Dave W Plummer
@davepl1968 • 112,227 subscribers
Hi! I'm Dave Plummer. You might remember me from such Windows components as Task Manager, Windows Pinball, Calc, ZIPFolders, Product Activation, etc. Cheers!
Shorts
![My AI broke the world record on Tempest yesterday! But I still hold the human record :-) [on Extreme difficulty settings] Here's a little demo reel of the Tempest AI doing inference and training at the same time up on the hardest Tempest levels. This is all running on our Dell Technologies 7875 Workstation, with the 9995WX CPU handling 2000 fps of Tempest while the dual Blackwell RTX6000 GPUs do inference and training.](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2027092452193251734/amplify_video_thumb/2027091957403787264/img/-a2Czn1TjOzMLLZ7.jpg)
Videos
30 years ago, I wrote Task Manager. Today, I broke this PC four ways — CPU, memory, disk, and power — and watched the usual diagnosis pick the wrong suspect. Sorting processes by CPU is like investigating every crime by questioning the tallest person in the room. You've confused what is visible with what is relevant! Here's how to do it right! TMOG 1.0 is out. Free on Windows, Mac, and Linux:
Dave W Plummer395,649 Aufrufe • vor 23 Tagen
Say HELLO to my little friend, Task Manager OG! I'm please to announce the immediate availability of the MacOS version of TMOG today; Windows support will follow shortly, so follow for the update! TMOG is a free application; I may do a Pro version at some point, but everything here is and will remain free. Get the beta:
Dave W Plummer614,010 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
Back in the early 90s, before the Internet, we had "Defrag and Chill". You'd start Disk Defragmenter on your 540MB hard drive, dim the lights, crack open a Surge, and just vibe while the little blue bars crawled across the screen like they were solving world peace. Forty-five minutes of pure, unfiltered anticipation. No notifications. No algorithms. Just the two of you, the gentle grinding of the hard drive, and the sacred promise that your Solitaire games were about to feel 3% snappier. This is MS_DOS 6.22, which I worked on, but I honestly have no idea who wrote defrag. Iconic utility though!
Dave W Plummer384,317 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten
He was the multimillionaire software visionary that created the Zip file format still used almost universally to this day. And now, at the age of just 37, Phil Katz was dead. His life came to an inglorious ending in a lonely hotel room somewhere in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin. He had a home nearby, and the cops had been summoned to it at least once before when neighbors complained of odors, insects, and mice infesting the neighboring luxury apartments. Once inside, the police were confronted with knee-deep garbage, decaying food scraps, and much more. When they later found his lifeless body slumped against a nightstand in that dingy south side hotel room, he was still cradling an empty bottle of liquor. A half dozen similar bottles littered the room. He was completely alone now, having long since been estranged from his family and now virtually a stranger even to the employees of his own company. His body could no longer sustain the abuse from years of chronic alcoholism, and he died alone that night of acute pancreatic bleeding. The Dark History of Zip Files: you might already know that I wrote the Zip file support that's been in Windows for about 30 years... But I had nothing to do with the creation of the Zip format, which goes back to Phil Katz. This is his tragic and cautionary tale... as told by me. I never met Phil before he died. I'd like to think that before he started his descent into darkness, we'd have a lot to talk about.
Dave W Plummer303,215 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
Hard Drive activity indicator for the Mac: my first Swift app. Wrote it this morning because I wanted it. It monitors disk queues at 120Hz and triggers the LED for 10ms, which seems pretty realistic. What should I do with it? I pay the $100 Apple Developer tax, should I put it on the app store for $1 or just stick it on my GitHub and hope people can figure it out?
Dave W Plummer310,897 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
Breakout by Grok3! If there's interest, I'll check the code into Github.
Dave W Plummer483,696 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
Here's a video of our Dell Technologies 7975 Precision workstation running local AI for coding agents. It features dual RTX6000 Blackwell GPU w/ 96GB each, so I'm running Qwen 3B on it. I had ChatGPT's desktop app set it all up and configure the integration into VS Code as well. I've done that by hand once before, and once was enough! Now I can query my local agent just as easily as I can with Codex or any other paid model. It's a bit slower, and I only use it to REVIEW code, not author it. Still, it's impressive that you can do this 100% locally now! I'm giving it a final pass over the Task Manager TMOG codebase on "Very High", with unlimited runtime! Only the best for :-)
Dave W Plummer25,673 Aufrufe • vor 28 Tagen
I wanted to recreate that optical illusion where it can be seen to rotate in two directions at once, as created by Etienne Jacob, but I'm clearly missing the secret sauce! If anyone knows what I'm missing, please do let me know. The code is less than 200 lines long and you can view it at
Dave W Plummer166,907 Aufrufe • vor 10 Monaten
On Friday's "Shop Talk" episode, someone asked about a TUI version of Task Manager TMOG, and I had to confess that I didn't even know what TUI was! Today, here's TMOG running in a console as a TUI app! I take no credit for this one; someone else did it, but it's cool!
Dave W Plummer16,629 Aufrufe • vor 28 Tagen
A little video of my PDP-11/83 doin' stuff. Compiling code, being cool, blinking its lights.
Dave W Plummer123,618 Aufrufe • vor 11 Monaten
