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 2026/02/12
De SMS van dinsdag:
Beste klant, je bestelling of wijziging van KPN HotSpots is verwerkt. Ga naar MijnKPN (kpn.com/mijnkpn) voor meer informatie. Groet, KPN
Die SMS had nooit verzonden moeten worden, want KPN HotSpots zijn al jaren gratis voor iedereen toegankelijk, en de abonnee had zelf niets gewijzigd.
Zie: [Wayback/Archive] SMS gehad dat wijziging van KPN Hotspots is verwerkt | KPN Community
Woensdag kwamen er, ook per SMS, excuses. Twee keer zelfs.
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Posted in Internet, ISP, KPN, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/12
From quite a while back but still very relevant today, especially when debugging problems (most people would post them in the order integers, floats, but Julia did it in the opposite way):
- [Wayback/Archive] Julia Evans on Twitter: “had a great discussion of how floating point arithmetic can betray you on Mastodon yesterday, there are tons of good examples in the replies”
[Wayback/Archive] Julia Evans: “today I’m thinking about how floating point numbers can be treacherous — what are specific examples of when they’ve betrayed you?so far I have:…” – Mastodon
- [Wayback/Archive] Julia Evans on Twitter: “examples of problems with integers”
Usually I tend to explain integer versus floating point math as lossless versus lossy data compression (for instance WavPack and FLAC versus MP3 compression of PCM audio data, or BMP versus JPEG compression of 2D digital image data).
Either way: floating point and integer problems cause real harm. One interesting comment illustrating that was [Wayback/Archive] Ian Kirker on Twitter: “@b0rk I didn’t see this one in the list, which sticks in my memory: science.org – Fatal Error: How Patriot Overlooked a Scud”
[No wayback/Archive] Fatal Error: How Patriot Overlooked a Scud | Science
If you like listening instead of reading, then [Wayback/Archive] 452: Numbers on Computers Are Weird — Embedded is a great podcast episode where Julia gets interviewed by Christopher White, and Elecia White which I found via [Wayback/Archive] Julia Evans on Twitter: “was on the @embeddedfm podcast this week talking about our upcoming “How Integers and Floats Work” zine, plus some meta discussion about making zines”
Either way, be sure to read the other replies to b0rk’s posts too as many interesting tidbits did not make it in her underlying blog posts:
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Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/11
This was the easiest tool to remove HTML from select tags while keeping line breaks: [Wayback/Archive] Online HTML Stripper. Remove HTML and formatting from text.
Especially the client-side on-line tools I tried failed that option:
This just does not work at all for me: [Wayback/Archive] HTML Cleaner (cannot paste HTML text: needs to paste formatted text which does not work with select elements).
Could I have done this on a command-line? Of course, but I don’t need it often enough to warrant investigating and remembering how to do that in an efficient manner.
Queries:
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Posted in Blogging, Development, HTML, JavaScript/ECMAScript, LifeHacker, PHP, Power User, Scripting, SocialMedia, Software Development, Web Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/11
A while ago I bumped into [Wayback/Archive] Quick Accent steals the WordPress classic editor space after a hyphen-minus sign or asterisk · Issue #24623 · microsoft/PowerToys.
In the WordPress Classic Editor, the * or - combinations quickly generate an empty bulleted list:
When enabling the PowerToys Quick Accent (formerly [Wayback/Archive] PowerAccent) with their default settings this fails (but it does work in the WordPress Gutenberg editor, Word and some other tools I tested).
The easiest way to work around this is to switch from the default “Activation Keys” setting “Left, Right or Space” to “Left/Right Arrow”.
Hopefully besides the workaround there will also be a full fix.
The related C++ and C# source files:
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Posted in .NET, C#, C++, Classic editor, Development, Gutenberg editor, Power User, PowerToys, SocialMedia, Software Development, Windows, WordPress | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/10
I need to check out which ROM my Apple //e and //c have as per [Wayback/Archive] Single Step in Monitor | Applefritter comment by [Wayback/Archive] jeffmazur | Applefritter:
Depends upon which machine and ROM version you have.
The original Apple II monitor does have an S command to single step code in the Monitor. That was removed however to add other features and was not restored until ROM00 of the //c. There are however various 3rd-party ROM images that also have the Step and Trace commands, for example ROMeX and ROM4X, APPLEII.EDM, etc.
There are also hardware boards available to do this as well
Links
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Posted in //e, 6502, Apple, Apple ][, History, Power User, Retrocomputing | Tagged: 394 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/10
Sometimes Wikipedia entries are way too short, for instance Philip A. Kaufman – Wikipedia, who in 1992 – at the age of around 50 – died way to early, does not do justice to his time at Intel.
His name rang a bell when searching for early Intel 8087 documentation distributed via LISTSERV, so below is a bit more information on Phil.
True, his life after Intel was very important especially on the front of electronic design automation. That in fact sparked the posthumous instantiation of the Phil Kaufman Award which you can read for instance at [Wayback/Archive] The Phil Kaufman Award Dinner Is Later this Month. Who Was Phil Kaufman? – Breakfast Bytes – Cadence Blogs – Cadence Community.
After his floating-point endeavours at Intel and the IEEE, he was also very instrumental at Intel in finding another big market for silicon: network controller chips (and getting the Ethernet standard going: think DIX (Digital/Intel/Xerox) [Wayback/Archive] Ethernet Blue Book (1980) which was named that way earlier than the PostScript Blue Book (1986) and CD Blue Book (1986)).
This period is very well described in the [Wayback/Archive] 1988 Computer History Museum interview of Phil Kaufman by James L. Pelkey (via [Wayback/Archive] Phil Kaufman | History of Computer Communications).
Back to floating point: Phil’s post from 1987 way better describes what early processor technologies at Intel he was involved with than the above links. That period was instrumental in getting IEEE_754-1985 going (it was released way after the 8087!) and still shapes the floating point aspects of almost any CPU from any vendor today so I quote it in full from [Wayback/Archive] Info-IBMPC V6 #59:
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Posted in 8086, 8087, 8087, 8088, Algorithms, Assembly Language, Development, Floating point handling, History, x86 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/09
I combined these two Meinl percussion products
After about 10 years of use, the foam handle of the tambourine started deteriorating, so I already had replaced it with Reece Cotton Tape (a grip tape for instance used with hockey sticks).
Last year, I added more grip tape to make it snug fit the MC-TH Tambourine Holder as without grip tape (even with foam padding), that would be a way too loose fit.
Products:
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Posted in DIY, LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/09
Diagram.net is a wonderful on-line and off-line drawing tool that saves drawings in XML format and provides a rich set of shapes libraries.
It used to start out as draw.io (well, actually diagram.ly when some parts were still Java applets), but then in 2020 started migrating to migrate to diagrams.net, both for domain and name, because, well a [Wayback/Archive] wonderful piece of modern day British Imperialism. See [Wayback/Archive] Blog – Open source diagramming is moving to diagrams.net, slowly for details.
Oh yes, this is one of the tools where Java and JavaScript actually are related (:
The tool is still open source at [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – jgraph/drawio: Source to app.diagrams.net.
These were helpful links:
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Posted in Cloud Apps, draw.io, Internet, LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/08
Full changelog at
https://app.meshcore.nz/assets/CHANGELOG.md
Excerpt of v1.39.0 changes:
## v1.39.0 - 08/February/2026
- added seconds to rxlog timestamps
- added ability to manage repeater regions via remote management
- added ability to discover regions from nearby repeaters in select region menu
- added ability to dismiss repeater region info banner on channel messages screen
- added ability to change repeater identity keys and choose new prefix via remote management
- added new received packet errors field to repeater status screen
- added experimental setting to use companion clock for packet timestamps
- coverage tool now tells you if there is no elevation data for selected point
- hashtag symbol is no longer required when adding region scopes
- tx power is now read as signed int as new firmware will allow negative tx power
- app will now only process v1 packets in preparation for new v2 packet formats
Expect it to appear in the iOS and Android app stores soon
–jeroen
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Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/06
Expensive, but still interesting: [Wayback/Archive] Cymbal Trolley – Deluxe with Wheels – Protection Racket
| Catalogue No. |
Product |
Internal Dimensions |
| 6021T-00 |
24″ Deluxe Cymbal Trolley |
(25.5″” x 6.5″ Internal) |
| 6020T-00 |
22″ Deluxe Cymbal Trolley |
(23.5″ x 6.5″ Internal) |
All of their product dimensions (they make a lot more percussion cases) at [Wayback] www.protectionracket.com/files/dimensions/internal-dimensions-list.xlsx [Wayback XLSX View/XLSX View]
Via: [Wayback/Archive] percussion trolley – Google Search
--jeroen
Posted in LifeHacker, Music, Power User | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 
Depends upon which machine and ROM version you have.
The original Apple II monitor does have an S command to single step code in the Monitor. That was removed however to add other features and was not restored until ROM00 of the //c. There are however various 3rd-party ROM images that also have the Step and Trace commands, for example ROMeX and ROM4X, APPLEII.EDM, etc.
There are also hardware boards available to do this as well