<span class="mw-page-title-main">Things I did with Claude on a Week-End</span>
Fabrice P. Lauss𝕪’s ℤetetic Web

Things I did with Claude on a Week-End

This is the Elephants' graveyard where I put more or less big projects which have been tackled and, sometimes, even fulfilled beyond expectations, mainly based on Things to do with Claude on the Week-End.

TeX to unicode

This is the first one I completed, on 25 July (2026). That was the goal:

Find a way to map TeX-to-Unicode on the go, without passing by https://www.unicodeit.net/, e.g., instead of Ctrl+Shift+U opening a u and inviting a unicode character (for em-dash), do something like Ctrl+Shift+Alt Gr+U invites a TeX command that parses into unicode, such as g^{(2)}(\tau) turning into g⁽²⁾(τ).

and it resulted in the mighty TeX2unicode. This was better than I intended, so a big success for a first try, that went beyond expectations, although those were very high. The wonders of AI and the power of the tool!

Prettify glosses

On the next day, 26 July (2026), this one went down too:

Prettify the listing of my glosses in my diary, so that instead of, e.g., for July (2026): 

* [[July 22|22]]: Gloss on {{Malygin85b}}
* [[July 22|22]]: Gloss on {{Howell04a}}
* [[July 22|22]]: Gloss on {{Edgar12a}}
* [[July 23|23]]: Gloss on {{Moreau12a}}
* [[July 23|23]]: Gloss on {{Lantz15a}}

which renders as

Have something more styleish and tidy, e.g., with a manicule and some grouping:

Indentation should be neater, which is also part of the task.

I use Palmyrene numerals 𐡻, 𐡺, 𐡹 (they normally read from right to left) which are beautiful glyphs for Palmyrene Aramaic, the language of Palmyra (in present-day Syria) from roughly the 1st century BCE to the 3rd century CE:

Fix llw2wl when there is network failure

I met with a network failure, so some files could not be uploaded: 

laussy@azag:~$ !llw
llw2lw --doit
Running in write mode
Enter the start datetime (YYYY-MM-DD [HH:MM:SS], default: 2026-07-23 22:59:26): 

== Pages to push ==
2026
July (2026)
Oemrawsingh02a
Template:Mostafavi25a
Things to do with Claude on the week-end

== Files to push ==
File:Screenshot 20260723 231737.png
File:Screenshot 20260723 235846.png
File:Screenshot 20260724 000205.png
File:Screenshot 20260724 001310.png
File:Screenshot 20260724 002100.png

Uploaded: File:Screenshot 20260723 231737.png
Uploaded: File:Screenshot 20260723 235846.png

== Failures ==
File:Screenshot 20260724 000205.png: Invalid CSRF token.
File:Screenshot 20260724 001310.png: Invalid CSRF token.
File:Screenshot 20260724 002100.png: Invalid CSRF token.
2026: Invalid CSRF token.
July (2026): Invalid CSRF token.
Oemrawsingh02a: Invalid CSRF token.
Template:Mostafavi25a: Invalid CSRF token.
Things to do with Claude on the week-end: Invalid CSRF token.
Log file updated: /home/laussy/comp/lw/llw2lw-log.txt

When this is the case, on next attempt, they should be uploaded again, as opposed to filed as "backed-up" or "synced". Importantly, this must not concern files taken from syncy which also generate an error but of duplication.

Claude took care of this and it appears now to be robust to such failures.

Restore Right-Click Image Menu services

There was some nice KIM service-menu way to get essential shortcuts at the tip of your ring finger but this became nightmarish to install and maintain, so I essentially gave it up. Claude could probably bring this back in an efficient/portable way, to do things like:

  • Compress images
  • Move files (say to bib repository)

etc.

It did, and the list of things he's servicing is in LaussyMenu.

Debug doi2bib

I have some (minor, yet still better if fixed) bibTeX processing issues, such as: Demonstration of nondeterministic quantum logic operations using linear optical elements. T. B. Pittman, B. C. Jacobs and J. D. Franson in Phys. Rev. Lett. 88:257902 (2002). dropped the initials (should be T. B. Pittman, B. C. Jacobs, J. D. Franson). The "Title Case" vs "sentence-case" BibTeX convention should be consistent.

Claude did it on 6 October (2026). The initials were lost because the given name was split on hyphens only, so CrossRef's T. B. came out as T.. doi2bib became v°2.0.0: every initial kept, compound surnames braced, titles in sentence case with the names and acronyms braced (the style lowercases everything else, so an unbraced QED printed as "qed"), and MathML turned into TeX. The same went over the whole of sci.bib: 1555 titles brought to sentence case, 424 entries given back their initials from CrossRef, 20 broken doi links mended, an entry that carried another paper's title (Single photon emission based on coherent state preparation. P. Ester, L. Lackmann, S. Michaelis de Vasconcellos, M. C. Hübner, A. Zrenner and M. Bichler in Appl. Phys. Lett. 91:111110 (2007).), a bare % that cut every bibliography short (Detecting telecom single photons with $99.5^{+0.5}_{-2.07}$% system detection efficiency and high time resolution. J. Chang, J. W. N. Los, J. O. Tenorio-Pearl, N. Noordzij, R. Gourgues, A. Guardiani, J. R. Zichi, S. F. Pereira, H. P. Urbach, V. Zwiller, S. N. Dorenbos and I. Esmaeil Zadeh in APL Photon. 6:036114 (2021).) and some ten others that stopped LaTeX—the whole file now compiles without a single error. The templates were updated silently, and the new initials got redirects to their author pages (P.-A. Moreau, M. G. Bawendi, D. G. Thomas).

Pdf landing/download page

Instead of something like

on a pdf file page, implement a previewer and other useful servives (what-links-here, etc.)

Wanted since 0N2pV (af).

Claude did it on 24 October (2026), as the gadget filepage, for images and pdfs alike. A file page now opens with the file's name as its title, then the file itself, centred and as large as the column allows: a pdf is drawn page by page in a scrolling box (with the same pdf.js as {{pdf|…|view}}), a video or a sound plays, and a click on a picture opens it full size. Under it, its size and two buttons, Download and Open. A paper's pdf named after its key comes with the citation from its template, e.g., File:Zubizarretacasalengua24b.pdf.

Then "About this file", for my own comments, written on the file page itself and shown only when there are some (the uploaders' stamps, "MsUpload", "Dropped into the edit box" and the like, which are 95% of the descriptions, are left out), and the pages where the file appears or, for a pdf, every page citing it. A small print says that the pdf is made available by the author, with a link to the version of record, when I am one of the authors, and offers to take it down otherwise. The history, metadata and other wiki matters are folded in a closed box, the history reduced to the last upload with its AF tag, e.g., File:Lw-0NMjV.png.

Fix Emacs latency

Shortcuts in Emacs don't work, e.g., \equiv (AltGr+Shift+=) reads 

\eiuqv
\iuevq
\qveiu
\equvi

because of some latency of some sort in the key deliveries. Surprising, that such a powerful editor gets badly broken in this way. I should see whether this can be fixed without inserting very long delays between letters (which end up being noticeable).

Claude did it on 24 October (2026), without a single delay. It was not latency, nor the fault of Emacs, but ibus, the input-method server that sits between the keyboard and the applications. Ubuntu's im-config starts it in "asynchronous" mode (IBUS_ENABLE_SYNC_MODE=0), and Emacs is the one application here that talks to it through XIM, the old X input protocol: every key makes a round trip to ibus and back, and in asynchronous mode the answers can come back in any order. keymapper types the six characters of \equiv a few milliseconds apart, so they came back shuffled, while the same letters typed by hand, further apart, survived.

ibus brings me nothing anyway (its only engine is the French layout, and KDE does the switching between layouts), so Emacs now starts without it and uses X's own input handling, which keeps the order and still does the Compose key, the dead keys and keymapper's ñ. This is a small wrapper, ~/bin/emacs, that sets XMODIFIERS=@im=none before starting the real Emacs, with a copy of the Emacs launcher in ~/.local/share/applications that points to it (the system one calls /usr/bin/emacs directly, so Dolphin would bypass the wrapper). It cannot be set from .emacs: Emacs connects to ibus before it reads any init file.

Every option was tried in a private virtual X display, typing \equiv 120 times at full speed:

Setup Correct
ibus as it was (asynchronous) 0/120
ibus in synchronous mode about 90%
ibus in "hybrid" mode 0/120
Emacs without ibus 120/120

Option to scrap screenshots

Wolfram has this nice touch of tearing out the sides of paper extracts, being mindful of which sides would have been actually cropped:

I once programmed something in Mathematica to do that. But it had to be run by hand. It could be integrated to Spectacle. Feature requested on 12 September (2026) (af).

Claude did it on 24 October (2026), in Spectacle itself, where a button in the viewer's toolbar tears the screenshot. Which sides it tears is decided the way Wolfram does it: a side cut out of something larger is torn, a side that lay along the edge of the screen is left straight. So a region grabbed from the middle of the screen is torn on all four sides, a window or a whole screen on none, and any combination can be set by hand afterwards.

The edge is rendered rather than merely jagged: the rip carries a fringe of fibres, the paper scuffs and lightens where it was pulled apart, and the edge casts a shadow on what is under it. Sliders set how deep the tear bites and, for each torn side, how far along the sheet it runs; the shadow can be switched off. Each capture gets its own seed, so a screenshot always tears the same way however the settings are played with, and one button puts every side back to the automatic choice.

What is saved or copied is cropped to what the tear leaves, so the file is the picture and not an empty margin around it. While the image is being annotated the tear stays on show, so an arrow or a label is placed against the edge it will be exported with.

It runs on both machines: built against the current Plasma in a container here, since the one shipped with this Ubuntu is too old, and carried to the other machine as a Flatpak, which brings its own KDE along and so does not mind that the system there is older still. Giving it back to KDE waits on an account with them.