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 2026/02/10
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 »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/06
Historically I have been using Uptime Robot a lot, but in practice they are only good for HTTP/HTTPS uptime checking and TCP connection checking. SMTP checking requires more than just a valid TCP check which they can’t, so I took a look at hetrixtools.com.
They advertise being forever free when using a limit number of Uptime/Blacklist endpoints as per
[Wayback/Archive] Free Uptime Monitor & Blacklist Monitor- HetrixTools
- 15 Uptime Monitors • 1 Minute Interval
- 32 Blacklist Monitors • Checked Everyday
FREE Forever!
Unlike many other free uptime checking tools, their interval is better.
A thing to consider is that, like many online-first companies, they do not provide company details on either of these pages which you have to agree with when signing on for their service:
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Posted in *nix, hetrixtools, Monitoring, PagerDuty, Power User, Uptimerobot | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/05
Every interview with Kevlin Henney is worth reading, listening or watching and this is no exception: [Wayback/Archive] #122 – Essential Things Every Software Engineer Should Know – Kevlin Henney – Tech Lead Journal
It covered quite a bit of two classic books he (co-)edited: “97 Things Every Programmer Should Know” and “97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know” as their content is relatively timeless.
His first book has been open source for more than 10 years now. The repository is at [Wayback/Archive] 97-things/97-things-every-programmer-should-know: Pearls of wisdom for programmers collected from leading practitioners. and an easier readable edition is at [Wayback/Archive] Introduction · 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know.
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Posted in Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/04
Via [Wayback/Archive] Crowbarring Windows 95 into Windows NT with CAPITALS • The Register refers a nice trick that I have used in various case-codebases as well.
On case sensitive environments the casing method is easy no matter if you use macros or just regular identifiers.
On case insensitive environments, prepending or appending soemthing like an underscore (_) works just as well.
The trick referred to is in a section of [Wayback/Archive] How did the Windows 95 user interface code get brought to the Windows NT code base? – The Old New Thing:
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Posted in Development, Software Development | Tagged: define | 1 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