WhatCable

Or: Playing Nicely With Others A couple of weeks ago, a new project on GitHub was mentioned on the Infrastructure Club Slack: WhatCable, with the word “YES” being followed by a bunch of discussion. It solves a problem that many of us have: knowing what a USB C cable can do.USB C is the ubiquitous connector, which is great, but the actual cables can support anything from USB 2 speeds (480 megabits per second) up to Thunderbolt 5 (one direction can go up to 120 gigabits per second), and power from just 5 watts up to 240. In other words, one cable will charge the beefiest gaming laptop and copy data to your external SSD in seconds; another will not stop the battery from draining and take hours to back up.WhatCable lives in the menu bar (or Dock, as a standard app), and tells you what cables and devices are plugged into your computer; how fast they are; and how much charge is passing through them. It’s focused, and useful.I had a quick look at the project, and realised that pressing ⌘,…