Lab notebook

Two small Plasma widgets, for two very different signals

1 min read

Two unrelated problems, solved with the same shape of answer this stretch:
small KDE Plasma 6 widgets that put a piece of information directly on the
desktop instead of behind a tab I have to remember to open.

The first is a bird-feeder widget — it surfaces the latest photo from a
backyard bird-feeder camera pipeline right on the panel. No app to launch,
no dashboard to load, just whatever the camera saw most recently.

The second tracks something a lot less charming but genuinely useful: how
much a token-compression CLI tool is saving on AI coding-agent output. When
you're running coding agents against real infrastructure regularly, that
number adds up, and having it visible rather than buried in a log made it
feel a lot more real.

Along the way the dashboard URL the bird-feeder widget defaults to moved,
since the site it points at relocated to a different host in the lab — a
one-line fix, but the kind of thing that's easy to forget when you migrate
a service. There was also a pass on both widgets to fix width, overflow, and
alignment — small polish, but it's the difference between "works" and
"looks intentional" on a panel.