The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Having cancer is not a fight or a battle, it is about having luck or misfortune

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 »

Online HTML Stripper. Remove HTML and formatting from text

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 »

Quick Accent steals the WordPress classic editor space after a hyphen-minus sign or asterisk · Issue #24623 · microsoft/PowerToys

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 »

Apple II: Single Step in Monitor | Applefritter

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: | Leave a Comment »

Some lesser known achievements of Phil (Philip A.) Kaufman

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 »

The Meinl TMT1B-BK Tambourine on the MC-TH Tambourine Holder: use Reece Cotton Tape makes it fit perfectly

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 »

A few diagrams.net (formerly draw.io, see below why) that made me more productive with it

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 »

MeshCore v1.39.0 – 2026-02-08

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

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Cymbal Trolley – Deluxe with Wheels – Protection Racket

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 »

Some links on hetrixtools.com Uptime and Blacklist monitoring, and PagerDuty integration.

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 »

Bit by Bit – Exploring Low-Level Programming on the Apple IIe | decuser’s blog

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/05

At the time of posting [Wayback/Archive] Bit by Bit – Exploring Low-Level Programming on the Apple IIe | decuser’s blog in 20251010, four episodes were up at [Wayback/Archive] Bit by Bit – Exploring low-level programming with an Apple IIe – YouTube which at the time of archiving at the end of October 2025 already got 10 episodes.

Hopefully by now – some 2 months later – the list has grown even further.

Via [Wayback/Archive] Bit by Bit – Exploring Low-Level Programming on the Apple IIe | Applefritter who explains further than the blog post:

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Posted in //e, 6502, 6502 Assembly, Apple, Assembly Language, Development, History, Power User, Retrocomputing, Software Development | Leave a Comment »