TL;DR: It's been nearly a month! I built a terminal multiplexer for ultrawide monitors on a whim, got trending topics working in my feed reader, shared a synthpop mixtape, 3D-printed an uncomfortable amount of hot dogs, and brokered a fragile peace treaty between the cats.

Wideboi terminal management

On a whim, I started a new project this month called wideboi to solve a very specific problem: trying to wrangle a stupid number of terminal sessions across an ultrawide monitor. I just want to have a bunch of things running, go zoop zoop zoop between, and vaguely see them chattering away while I stare off and dissociate.

wideboi tries to treat the sessions as a fan of overlapping cards to swipe through:

I took a ton of inspiration from gwae. That's a terminal multiplexer inspired by the niri window manager, which is a whole other rabbit hole down which I started to go but quickly bailed out.

Beyond screwing with ANSI animations for BBSes back in the day, I hadn't played much with raw terminal logic before. I figured it would be worth throwing Claude at it to see what came out. In the process, I've learned a ton about how terminal multiplexers actually work under the hood. Turns out there's a lot going on in there, these days.

I've just about got this thing to a point where it feels like a potential daily driver for me. Works over ssh and I've just about got the bugs worked out of detaching / attaching. From there, I'm thinking I might try building a web client for it. I know there's already stuff out there that does this, but it's been neat to tinker with it myself.

Feedspool trending topics

This week I finally tackled an issue that had been sitting in feedspool-go since January: trending topics. If the server's up and I haven't broken anything, you can see my current trending topics right here. It's a static web site, so hopefully it can take a few hits.

My reader groups items by feed, which is great for skimming a blog but terrible for noticing when fifteen feeds are all writing about the same story.

So now it runs every item through a local embedding model, stores the vectors in SQLite, and clusters them by similarity. A small local LLM then names each cluster. The result is a page that says "here's what everyone's talking about", with the articles from all those feeds gathered under each topic.

This is me finally using all that stuff I wrote about embedding and clustering, a couple years ago, for something actually practical.

It all shipped as v1.2.0. If I get around to it, I might draft up a longer post nerding out about how all the grungy parts work.

Here, have a mixtape

Since I built a whole thing for it, I keep wanting to share more mixtapes. So, here's one with some of the stuff that's been stuck in my head this month. Semi-random mix of shoegaze, post-punk, dark stuff - oh and Mother Mother, for some reason:

Here, look at some cats

Miss Biscuits and Minnaloushe are finally starting to tolerate each other's presence. They haven't become best friends, but we reached a peaceful detente on the living room floor. And because one can never have too many cat photos, here's Minnaloushe hiding in the yoga mat basket and relaxing in a plush bed on my desk.

3D-Printed Whimsy

I found NASA's incredible repository of 3D models and promptly went to town.

I printed a Voyager spacecraft and a Curiosity rover. Having tiny physical representations of humanity's greatest scientific achievements sitting on my desk is weirdly comforting. But I cannot take anything too seriously, so I also printed several highly realistic hot dogs and a completely flaccid, floppy corn-on-the-cob.

Miscellanea