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 tools to test JSONPath Queries (plus a small list of Amazon top level domains)

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/15

I wanted to parse some JSON being sent back during an XMLHttpRequest (what a wrongly named call is that!) of which I grabbed the content using the web development tools of my Chromium based browser.

Input

I got this list of amazon top level domain names from research I did for my blog post Download your Kindle books soon, because Amazon will block them after February 25, 2025 . The source is [Wayback/Archive] Amazon operating domains by country. · GitHub [Wayback/Archive] in the file amazon-domains.json:

{
    "us": "https://www.amazon.com",
    "uk": "https://www.amazon.co.uk",
    "ca": "https://www.amazon.ca",
    "de": "https://www.amazon.de",
    "es": "https://www.amazon.es",
    "fr": "https://www.amazon.fr",
    "it": "https://www.amazon.it",
    "jp": "https://www.amazon.co.jp",
    "in": "https://www.amazon.in",
    "cn": "https://www.amazon.cn",
    "sg": "https://www.amazon.com.sg",
    "mx": "https://www.amazon.com.mx",
    "ae": "https://www.amazon.ae",
    "br": "https://www.amazon.com.br",
    "nl": "https://www.amazon.nl",
    "au": "https://www.amazon.com.au",
    "tr": "https://www.amazon.com.tr",
    "sa": "https://www.amazon.sa",
    "se": "https://www.amazon.se",
    "pl": "https://www.amazon.pl"
}

The list is far from complete, so tomorrow I will post some more sources in Some pages that have lists of Amazon toplevel domains.

The queries and results show you that the original JSONPath (2007) and its RFC 9535 definition (2024, just 2 years ago) do not support getting the key names of the above list the ~ part in the first query below fails, and only the second query works.

This means that finding the right tooling is important.

Example

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Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Development, Event, JavaScript/ECMAScript, JSON, JSONPath, PHP, Python, Scripting, Software Development, TypeScript, Web Development | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Need to find a “smart” broken/404 link checker

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/15

Most of the links from my blog get accompanied with Wayback or Archive.today links, but some don’t.

For those, I need to find a broken/404 link checker which I already hinted at in scr.im « Share your email in a safe way. Get less spam.

Some links that hopefully help me:

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Posted in Development, HTTP, Internet protocol suite, Power User, Software Development, TCP, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

Google Sheets actually has a ton of Excel compatible functions; wish the User Experience was better though

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/14

I have been using Microsoft Excel since it beat the Quattro Pro limitation of rows and columns with the version 12.0, on Windows more commonly named Excel 2007 (which also introduced a fully new user experience including the vertical screen estate eating Ribbon – the main reason I like 16:10 monitors over 16:9 ones) and on Mac as Excel 2008.

It means I have like 20 years of Excel experience not just on what it can technically can do (see my Excel posts) but especially on the user experience bit.

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Posted in Development, Excel, Google, GoogleDocs, GoogleSheets, Office, Office 2007, Power User, Software Development, User Experience (ux) | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Honghong Lu on Twitter: “Alcohol+paste flux = liquid flux It is pretty good, especially when I use to tin the cable with the solder pot.”

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/14

Smart: [Wayback/Archive] Honghong Lu on Twitter: “Alcohol+paste flux = liquid flux It is pretty good, especially when I use to tin the cable with the solder pot.”

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Posted in Development, Hardware Development, Soldering | Leave a Comment »

Falconer’s knot: the worlds best one handed knot! – YouTube

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/13

[Wayback/Archive] The Worlds BEST One Handed Knot! – YouTube which “The Bear Essentials” in this video calls “the thumbs up knot” but in fact is the Falconer’s Knot (which in turn is a one-handed way of tying a Halter Hitch) and also covered in his longer video [Wayback/Archive] TOP 10 BEST Knots for Life – YouTube.

The Thumbs Up knot is in fact a different knot which you can for instance use at the start of a paracord keychain: [Wayback/Archive] THUMBS UP! – YouTube

The short video explains the Falconer’s Knot well, but I do more like the step by step pictures in [Wayback/Archive] The Modern Apprentice – How to Tie a Falconer’s Knot

A video that also explains it better is [Wayback/Archive] Tying the Falconers Knot – YouTube.

More links:

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Posted in DIY, LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Interactive maps with building ages in The Netherlands / Interactieve kaarten met bouwjaar gebouwen in Nederland

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/13

I found these maps:

  • Years at the time of writing this post (spring 2023)

Via:

–jeroen

Posted in LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Some URLs Are Immortal, Most Are Ephemeral

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/10

I mention dead links a lot, and always try to archive content before scheduling it in a blog post.

No different for [Wayback/Archive] Some URLs Are Immortal, Most Are Ephemeral, which provides background information about how the short lifespan of most URLs.

Their 2024 publication was a poster in PNG and PTTX format (linked below under the abstract), so I created this PDF out of it:

Abstract

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Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Event, Internet, LifeHacker, Power User, Web Browsers, WWW - the World Wide Web of information | Leave a Comment »

scr.im « Share your email in a safe way. Get less spam.

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/10

Cool: [Wayback/Archive] scr.im « Share your email in a safe way. Get less spam.

Bumped into this via [Wayback/Archive] Mary Branscombe (@marypcbuk) / Twitter.

At the time of writing, it had an invalid TLS certificate, so you would get red warnings when accessing it over HTTPS.

Hopefully that has been fixed by now.

It’s not exactly security through obscurity, but it allows people to access your email after solving a captcha so it is not 100% secure but a lot more secure than otherwise.

I found it 5 years after mailhide got discontinued by Google. I used it on my [Wayback/Archive] Contact form through mailhide.recaptcha.net which Google slowly killed without me noticing likely because Google didn’t want to upgrade it from using reCAPTCHA v1 into v2 or v3.:

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Posted in LifeHacker, Power User, Security | Leave a Comment »

Reflection Frame: is there a public API yet?

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/09

The display quality of [Wayback/Archive] Reflection Frame is nice, but the there was no public API at the time of writing, so I wonder if there is now.

Public API request initially denied at [WaybackSave/Archive] Reflection Frame: Digital Photo Prints by Creative Design Worx — Kickstarter:

  1. Would you expose some simple REST API that would accept a jpeg or similar? It’s fine if it needs to be pre-dithered. Only interested in this if it can be controlled from Home Assistant, not interested in manually using any smartphone app.
  2. … At this time, we don’t have plans to open-source the connection protocol, as our hardware and firmware are designed as a proprietary system. …

Via [Wayback/Archive] Colour E-Ink Picture Frame – The Reflection Frame – YouTube.

--jeroen

Posted in Development, Hardware, Hardware Interfacing, IoT Internet of Things, Power User, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Only available on Window, but sometimes useful, the Excel FILTERXML function

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/09

Some links on the [Wayback/Archive] FILTERXML function – Microsoft Support.

It is only available on Windows (because of the underlying XPath libraries used, I think it is MSXML), and “only” as of Excel 2013, but still can be useful.

Some links below on FILTERXML and related XPath information so I can more easily find their content back.

Notes:

  • FILTERXML only supports XPath 1.0
  • The quotes are huge, for one because I don’t use Excel enough to be an expert, but have enough software experience to sometimes want to use complex concepts in Excel. Having all this in one place helps me with that goal.
  • You need to ensure your data is either XML in a well-formed document format, or you can translate your data to well-formed XML.

The links and quotes starting with the question that sparked my interest:

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Posted in Development, Excel, Office, Office 2013, Office 2016, Office VBA, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, XML, XML/XSD, XPath | Leave a Comment »

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