Posted by jpluimers on 2021/12/10
It has been a while after my last post about me having cancer. No, I am not giving up. But I am having the regular fear of the upcoming checks: did the metastases return, or do I have the luck to outlive some 30% of my peer group.
The last metastases surgery has been slightly more than a year ago. A year from now, that percentage hopefully will be 50% and slowly increase over time until about 90% in some 9 years from now.
At year’s end, I will know for sure.
Below are some links on, mostly Dutch but with English abstract, articles about the mental side of having cancer, or having survived it for now.
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Posted in About, Cancer, LifeHacker, Personal, Power User, Rectum cancer | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/24
You can find the binary files sound files of the Mastodon beep sound at
They were created by [Wayback/Archive] Josef Kenny (blog: [Wayback/Archive] josef.one; Mastodon “i made that mastodon boop sound”: [Wayback/Archive] josef (@jk@mastodon.social) – Mastodon) early 2017 and updated with metadata later that year. In 2022 it became clear that using the sound is allowed as long as there is credit:
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Posted in Audio, Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, git, GitHub, Mastodon, Media, Power User, SocialMedia, Software Development, Source Code Management | Tagged: 25827, 5531 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/24
On my research list: [Wayback/Archive] sjinzh/awesome-yolo-object-detection: 🚀🚀🚀 A collection of some awesome public YOLO object detection series projects.
YOLO (You Only Look Once) is a series of computer vision algorithms and libraries based on training data that does ultra-fast object recognition. Most of it is written in Python with the more recent versions all using Pytorch, though interface from various other languages and environments are available. The above article lists them all.
A long time ago I gave a presentation on a few conferences using computer vision of which I blogged about the first one: Spoken @ DevDays 2009 NL – download is online: .NET & hardware – capture video & control servos, in a fun application
My presentation (.NET & hardware – capture video & control servos, in a fun application) was as a GeekNight session.
That imposed geeky stuff, but in addition it addressed an important point: there will be many more means of interaction.
In particular, my ‘geek’ combination of hardware and software would react on movements seen by the webcam by pointing the beam of the laserpointer towards the largest area that moved.
So it is cool to revisit the topic by for now a link dump: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in .NET, AI and ML; Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Development, Python, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/23
Over the last decades, I hardly needed to upgrade Excel. For a very long time I stayed at Excel 2003, as the ribbon interface introduced with Office 2007 (version 12) was horrible (it still is, especially since 19:10 monitors are gone and the ribbon takes too much vertical screen estate).
After that, I needed newer features so I upgraded to Excel 2013 (version 15) mainly because it ditched Multiple-document interface (MDI) and I like SDI over MDI a lot, and Office 2013 was largely compatible with Office for Mac 2011 (version 14).
Mostly recovered from my cancer treatments, I noticed that MacOS ditched 32-bit support in MacOS 11 Big Sur, which meant I could not use Office 2011 any more (it was 32-bit x86 only) so in 2022 I upgraded all my office installations to Office 2021 (up in the version 16.* range as starting with Office 2016 the major version number stayed 16.minor).
I might actually upgrade to Office 2024 (version 16.many) soon despite the major version 16, finally Excel has started sped up new development of new functions and features, of which the ones below are very interesting: they will make my largest spreadsheets a lot simpler and therefore easier to maintain:
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Posted in Excel, Office, Office 2003, Office 2011 for Mac, Office 2013, Office 2021, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/20
Since a few days, oo my desktop systems, Chromium based browsers cannot completely load the Google Chat progressive web app any more.
Symptoms:
- Google Chat Android app works fine from my mobile devices
- This link works fine on my desktop in Chromium based browsers: mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#chat/home
- This link fails to fully load on my desktop in Chromium based browsers: chat.google.com/u/0/app?wr=1
The failure is that the green progress bar under the Google Workspace logo quickly almost fills up to become fully green, but then stalls without any network activity.
What I tried but does not fix:
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Posted in Chrome, Google, GoogleChat, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/20
They have existed since early this century, and manage to continuously feature up to date Dutch speed trap information on the interwebz:
I wish they had linked to a site like [Wayback/Archive] HMpaal.nl to quickly access location information, for instance [Wayback/Archive] HMpaal.nl: A4/R/36.6:
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Posted in Android, Awareness, cars, LifeHacker, Mobile Development, Power User, Windows CE, Windows Phone Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/19
A while ago, I needed to check if 20251120T0700Z was a valid ISO 8601 timestamp. [Archive] ISO8601 Date Converter Online – DenCode showed it was.
It can even be called directly: [Archive] ISO8601 Date Converter Online – DenCode: 20251120T0700Z Europe/Amsterdam .
Not sure what language it was developed in (it runs server side), but it is a great tool to do some occasional testing of timestamp values.
Query: [Archive] datetime parse iso 8601 online at DuckDuckGo
I didn’t have time to check all the links from the Query in depth, but one seems to be JavaScript and another one is server side:
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Posted in Algorithms, Date and Time algorithms, Development, ISO 8601, Power User, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/19
I missed the below repository as when it got introduced early 2021 I was very much coping with recovering from a truckload of procedures curing my rectum cancer and its metastases.
Anyway, [Wayback/Archive] RADProgrammer Style Guide · radprogrammer/radteam Wiki is yet a new style guide which unlike the others hopefully will be maintained.
Also unlike the others it stresses not to use a specific Delphi feature, in this case inline variables (introduced in 2018) because in 2021 the internal IDE tooling and run-time around it still had not caught up.
I have always generalised this to refrain from using new features until they are broadly supported in the product. The reasoning is that as for more than the last decade, the R&D team has a tendency to introduce features half baked, ticked a marketing feature in the product matrix then goes on with new features deferring work needed to actually make the feature useful towards the indefinite feature, so here is something you can quote me on
In Delphi, refrain from using new language features until the product fully supports it including at least these bits:
- documentation
- code generation / code completion
- run-time behaviour (like memory leaks)
- editor support (navigation, selection, expansion)
- code refactoring
- code formatting
- debugger support
They refer to it from [Wayback/Archive] RADProgrammer Style Guide Other Guidance · radprogrammer/radteam Wiki:
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Posted in Delphi, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/18
Relatively old mathematics that is still relevant: Markov Chains.
It is about predictability of events based on the current state of affairs (and not past state of affairs). Lot’s of AI have been about Markov Chains for a long time: spam filters, text prediction while typing, search engine results, language recognition by letter-pairs, and many more.
A nice video about it is [Wayback/Archive] The Strange Math That Predicts (Almost) Anything – YouTube
Related are many foundations in information technology, of which Markov and Shannon are mentioned in the video:
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Posted in Development, LifeHacker, Mathematics, Power User, science, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/18
From a long while back, but I forgot to add it as a blog post.
The answer to [Wayback/Archive] delphi – How to have both VCL and FMX in one application? – Stack Overflow (thanks [Wayback/Archive] Gad D Lord for asking and [Wayback/Archive] Aleksey Timohin for commenting) is actually straightforward so Gad wrote a blog post on it back then [Wayback/Archive] MTG Studio: How to create and application which compiles both for Firemonkey and VCL.
It follows my answer closely, so here it is:
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Posted in Delphi, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 