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 »
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 »
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 »
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:
- 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.
- … 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 »
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 »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/08
I could not find a reliable per-user setting that works with just logoff/logon for Windows 11 like I found for Windows 10 in Disabling the Windows 10 and Windows 11 news (and weather) feeds.
So (for now?) there is only a global Globally which needs admin rights and a logoff/logon sequence:
:: requires admin
reg add "HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Dsh" /v "AllowNewsAndInterests" /t REG_DWORD /d "0" /f
echo logoff/logon to apply the change, or restart Explorer
Via:
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Posted in Batch-Files, Development, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/07
Windows had its own aCropalypse in the Snipping tool, but other UWP based applications are vulnerable of that too because of this:
[Wayback/Archive] Steven Murdoch on Twitter: “However, the new “more secure” Universal Windows Platform (UWP) sandboxes the file picker in a separate process, allowing neat features like capability-based access control. It returns a file handle which, if the selected file exists, will not overwrite the existing content! 3/9”
It is part of this interesting [Wayback/Archive] Thread by @sjmurdoch on Thread Reader App with these two parts just after the above Tweet:
The old Win32 API for saving a file was (roughly) to show a file picker, get the filename the user selected, and then open the file. To open a file, the programmer must specify whether to overwrite the file or not, and example code usually does overwrite the file.
However, the new “more secure” Universal Windows Platform (UWP) sandboxes the file picker in a separate process, allowing neat features like capability-based access control. It returns a file handle which, if the selected file exists, will not overwrite the existing content!
The tread continued supporting this statement, that in the new situation you need to manually truncated the file, and referenced these links:
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Posted in .NET, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, SocialMedia, Software Development, Twitter, UWP (Universal Windows Platform), Windows Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/06
Op [Wayback/Archive] Sirenes – Brandweer staat dit:
👉 Geen testalarm!
Op maandag 6 april (2e paasdag) en op maandag 4 mei (dodenherdenking) is er geen test-alarm. De sirene zal dan niet te horen zijn.
Ze vergeten daar de vervolgvraag: wanneer gaan de sirenes dan wel af?
Met andere woorden: wordt het uitgesteld tot een week later, of wordt het maar liefst twee maanden overgeslagen tot maandag 1 juni? Of pas als de voorraden fossiele brandstoffen op zijn en er chaos uitbreekt?
Dit is een iets aangepaste versie van mijn toot [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers: “Vandaag om 12:00 waren wel de …” – Mastodon
--jeroen
Posted in LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 