacking for the first time.
Growth areas: I heard complaints and suggestions from users directly and also learned from how people use Meutch, leading to improvements (here’s everything that changed in Meutch in May). For instance, 96 people logged into Meutch in May, but two-third of them then took no further action. I’m now nudging new users to join a circle so they see activity in their feed immediately of what’s going on near them.
On the technical side, I completed the foundation for a mobile app, moving things around on the backend to get ready. Meutch is not a slam dunk case for a mobile app, given that it works fine in your web browser. But I think a lot of people expect a mobile app and I want to meet people wherever they are. That said, in June I want to prioritize the core web app experience.
Thanks to everyone who signed up and especially those of you who made a circle and told your friends about Meutch! I’m hopeful that we can sustain a foundation of activity among early adopters who are passionate about sharing and keep growing the user base.
Here’s to sharing in June! On my summer bucket list is to go tubing on the Huron River … I plan to borrow the tubes on Meutch.
I enjoy borrowing things from friends. And I love lending to them even more. We all have stuff sitting on a shelf that could be out there helping people! When I lend out my darning supplies, or borrow a board game to try it out, it warms my heart.
My sharing activity is limited by my worry that I’d be spamming my group texts, Slack chats, and neighborhood email list. But I know some people in those groups likely have the item I need and would eagerly lend it.
Surely, I thought, there must be some app for this? I looked for a community lending site for years and couldn’t find one that met my needs. There’s the local Buy Nothing group on Facebook but that’s not what I want – it’s massive, unorganized, and I have to go on Facebook.
In 2024 I found myself with free time as I recovered from surgery and began bringing my vision to life. It started off as a proof-of-concept, then took shape with a name, website, and serious functionality. I’ve been using it with friends and it’s finally ready for the world.
Meet Meutch!
I’m excited to unveil Meutch! The name is short for “mutual aid”.
Meutch provides a set of features that don’t exist together anywhere else:
It accommodates both temporary loans and permanent giveaways.
You share through circles to people you are socially connected with: your neighborhood, faith community, workplace, etc.
It’s uncommercialized. No ads, no data tracking, no fees, you don’t need a social media account – just an email address. To my nerds: the code is open-source.
Meutch benefits its users, who save money, avoid storing more things in their homes, and feel good from strengthening ties with people in the communities.
It also has big potential upsides for the world, as it can reduce consumerism (I’ve gotten items faster than I could on Amazon Prime) and build trust and connections at a time when we are atomized.
Let’s take a peek inside
Here’s the home feed of actual real-world sharing activity:
Beyond watching the home feed, you can browse & search items that people in your circles have posted.
The blue boxes show how far away an item is from you
Here’s my current Meutch lending activity (blacking out my friends’ names):
You connect with others by joining circles. These can be public, private (requires approval to join), or even unlisted. This screenshot was taken from my phone; there’s no native app yet, but it works well on a mobile browser.
It has been a delight to use so far. For instance, I wanted to try the boardgame Forbidden Sky; I posted a request and my friend Aaron saw it and lent me his copy. I played it twice and didn’t like it. I won’t buy it. Success!
Since the loan was tracked on Meutch, we got reminders to return it. Those would have been nice for everything I’ve lent over the years and then lost track of.
Here are some things I’ve lent so far:
Hammer drill and drill bits
Stockpot for making maple syrup
Sashiko clothes mending kit
Azul board game
Kintsugi ceramics repair kit
Project Hail Mary book
Pair of sawhorses
Balance bike
Calico board game
Tarp
Backpacking equipment
And borrowed:
Dungeon Crawler Carl Book
A black cape for Halloween
Forbidden Sky board game
A cat costume for my 2nd grader’s “dress up as a book character” day at school
Tools to perform a hydraulic brake bleed on my bike
I’ve also given away a bunch of objects, ranging from native trees that had reseeded in my garden to a roll of chickenwire.
It’s Go Time
So please: join Meutch! Register, join circles, then post requests and respond to others. Subscribe to the digest emails, ideally daily. Then you can see what people are posting and asking for and engage when you want, instead of needing to regularly visit the site to see activity.
I’ll keep improving Meutch, but it’s time to move from “build the software” to “grow the user base.” This is the hardest part! I need help from everyone I know in Ann Arbor to get to an activity level where people find the platform useful. Once we achieve critical mass, the sky’s the limit.
Yes, “in Ann Arbor” – for now. Meutch works everywhere else, but you’d have to bring your own group to lend with. A board game collective in Seattle could create a circle and start sharing today. I would love to see it happen! And I hope someday to help with outreach in other cities. But for now I’m focused on Ann Arbor, since that’s where my local ties are (I hope an Ypsilanti resident will create a circle for Ypsi).
One tip: I’ve added “share” buttons to circles and public giveaways and requests to spread the word about Meutch. These generate links that render pretty previews to people viewing the links from outside of Meutch.
These links are the best way to share Meutch resources on other social networks. For instance, you could share your request to Nextdoor, create a circle for your neighborhood and send it to the group’s email list, or post a giveaway link to Facebook. You get the attention on your post from those other networks while managing the activity on Meutch.
You can even share temporary links to your own items with people not yet on Meutch. So when someone posted to the Common Cycle email list, “does anyone have a bike repair stand I can borrow?” I was able to send them a link to my bike stand:
I’ve prioritized privacy in designing Meutch and you would have no way to tell that I have this item listed for loan unless we belonged to a shared circle. This share-link mechanism gives me a way to bypass that briefly for a single item when I want to.
That’s enough of me showing it. Go try Meutch yourself!
I’ll even bribe you! Kind of.
How else can I boost user engagement now? The most common strategies used by new tech companies are off-limits to me. I’m not going to create fake users and upload dummy items, the way Reddit founders populated their site using pseudonyms at its launch. And I can’t offer cash bonuses to active users, the way a startup with millions in venture capital backing can.
Here’s my incentive idea for Meutch: at the start of every month in 2026 I’ll make a donation to a local mutual-aid-type charity of $1 for every user active on Meutch in the prior month, up to $500. “Active” means you:
Belonged to at least one circle with other people
Took at least one action: posted a request, added an item, borrowed an item, or responded to someone else’s request or giveaway
This incentive isn’t restricted to people in Ann Arbor. Folks elsewhere might need to recruit a local circle to start sharing with, but I’ll count anyone active, anywhere.
I piloted Meutch in April with some friends from my co-working space. They told others and we got to 17 users who took actions last month. I’ve just donated that much to Common Cycle, Ann Arbor’s community bike repair nonprofit.
Seventeen bucks is measly, I know. I can put Common Cycle back onto the list later. Help me grow that number in the meantime!
My deep gratitude to those of you who share Meutch with your friends and neighbors at this critical early stage. I will be self-promoting Meutch now that it’s officially launched, but your word-of-mouth is much more effective and less awkward. If this project takes root, it’ll be because of you.
They were quite good! They were also a lot of work and I’m not often game for involved cooking projects so I haven’t made them again.
The most recent book I finished, Automatic Noodle, also found me reading mouthwatering descriptions of a food I’d never tried. The two books have a lot in common: near-future sci-fi set on Earth, anarchist vibes – even the titles are similar. (Side note: I liked Automatic Noodle but didn’t love it. I am realizing that “cozy” books, with their low-stakes plots and pleasant vibes, aren’t my thing.)
In this story, four sentient robots team up and open a noodle shop that serves biang biang, a certain style of Chinese hand-pulled noodle served with chili oil. I read the book in bed and kept thinking night after night, “I need to make these noodles.”
My kids and I finally did it! We were all pulling noodles and slapping them on the counter, wha-bam, and having a jolly good time. Some were thick, some were thin, some were very long. I stretched and slapped the noodles to my full extended wingspan and still they did not break.
I’m not sure we cooked them exactly right. We used this recipe but loaded into my recipe manager which doesn’t show all the pictures… looking at it now, and reading about how some biang biang is as thick as a belt, ours were too thin.
I would love to try an authentic version. That said, we were all thrilled with how they turned out and wished we’d made more.
Going farther back: the book Little House in the Big Woods enticed me to make maple syrup candy by pouring syrup on fresh snow.
It’s a testament to the authors’ evocative descriptions that each of these stories compelled me to cook.
Here’s an update on my journey deploying Apache Superset and using Docker. It felt good to write about what I’ve learned at work, and it’s been a while: I don’t think I posted here that my job title is now Senior Data Engineer! But people who don’t work on computer infrastructure might not find this one interesting.
In 2023, we deployed Apache Superset at the City of Ann Arbor as our Business Intelligence (BI) / data visualization platform, choosing it over Microsoft Power BI or Metabase. That decision has been a resounding success. Superset is a rock-solid product that keeps getting better … and* we’ve saved over $150k and counting in license costs vs. proprietary software.
I’ve re-read the 2015 talk “Choose Boring Technology” a couple of times while working in my current job (that link goes to a slideshow version of the talk, turned into a website – that’s the format I’ve experienced it in). The author talks about having only three innovation tokens to spend on new tech at a given time. The rest has to be boring. Then when you’ve mastered the new tech, you get a token back to spend on something else.
Deploying Superset took all my tokens: Docker, DevOps, Linux sysadmin. I said, we will only deploy official Docker images released by the Superset project. No way are we in the business of creating our own, this is complicated enough.
I learned a ton in the intervening years. I’m still learning a ton. It’s great! As I’ve gotten those tokens back by becoming competent at those technologies, I’ve been able to do more with our Superset deployment.
First that looked like building our own Superset Docker image, tweaking the environment but not touching the code. The project forced our hand on this because starting in 4.1.0, it no longer included basic drivers needed to use Superset out of the box, most notably the one to connect to the PostgreSQL backend database. I’m still not entirely convinced this was the right choice for the project but I saw the other side’s argument that everyone really ought to be building their own image.
