Recent Messages

3/9/2024 10:18:18 PM
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Finally, all the rewrites and re-rewrites are done! (Converting from Blazor 7 to Blazor 8 got a bit tricky)MessageBase 6 is finally live, so that's what we've been waiting on.Click the GameZone link to start playing!
3/8/2024 3:55:31 AM
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Finally, after 3 years of planning and development, LLabmik Software Development is happy (and relieved!) to announce the latest iteration of MessageBase.net!Amazing that it's already 26 years since the original MessageBase Version 1.0!The new version is written with advanced architecture, implemented using .NET 8 and Blazor Interactive Server.
2/4/2024 9:46:42 PM
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Some pretty cool new stuff.See details here.
2/4/2024 9:44:05 PM
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Lots of good stuff to make your life as a developer more easy:In the Debugger's Spotlight: A Year in Review - Visual Studio Blog (microsoft.com)
12/21/2023 5:08:16 PM
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Just got done putting together a demo of how to share authentication between multiple .NET 8 Blazor apps so that users do not need to re-log-in to each app as they move between them.See the GitHub source here: Blazor Shared AuthenticationNote that this will only work with .NET 8, previous versions of .NET used a different way of doing authentication.
12/21/2023 9:55:07 AM
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Currently about a year into converting MessageBase codebase to Blazor and .NET 8.Originally rewrote it in .NET 7 and it was working great, just doing final bug checking and testing, then .NET 8 introduced many architectural changes and it's set me way back. Had hoped to switch over by end of 2023. But as you can see, that's about over (Or over where you are, dates are set to your local time zone here.) so not gonna happen...But once it's done, can release the "door games" Raid on the Forest of Horrors and Wild Frontiers 1888! Raid (ROTFOH2 is a Blazor-based rewrite of my old ROTFOH/Raid on the Forest of Horrors game that was somewhat popular about 20 years ago. Just some adaptations to both to syn with .NET 8 and ready to fly.
11/17/2023 2:49:13 PM
Topic: Windows
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It's always been a bit of a pain in Windows to create a dotfile (Like .gitignore, .dockerfile, etc) but I just learned this weird trick that makes it easier:In File Explorer, go to the directory where you want to create the fileRight-click and pick New, then Text DocumentFor the name (Say we want to create a .gitignore file), wipe out everything suggested for the filename, including the .txt extension, then give it a name of ".gitignore." (With a dot on BOTH sides of the filename)Hit EnterYou'll get the warning about changing file extensions, click Yes (Or just hit Enter as that's the default)Windows will strip the trailing dot, giving you a fresh empty file named .gitignore !!
4/15/2023 1:07:51 AM
Topic: Music
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Live Concert (COVID) 2020
4/10/2023 6:20:34 PM
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OK, the new version is finally playable (!!), but there's still some stuff to finish. Online (and offliine) battles are working great. Come play it today!Still need to add more weapons, armor, and monsters. (And graphics, oh I need graphics, it's kind of plain looking at this point!)BUT - IT WORKS!! :)Warning: It does not use your MessageBase account as of yet, so you'll have to create a separate account. (Even if it's the same id and password, they just don't talk yet.) And the registration process is pretty hinky. (Basically sign up, and then you'll get to a place where you're not sure what to do next. At that point, close your browser and re-open it, then it will work for you.) Once I get MessageBase rewritten, then will be able to link the two. (ROTFOH is using a newer .NET (Core) codebase and MessageBase is still in older .NET Framework, so the login data is not sharable.)Here's the new link: https://MessageBase.net/ROTFOHLet me know here in this forum if you run into any issues. I'm excited!
4/9/2023 11:02:51 PM
Topic: Music
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BLACK SMOKE TRIGGER
4/2/2023 2:38:26 PM
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A story from an ex insurance adjuster: I used to be the guy who worked for insurance companies, and determined the value of every little thing in your house.  The guy who would go head-to-head with those fire-truck-chasing professional loss adjusters.  I may be able to help you not get screwed when filing your claim.Our goal was to use the information you provided,  and give the lowest damn value we can possibly justify for your item.For instance, if all you say was "toaster" -- we would come up with a cheap-as-fuck $4.88 toaster from Walmart, meant to toast one side of one piece of bread at a time.  And we would do that for every thing you have ever owned.  We had private master lists of the most commonly used descriptions, and what the cheapest viable replacements were.  We also had wholesale pricing on almost everything out there, so really scored cheap prices to quote.  To further that example:-  If you said "toaster - $25"  , we would have to be within -20% of that... so, we would find something that's pretty much dead-on $20.01.   -  If you said "toaster- $200" , we'd kick it back and say NEED MORE INFO, because that's a ridiculous price for a toaster (with no other information given.)    -  If you said "toaster, from Walmart" , you're getting that $4.88 one. -  If you said "toaster, from Macys" , you'd be more likely to get a $25-35 one. -  If you said "toaster", and all your other ...
3/29/2023 9:39:26 AM
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Curious about what’s out there? Tired of mainstream entertainment ruining all your favorite franchises? Downstream Pulp covers the latest in Iron Age creations, not to mention original tales. A place where literature fans can relax, grab a warm beverage, and discuss the wonders of the imagination.Downstream Pulp
3/26/2023 10:23:12 PM
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The average person evaporates 32 gallons of water from the surface of their eyes each year. People with dry eye syndrome can evaporate over 50 gallons per year, as water evaporates when faster for them!Source formula: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8339563/
2/17/2023 5:28:59 PM
Topic: Windows
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One of my machines hasn't picked up the "Kill IE" update yet, so decided to fire it up once last time (Although I haven't used it in quite a while) and am using it to post this message.It was fun while it lasted, peace out from Internet Explorer 11!(At least software development is far easier without having to put in all kinds of IE-only tweaks!)
1/26/2023 2:43:09 PM
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There are two versions of Blazor (Blazor Server and Blazor WebAssembly), I've been getting heavily into Blazor Server lately, so I'll post stuff here that will come in handy to others.
1/23/2023 12:57:32 PM
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This is a good quick reference, focusing on all the different possible properties for the parent element (the flex container) and the child elements (the flex items).A Complete Guide to Flexbox
1/9/2023 11:02:01 PM
Topic: Music
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This is very cool, recorded and filmed all over the world. Finland to New Zealand, Louisiana to Africa. Featuring John Paul Jones.
1/8/2023 11:40:39 PM
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Getting old is a lot like that scene in "Back to the Future" when Marty and his family start fading from the photo. More and more things that you knew for most if not all of your life begin to disappear, one by one. The grandparents. One, if not both, of your parents. Perhaps a sibling, or friend, gone too soon, but not improbably soon. The kid from that TV series that you related to because you were about the same age. Each falling away one by one. You're left like a contestant in an old-time dance contest, wondering how many other competitors will be eliminated before the judge finally comes to tap you on the shoulder...
1/6/2023 12:53:00 AM
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I found my old source code (written in pre .net active server pages with vba, wow this is some old stuff!) and rewriting it in C# and Blazor. Getting close to done, raids, battles, tavern, bank, and armor shop are done. Just a few more things to get converted. Excited to see this once popular game relaunch soon.Stay tuned!
1/3/2023 11:47:07 AM
Topic: Windows
Viewed: 277 times
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Say you've got three (or more) monitors on your system. In my case, I have a (smaller) monitor built into my laptop, and two larger external monitors connected to it. I wanted to just use the two external monitors for a Remote Desktop (RDP) session, but not use the smaller laptop monitor. There's a "Use ALL my monitors" checkbox in the options for the Remote Desktop client, but no way to just pick individual monitors to be used. So I had to research a way to see if there's a way to do this. Although I didn't think I would succeed, I did! And it's pretty easy to do. Here's how to do it:1) Open Remote Desktop, expand "Show Options".Click the Save As button. (You could use just Save, but I wasn't sure where it would put the file. Turns out by default it goes in your Documents folder)2) Save it as Default.rdp:3) Right-Click on your desktop and select "Display Settings". Look at the numbers for your screens. In this case, I want to use 3 and 2.4) Open Default.rdp in a text editor.Find the selectedmonitors line. Subtract 1 from the numbers assigned to your screens in "Display Settings" (Which starts counting at 1, but RDP starts at 0) and put in the monitor numbers you want to use for your RDP session, separated by comnmas.5) Open Remote Desktop again (Close it first if it's still open), expand Options again, go to the Display tab, and select "Use all my monitors for ...
12/24/2022 7:26:49 PM
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Oh, I'll admit it isn't looking good this year but the war is never over. I'm still limping from an ambush three weeks ago. We were just outside Wyoming spraying down nativity scenes with napalm when they hit us. At first it was just some light caroling and we figured we had us some wet nosed UCC'ers on our hands. So we dug in. I took point with Das Kapital, Hoss set up the big rig burner we were using, and Lucky stood by to run us craft beers and angry pamphlets as we needed them.They started coming and we started having a real damn good war. We hit them with everything we had. Did you know Pepsi invented Santa Claus? Would you let a Muslim set up a statue in front of a courthouse? Did you know that Christmas is based on a pagan holiday? You didn't know that you miserable motherfarkers. You've never heard such mind-blowing shiat in your whole life. They were dropping like disillusioned flies.Then they stopped coming. It was suddenly quieter than when you accidentally say "God damn!" at atheist church. Then there was a low, heavy step. It was so deep we felt it rather than heard it. It took a minute for me to realize the horror of what it was. A reindeer. Let me tell you something, if you see a reindeer you just run. Don't try to hide. Don't try to fight. Those bastards weigh over three hundred pounds, have four ...
12/14/2022 6:13:04 PM
Topic: Women Only
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The story of Candice the Ghost goes something like this.Candice was a little girl who came from a single parent home. Because of her mom's occupation, she had to move quite often and never had the chance to meet any close friends. Candice was lonely most of the time. Her mother never had time for her because she always had to work. Her favorite place to play was her tree house. In there she could entertain herself for hours at a time.One unfortunate day, she was climbing her tree house and fell. Without any supervision, Candice lie there for hours facing the bright sun and eventually died. Her last memory on earth was this vision of a silhouette of a crow circling around her. Upon her death, Candice was sent to meet the king of hell, Yen Luo Wang. The emperor of hell sensed something unique in Candice and after careful calculation sent her back to our world as a ghost. At first Candice was very sad. Without her mother and no one around her, she was desperate. Her depression soon turned into anger as she started resenting the human race. Why should these people be having so much fun while she could only watch. She soon found a cruel joy in scaring off people.After a while curiosity lead her to start observing the human race for the first time. This is something she could never have done when she were part of the living. She noticed the love and ...
11/18/2022 9:35:55 AM
Posted By: Dan Taub
Topic: Quotes
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The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination.- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
11/10/2022 10:57:25 AM
Posted By: Dan Taub
Topic: Quotes
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"Inflation, as this term was always used everywhere and especially in this country, means increasing the quantity of money and bank notes in circulation and the quantity of bank deposits subject to check. But people today use the term `inflation' to refer to the phenomenon that is an inevitable consequence of inflation, that is the tendency of all prices and wage rates to rise. The result of this deplorable confusion is that there is no term left to signify the cause of this rise in prices and wages. There is no longer any word available to signify the phenomenon that has been, up to now, called inflation. . . . As you cannot talk about something that has no name, you cannot fight it. Those who pretend to fight inflation are in fact only fighting what is the inevitable consequence of inflation, rising prices. Their ventures are doomed to failure because they do not attack the root of the evil. They try to keep prices low while firmly committed to a policy of increasing the quantity of money that must necessarily make them soar. As long as this terminological confusion is not entirely wiped out, there cannot be any question of stopping inflation." Ludwig von Mises.
11/9/2022 1:30:36 PM
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I would seriously lose my temper and find a new job!
11/7/2022 11:08:40 AM
Topic: Reference
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As of VSCode 1.69, it has an excellent three-pane merge tool on par with the GitKraken and Beyond Compare merge tools. Here's how to configure Hg to use it (In Linux anyway, for other OS's you will have to keep searching...)I'm pretty new to Mercurial, being totally used to Git and GitKraken, so I've been a little lost with handling merges as most Linux-based merge tools make no sense to me as far as understanding how to work with their UI. (kdiff, meld, vimdiff all are off on another planet as far as what I'm used to.)So happily I found this article (Using VS Code for merges in Mercurial) explaining just how to do that.It has additional info that you will find useful, but I wanted to capture the basics just in case the article goes away.Base changes needed in your ~/.hgrc file:[extensions] extdiff = [ui] merge = code [merge-tools] code.priority = 100 code.premerge = True code.args = --wait --merge $other $local $base $output [extdiff] cmd.vsd = code opts.vsd = --wait --diff
10/26/2022 3:19:02 PM
Topic: Reference
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A little embarrassed that I did not know this, even though I have used PDFs for decades, and have always been frustrated with them because every time you re-open a PDF, you end up right at the first page of the document and have to try and remember where you were the last time. Really a pain when reading a long document or book that will take more than one sitting to get all the way thru.I've always looked for a way to "bookmark" the current page, just like you would in a book. But Adobe had other uses for the word "bookmark" when they created Adobe Reader. A "bookmark" to them is to create one of many shortcuts in their "bookmarks" list. Even worse, you cannot create one in the free version of Acrobat Reader. So that sucks.So how do you do this with the free version of Adobe Acrobat Reader?Well...It's embarrassingly simple, but this is all you have to do: Click on Edit, then Preferences, then Documents, then put a checkmark in for "Restore last view settings when reopening documents". Click OK.That's IT!!Scroll down to some page, close Reader, re-open, and VOILA - you are right at the page you were at when you closed the document.(Damn Adobe, that's some terrible User Experience there. That should be front-and-center. I can't think of anything more important in a book metaphor than how to mark your last page read. Normally, you use a bookmark with a physical book. but with a ...
10/13/2022 9:03:11 PM
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Finally, after way too many years (decades actually!) I finally feel that the game is ready for public usage.Still counting it as "beta" quality, and have many ideas for things to be added, but it's playable and looks "alright" both in desktop and mobile perspectives.What is it? Basically you are exploring frontier Nebraska back in 1888. Take your horse-drawn wagon and go from township to township, buying and selling commodities at tradeposts scattered throughout the state. (And when I say scattered, I mean scattered - a monster EF6 tornado has rearranged the state to the point that even actual Nebraskans will find that towns and roads are not where you would expect them.)Saddle up your horse and check it out at https://messagebase.net/WildFrontiers/ !!Also see the new MessageBase topic dedicated to WildFrontiers!
10/3/2022 4:37:37 PM
Topic: Linux
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Running some versions of Gnome have weird issues with when it shows the "standard" three buttons (Minimize/Maximize/Close) at the top of a window. Some have it, some do not.A nice way around this is to just tell Gnome to ALWAYS show them. The following command will do that for you:gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences button-layout ":minimize,maximize,close"
9/8/2022 12:15:12 PM
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Had some big JSON returned from a Web API project I was developing, Swagger was taking FOREVER (More than 20 minutes!) to display the returned data.So I got looking into what I could do to increase the speed. Found some good settings that massively improve the rendering speed. The main fix is to disable Syntax Highlighting, but the other settings are handy as well.Depending on your app, open either Startup.cs or Program.cs, look for the part that has app.UseSwaggerUI() and expand it as follows:app.UseSwaggerUI(c =>{ // Expand details shown from default setting c.DefaultModelExpandDepth(2); // Smaller display onscreen c.DocExpansion(Swashbuckle.AspNetCore.SwaggerUI.DocExpansion.None); // Display the example JSON by default c.DefaultModelRendering(Swashbuckle.AspNetCore.SwaggerUI.ModelRendering.Example); // Make it so you don't have to keep clicking "Try It Now" to use a WebApi method. c.EnableTryItOutByDefault(); // Disable highlighting as it really bogs down with large JSON loads. c.ConfigObject.AdditionalItems.Add("syntaxHighlight", false);});