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Show HN: WhatCable, a tiny menu bar app for inspecting USB-C cables

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Re: Show HN: WhatCable, a tiny menu bar app for inspecting USB-C cables

#121
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a heads up Ice is abandoned and broken on upcoming versions of MacOS. I still need to look into an alternative

https://www.macrumors.com/2024/06/06/alternatives-bartender-...

Thank you for posting this, I've been increasingly frustrated with ice recently and have been considering paying for bartender, now i won't.

Re: Show HN: WhatCable, a tiny menu bar app for inspecting USB-C cables

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To save me 10 mins and $2, is this posted to GitHub somewhere?

Absolutely this is worth packaging for KDE. Although I imagine if you don't have the motivation to make it in the first place, you likely don't have the motivation to package it.

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: WhatCable, a tiny menu bar app for inspecting USB-C cables

#123
I'm curious how the SPI to do this (e.g. `IOPortTransportComponentCCUSBPDSOP`) was discovered. There was nary a mention of it anywhere prior to release. Even Claude has to latch on to something. Always wondered if there was some way to read emarker data through some buried framework, but wasn't sure how to find it.

I don't think I can abide running vibe-coded software, but maybe I'll make a hand-coded fork now that the SPI is exposed. (Assuming it works correctly.)

Re: Show HN: WhatCable, a tiny menu bar app for inspecting USB-C cables

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely this is worth packaging for KDE. Although I imagine if you don't have the motivation to make it in the first place, you likely don't have the motivation to package it.

I am happy to package it and port it for Gtk/GNOME today.

Also happy to test it out on Gnome

Re: Show HN: WhatCable, a tiny menu bar app for inspecting USB-C cables

#126

This is pretty nice, but why do a lot of Mac apps insist on living in the menu bar?

Making 1 click to access is faster than typing the app name in finder. Dock is usually full and used for different type of apps. Makes also constantly visible output possible with standard ui patterns.

Spotlight exists. Typing is much faster than moving your cursor to a small target like a menu bar item.

Re: Show HN: WhatCable, a tiny menu bar app for inspecting USB-C cables

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's 1st of May here Is that date significant somewhere? It was an nice sunny Friday for me.

It's May Day, which is a labour holiday everywhere except North America commemorating the Haymarket Affair when American police brutally repressed striking workers . In North America we have Labor Day in September to distance it from the historical associations with actual organizing and police brutality.

You do know that no sea/ocean has split the continent and that Mexico is still in North America right?

1st of may is festive day in Mexico.

Re: Show HN: WhatCable, a tiny menu bar app for inspecting USB-C cables

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely this is worth packaging for KDE. Although I imagine if you don't have the motivation to make it in the first place, you likely don't have the motivation to package it.

I've got Opus crunching on it now, will update when I have it finished and published Edit: https://github.com/Zetaphor/whatcable-linux Running on my Fedora KDE machine right now. Also includes a CLI so you could wrap your own widget I still need to figure out publishing, doing this in between work meetings.

I do not use KDE and wanted just command-line version of it without any Qt dependencies, so I've burned some tokens and produced just that:

https://github.com/vzaliva/whatcable-linux-cli

Re: Show HN: WhatCable, a tiny menu bar app for inspecting USB-C cables

#130
post #40

Cool. Just want to chime in that I wanted to see how quickly GPT-5.5 can turn this into a KDE Plasma 6 Plasmoid. Took about 10 minutes and two dollars, and now I have a nice QML app showing the same information in my taskbar. Just wanted to say this because I feel it's really crazy that I can just do this today...

Did exactly this with the Sennheiser BTD-700 Bluetooth dongle. Found someone had done the work to create a little C library for controlling the dongle and with that Claude had created a nice widget for KDE to control my headphones.
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