Weeknotes 269

Nice to catch up with a friend this week. I don’t know why I haven’t been doing this already when the technology exists to do so. Things just get in the way I suppose.

I never thought I’d be one of those watches videos at 1.5x speed people but I have been this week. I’ve been working my way through a video course and found that I’m more engaged and focussed when the dialogue is faster.

WhatCable

USB-C hides a lot under one connector. Anything from a USB 2.0 charge-only cable to a 240W / 40 Gbps Thunderbolt 4 cable, all looking identical in your drawer. macOS already exposes the relevant info via IOKit; WhatCable surfaces it as a friendly menu bar popover.

USB-C, the most confusing cable connector of them all.

jit

It sits in .env, in ~/.aws/credentials, in ~/.zsh_history. One compromised package or one hijacked agent, and it is gone, silently. jit locks the real values away and leaves decoys in your files. Your tools keep working. Whatever gets stolen is worthless.

Finger: the 1971 social network that never died – I was reading about finger and the author recommended using Happy Net Box as a way of getting started with it. I then typed finger into my shell and had finger jordelver@happynetbox.com autocompleted. I have an account it turns out.

Go on, you know you want to.

I fixed some annoying issues with my ghostty and tmux setup this week with the help of, you guessed it, an LLM. These are issues that have been on and off bugging me for a long time but which seemed too far into terminal esoterica to tackle. The feedback loop: edit a config file, set up test conditions, test, repeat also make this sort of problem tedious to fix, hence not being fixed, until now.

Firstly, there was an inconsistency with how URLs could be clicked and opened in a web browser depending on which context the URL appeared in. If it were inside Neovim, or a normal Fish shell running in tmux, or inside a terminal TUI, the behaviour was different – sometimes just cmd + click was required, others shift + cmd + click.

This was seemingly easily fixed by enabling mouse mode with set -g mouse on in tmux.conf. This made the shift+cmd+click work the same way in all of the situations I use it. I don’t remember why I had mouse support tmux turned off but I can assure you there was some reason.

As a side effect some other niggles are also gone:

• When I’m SSH’d into a server I would always struggle to capture long output so I could copy and paste it locally. No more. Now I just use the mouse and highlighting text both scrolls the tmux pane and copies the text. What a time to be alive.

• I can click and drag panes to resize them

• I can click to focus a pane

VS Code users will read this and laugh at how ridiculous this all sounds, and it’s hard to argue against, so I won’t try. I’m old and don’t want to change.

Secondly, I had an issue which has bothered me less until I started using coding agent harnesses like opencode, claude, and codex on the command line, namely that shift + enter would not let me enter a newline without executing the current line. No multi-line input for me.

This fix was more involved and also required upgrading tmux to 3.7c AND fixing a regression where the file buffer finder was broken in Neovim.

TIL I learnt about LRCLIB

QUAKE SHAREWARE, A CD-ROM JUST A LITTLE TOO FULL

I bought an RAM upgrade for my home server on eBay because I’m a sucker. Going from 16GB to 32GB. I will attempt to recoup some of the cost by putting the 16GB I take out back on the ‘bay.