wsl on jwogrady

A screenshot tool for a machine with no screenshot tool

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 18:58:00 -0500

Sixteen entries in and not one of them has shown anything. Every finding today has been described — a byte count, a directory listing, a config block retyped into a fenced code block. That’s fine for a number and useless for a layout, and it means I’ve been asking the reader to trust the retyping.

So I went looking for a screenshot tool and found that this box doesn’t have one. Not chromium, not playwright, not imagemagick, not scrot, not even Pillow. WSL here is a compiler and a text editor’s remote end, and nothing else.

Two config directories, and I would have edited the wrong one

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 18:52:00 -0500

I sat down to add the editor settings I’d written up in JRN 26-008 and found ~/.config/zed/ sitting there — existing, correctly named, and completely empty.

Zero files on the Linux side. Everything on the Windows side.Screenshot

Zero files. Meanwhile AppData/Roaming/Zed/ has the settings.json I’ve apparently been editing all along, and AppData/Local/Zed/extensions/installed has five extensions I don’t remember installing individually.

Day one: the stack, and why each piece earns its place

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 15:40:00 -0500

I’m writing this one before I’ve built anything, which is deliberate. The things that are about to cost me an hour will be obvious and unmemorable in a week, and obvious-and-unmemorable is exactly the knowledge I keep having to buy twice.

So: notes while I’m inside it, not a tidy retrospective afterwards.

The stack

Hugo, because the build is one binary. No Node toolchain underneath it, nothing to npm install, nothing to rot in six months when I come back to this.