Posted by jpluimers on 2026/01/08
I feel old, because I vividly remember the PCX (1985) graphics file format: it was the defacto standard under DOS.
TIFF (1986) was slightly younger, and came from the scanner background resulting in very large files though unlike PCX (which had lossless compression), TIFF supported both lossless and lossy compression.
On Windows and OS/2, you had BMP (1985, lossless initially only black and white).
All three suffered from the same problems: different implementations causing all sorts of compatibility problems
Those were the reason for the implementation of newer file formats for graphics like JPG (1992, lossy) and PNG (1996, lossless).
[Wayback/Archive] What was before JPEG? #pcx #shorts – YouTube – @Vitaskhr
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Posted in Development, History, Software Development | Tagged: pcx, shorts | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/09/04
I have seen too many sites where cabling was laid en never tested before actual use, which meant locating the cabling and faults was a nightmare.
Be sure to have good (which can be very simple, but more complex when Power over Ethernet is involved) testing hardware and use it during installation. You will thank yourself later.
A few videos that can be helpful:
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Posted in Development, Ethernet, fiber, Hardware, Hardware Development, Internet, Network-and-equipment, PoE - Power over Ethernet, Power User | Tagged: cat5e, fiber, networking, run, shorts, toner | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/02/17
Every now and then you bump into an interesting post on a workflow you already have but did not know the name for.
This time it is [Wayback/Archive] Introduction to the Zettelkasten Method which has this nice definition:
A Zettelkasten is a personal tool for thinking and writing. It has hypertextual features to make a web of thought possible. The difference to other systems is that you create a web of thoughts instead of notes of arbitrary size and form, and emphasize connection, not a collection.
I thought a bit about it and it feels quite a bit like this blog: the ~5k draft posts at the time of writing are similar to a Zettelkasten: short notes with title and links either internally or externally.
These drafts are private, but the actual blog posts are either public (already published: some 8k at the time of writing) or queued for publication (some 2 years at the time of writing).
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Posted in Blogging, Development, documentation, Knowledge Worker, LifeHacker, Lightweight markup language, MarkDown, Power User, reStructuredText, SocialMedia, Software Development | Tagged: developer, Productivity, Python, shorts, tips | Leave a Comment »