Not all USB cables are the same. A while back I purchased a USB cable identifier from Crowd Supply or Amazon to help me find my good ones, and I labeled some of my most valuable cables according to their USB version and wattage. Both ends of the cable plug into the device, the device pairs over Bluetooth with an app on my phone, and I can see the etag information on the cable, the USB version, the wattage, and data transfer speeds, and the transport codes. I can also see it the cable manufacturer was lying, which as it turns out, happens all the time. The information was great, but the experience was lackluster. Not long ago I stumbled across the Whatcable app for macOS and, for me, it's a much better experience. Despite my USB testing device working exactly as I had expected and desired, I found being able to interact with the data on my laptop is the user pattern I realized I wanted. I aways know where my laptop is, I don't always remember where my tester is, or the name of the app. Whatcable has the ability to favorite cables, compare them against known cables in the Whatcable database, and explore what display capabilities are available if a monitor is plugged in, on top of surfacing all the information from IOKit macOS natively sees. It's free for the basic version, but the licensed version is £9.99, which to me is a purchase I'd make any day and I'd love to see the app stay up to date. Now I can finally get rid of all those crappy, slow, under-powered USB2.0 cables I've been hoarding and know for certain that no, I won't need them in the future.
#tech
I have a very, very long list of fun electronics projects for weekends that never seem to materialize, but this might rocket to the top. The Ollee Watch is a drop-in PCB replacement for the Casio F-91W and A158W that turns these classic watches into bluetooth-enabled smart watches. It has weather, some health metrics like heart rate monitoring, alarm snoozing, and time sync right now. $60 for the board itself, $100 for the complete watch.