Posted by jpluimers on 2026/06/04
Seems this is not an easily accessible built-in feature of MacOS: [Wayback/Archive] macos change brightness of external monitor at DuckDuckGo
Basically there seem to be two apps that are most popular:
Lunar is free, but has a fee for some features. MonitorControl is free derived from Lunar, but has less features than the paid Lunar license has and is less often updated.
Both have been developed in Swift and are on GitHub:
Posted in Apple, Development, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Power User, Software Development, Swift | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/06/04
Hopefully by now a 4th edition is available: [Wayback/Archive] Effective Java, 3rd Edition [Book].
Since I do not program in Java often, the above book is indispensable.
Read this review why as he much better phrases the reasons than I can: [Wayback/Archive] Effective Java by Joshua Bloch — A Must Read Book for Java Developers | by javinpaul | Javarevisited | Medium.
For Java versions 9 and up, read his recommendations here: [Wayback/Archive] Top 7 Courses to Learn New Features of Java 8 to Java 17 in 2023 | by javinpaul | Javarevisited | Medium.
Query: [Wayback/Archive] effective java – Google Search
Buy: [Wayback/Archive] Effective Java : Bloch, Joshua: Amazon.de: Books
–jeroen
Posted in Development, Java, Java Platform, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/06/03
[Wayback/Archive] Show HN: Live-updating version of the ‘What a week, huh?’ meme | Hacker News
As a fun evening project, I made a live-updating version of the ‘What a week, huh?’ meme (based on a panel from The Adventures of Tintin comics [1]).
There’s a page for every timeframe:
- ‘What a day’: https://tintin.dlazaro.ca/day
- ‘What a week’: https://tintin.dlazaro.ca/week
- ‘What a month’: https://tintin.dlazaro.ca/month
- ‘What a year’: https://tintin.dlazaro.ca/year
Current time is determined by a Cloudflare Worker using the request IP (not logged or stored). No JavaScript is sent to the browser.
[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/what-a-week-huh
It was easy to edit the HTML to change the message and CSS for the text dimensions, see the image on the right.
MacOS users will likely recognise the font as it is the Marker Felt font which is included by default on MacOS.
And it would be cool to alter the speech bubbles to be more like the ones Hergé used, see this comment:
Posted in CSS, Development, Fun, HTML, Meme, Power User, Software Development, Web Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/06/02
In a world where it becomes increasingly important to think and act on situations where for various communication via traditional means is not that easy any more, then LoRa (Long Range) wireless networks have been steadily gaining ground: they use open frequencies and for some of these networks, their repeater structure is largely ran by communities of volunteers.
Both communities and devices have evolved so far that its not just for early adopters any more: mere mortals can use it too.
In the LoRa area, MeshCore looks to have become the successor of Meshtastic: [Wayback/Archive] MeshCore – Off grid mesh radio communications system.
The core difference between these two LoRa networks is explained in the Wikipedia article on MeshCore:
MeshCore is often compared with other LoRa-based mesh networking systems such as Meshtastic. While Meshtastic primarily relies on broadcast-style message flooding, MeshCore emphasizes structured routing roles and store-and-forward mechanisms, resulting in different scalability and energy-consumption characteristics.
Communication over the MeshCore network reminds me a lot of three things, in this chronological order:
I think about everything of MeshCore is open source; mostly hosted in the hierarchy at [Wayback/Archive] MeshCore · GitHub.
MeshCore is fairly young which means it will have growth pains, and some hardware pains (like a node being limited to about 500 messages/hour because of physical bandwidth limitations – smaller cells work better than the FidoNet hub/spoke model – see the Dutch section below) but it also cool to see it evolving.
This blog post is going to be long, as a lot of MeshCore information is spread around the interwebz, so there is a lot to link to.
Posted in Development, Hardware, IoT Internet of Things, LoRa - Long Range wireless communications network, Network-and-equipment, Power User, Python, Scripting, Software Development, Solar Power | Tagged: 2, amstelland, analyser, bollenstreek, bot, burgernet, hamradio, kennemerland, leiden, meshcore, nl, noodkanaal, pingbot, test | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/06/02
For people like me that use Gist or GitHub comments as a image hosting service like Imgur or the the now defunct ImageShack.
In due time (parts of) GitHub might become unavailable too, but since they diversified, I think the chance is lower. This is great because the list of List of image-sharing websites is not really growing but the subset of Defunct photo-sharing websites is.
You have to remember that unlike for instance Imgur, which can be used anonymously, the URL of pictures that are added to Gists or GitHub comments are bound to your GitHub user id.
So for instance [Wayback/Archive] 232005837-5d3c45d8-4efe-4759-a968-4ce276e35a35.png (899×503) contains the ID 2033367 which us the user ID of jpluimers.
Posted in Development, gist, GitHub, Power User, Software Development, Source Code Management | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/05/29
“Tricking” ChatGPT to give you information is about navigating around the gates added by humans: [Wayback/Archive] Gokul Rajaram on Twitter: “lol”:
Posted in AI and ML; Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, ChatGPT, Development, GPT-3, LifeHacker, Power User, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/05/28
The question in [Wayback/Archive] git – What will happen when a pull request includes changes to ignored .gitignore? – Super User comes down to:
I don’t want anybody to change what’s in my
.gitignorefile because it includes some things that are specific to my own system.
Those settings should go in a personal gitignore file, which is mentioned in the [Wayback/Archive] Git – gitignore Documentation
Posted in Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, git, Software Development, Source Code Management, Versioning | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/05/28
Every now and then, documentation in source code requires an ASCII table. Sometimes table cells are spanning multiple rows or/and column.
TL;DR: The tools I tried did not support that, so manual labour is still needed.
Posted in ASCII, ASCII art / AsciiArt, Development, Documentation Development, Encoding, Excel, Fun, HTML, Office, Power User, Software Development, Web Development | Tagged: 2 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/05/27
Got an error when pushing a relatively large commit to GitLab: error: RPC failed; HTTP 502 curl 22 The requested URL returned error: 502
There was no big difference in information between these commands¹:
git pushgit push --verbose
Posted in //e, 6502, Apple, Apple ///, Apple IIgs, Apple ][, Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, git, GitLab, History, Power User, Software Development, Source Code Management, Versioning | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/05/27
After the 2022 GitLab.com backlash* to auto-delete “inactive” (for whichever metric of “inactive”) repositories of free users, I thought they would have multiple checks in place to prevent that from happening.
TL;DR: of two possible checks to prevent this, only one is in place.
This means that if by accident one of those checks stops working, all inactive repositories will be be deleted after a 7 day retention period. Which is very short, especially when you miss the email about it (for instance because of holiday or health reasons).
That bad!
Posted in Awareness, GitLab, Software Development, Source Code Management | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 