ExCL May Meeting 2026

2 minute read

May 2026 ExCL meeting slides.

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Below is a LLM-generated summary from the meeting slides.

🚀 ExCL Monthly Update — May 2026

This month’s meeting featured tool and workflow spotlights on file management and Git workflows, a recap of a recent planned power outage, and a discussion of the hardware wishlist for AI and agentic development.

📁 File Management Favorites (Aaron Young)

Aaron shared a roundup of tried-and-true and newly discovered file management tools across platforms:

Cross-platform

  • Beyond Compare — folder/file diffing, Git difftool/mergetool integration, SFTP folder access, image and Excel diff. A long-time favorite.

Windows-specific

  • OneCommander — a more performant Explorer alternative with dual-pane/tabbed browsing, flexible shortcuts, file age heatmap, and a plaintext config file.
  • Voidtools Everything — instant indexed filename search with expressive regex syntax.

Terminal / Cross-platform

  • Yazi — a blazing-fast Rust-based terminal file manager with Vim-style navigation, multi-tab support, bulk rename, and integrations with jq, fd, fzf, and zoxide.

Linux / macOS

  • ncdu — NCurses disk usage TUI
  • plocate (locate) — indexed file search

🔀 New Git Tools (Aaron Young)

Two tools for modernizing Git workflows:

Lazygit

  • Visualizes a Git repository in a TUI
  • Maps Git commands to vim-style keypresses for fast, keyboard-driven operation

GitButler

  • Very easy rebasing and commit editing — great for crafting clean PRs/MRs
  • Supports stacked and parallel branches with git forge integration
  • Easy to set up and tear down on existing repos
  • Con: Still in early development

🧠 Favorite Workflows (Aaron Young)

Note-taking / Personal Knowledge Base / Second Brain

  • Combines OneNote (Teams/Outlook capture) + Obsidian (local linked notes) + the PARA method (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archive) + the Linking Your Thinking framework

Remote Linux Development

  • MobaXterm + tmux + VS Code + ThinLinc — a stack for effective remote work on ExCL systems

⚡ Planned Power Outage — May 15–17

A planned outage affected 5600 K200 (research) and L200 (moderate infrastructure) racks over the weekend of May 15–17 to deploy a new UPS5 and complete triennial electrical maintenance.

Key outcomes:

  • Both ExCL racks in K200 were affected, including all file servers, hypervisors, Triple Crown, and several compute servers
  • The outage ended Sunday evening on schedule (no automated notification was received)
  • Most ExCL systems were restored by 11 AM Monday
  • A small number of follow-on issues appeared; post-maintenance procedures are being updated
  • Staff used the window to patch systems and remediate Copy Fail and Dirty Frag vulnerabilities

🖥️ Hardware Wishlist

ExCL is developing a new hardware wishlist and actively seeking user feedback and requests. The following systems are under consideration:

System Details
TensTorrent BlackHole P150 PCIe accelerator card
NVIDIA DGX Spark NVIDIA GB10 Grace Blackwell superchip
HP ZGX Nano NVIDIA GB10 Grace Blackwell superchip
Framework Desktop Mini AI Cluster AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395, 128 GB
TinyPilot Voyager 3 KVM Remote KVM management

If you have hardware requests or feedback on this wishlist, please reach out to the ExCL team.

📌 Summary

May’s meeting highlighted practical tooling improvements for day-to-day development workflows, a successfully completed infrastructure maintenance window, and a hardware wishlist in progress — feedback from users is welcome.

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