A Quiet Ace Shift, a Finished Door Lock, and StoreCast Becomes a Bootable Appliance
A calm day off the keyboard and a busy one on it.
A quiet Ace shift, and finishing off the door lock
Worked another delivery-day shift at Ace Hardware, 8:00 to 13:00 — nothing much happened. After work I helped a friend finish fixing his passenger door lock, the repair that started with a salvage-yard run and a stripped screw a few days back. Then my wife and I went grocery shopping.
StoreCast gets curated playlists
Added "Your Playlists" to StoreCast: a way to build playlists out of the Licensed Library and Public Domain track sets instead of relying only on genre shuffling. Made the local player able to play an exact set of files while still treating the library as one combined pool across both sources. Also cleaned up the YouTube Music source: it now shuffles a playlist when it starts and keeps repeat-all on, finds the real playlist header's play control instead of a decoy, drops the "Downloaded songs" entry from the picker since it isn't a real playlist, and fixed a clipping issue with per-output volume controls.
Admin support tooling and a system page
Built out the admin-facing System page: a "Get Help" button that files a support ticket (with passwords and other private details stripped out first) straight to software-support.jpps.us and shows the resulting ticket link — available even before an admin account is set up. Added alert emails, sent securely, for when the music can't recover on its own or a service needs signing back in, capped at one every 30 minutes so it can't spam me, plus an option to file a support ticket automatically on a real alert or a crash. Rounded it out with a way to back up and restore all the settings (accounts included, no passwords in plain text) and the system page itself: time zone, reboot, check for updates now, a switch to allow remote support access, secure web access, and firewall controls.
A real installer ISO
The big one: StoreCast can now be built as an actual bootable installer — pop in a USB drive, boot it, and it sets up a whole machine ready to run. The install questions are down to just a computer name, a password, and a final "yes, erase this drive" confirmation. It sets up my own software update source and installs Google Chrome with its security verified, then installs StoreCast itself. The screen you see at boot shows the web address to visit and, until setup is finished, a one-time setup code. Along the way, tracked down and fixed a handful of real audio problems on actual test hardware — getting sound to reliably come out the right jack took some trial and error, and the installer's own setup process couldn't talk to part of the system the normal way, so I had to write one setting directly to disk during install instead. Also built an installable package of SonoBus from my own version with the stereo-output fix, and wired the installer to include it.