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.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in About, Cancer, LifeHacker, Personal, Power User, Rectum cancer | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/04
Cool interesting video: [Wayback/Archive] UTF-8, Explained Simply – YouTube
It covers both history from the late 1800s Baudot Code (also known as ITA1) via 1930s ITA2 and 1950’s EBCDIC / FIELDATA ages through 7-bit ASCII in the 1970s and incompatible UCS-2 (now UTF-16) of the 1990s to the current day and age of UTF-8 (which actually started out on a placemat in 1992).
Though mentioning 8-bit encoding, it skips details of extended ASCII encodings like ISO/IEC 8859 and Windows-1252.
It goes to quite some length on decoding UTF-8 and showing how forgiving the UTF-8 standard is. Yes, it is a self-synchronising code thanks to the venerable Ken Thompson.
Definitely worth watching as it also covers the Zero-width joiner which is not just important for combining Emoji, as it is used by many people nowadays, but got in fact implemented to support various scripts like Arabic script or any Indic script.
Oh, the placemat story: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in ASCII, Development, EBCDIC, Encoding, ISO-8859, Software Development, UCS-2, Unicode, UTF-16, UTF-8, Windows-1252 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/04
Dit is net zo nalatig als de Odildo hack waar alle klantgegevens mee op straat kwamen te liggen: [Wayback/Archive] Odido-router verzamelt analytics van je huishouden
Bevindingen in het kort
- De Odido-router haalt bij een nieuwe WAN-verbinding een bash-script op over een onversleutelde HTTP-verbinding.
- Je kan dit script manipuleren om een root shell op je router te krijgen.
- Als je TLS-verkeer mitm’t zie je analytics-data over de lijn gaan; de scripters hebben TLS-validatie uitgezet (`curl -k`) dus je kan dit ‘versleutelde’ analytics-verkeer inzien.
- Je router stuurt namen en MAC-adressen van devices in je huis door naar Lifemote. Verder deelt het ding de SSID’s en MAC-adressen van WiFi-netwerken in de buurt. En wat analytics-stats over je dataverbruik. Lifemote adverteert met “AI-Powered Home Wi-Fi Solutions for ISPs”. Het voelt wat vies dat zij AI’s gaan trainen met data uit mijn huishouden. Daar vind ik wat van.
--jeroen
Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, bash, bash, Development, ISP, Odido (ex Dutch T-Mobile), Power User, Python, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/04
Finding a reference to DASM while researching yesterday’s post @jpluimers on Twitter: “@b0rk @jilles_com Acids vs bases.”, it felt even more like a trip like memory lane as I had used it in the 1980s on Apple ][ and Apple //e after mainly using EDASM. Lisa and Merlin.
I am glad that it is still alive and kicking with home page at [Wayback/Archive] dasm – macro assembler for 8-bit machines and repository at [Wayback/Archive] dasm-assembler/dasm: Macro assembler with support for several 8-bit microprocessors.
Especially this history section on the home page rang a bell:
- Matthew Dillon started dasm in 1987-1988.
- Olaf “Rhialto” Seibert extended dasm in 1995.
- Andrew “Dr.Boo” Davie maintained dasm in 2003-2008.
- Peter Fröhlich maintained dasm in 2008-2015.
- In 2019, the dasm source code and releases were moved to GitHub.
More links from this trip down memory lane:
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in //e, 6502 Assembly, Apple, Apple ][, Assembly Language, Development, History, Power User, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/03
For Some links on getting the most recent defragmentation time of a Windows volume I needed to copy back and forth some XML code back and forth between my ARM MacBook Pro to a remote Windows machine accessing via the Microsoft Windows App (the app formerly known as Microsoft Remote Desktop for Mac).
The problem with that is the copying would lose line breaks, which for XML meaning is no problem, but for human understandability while editing the XML in the Event View query dialog was.
So I decided to go to the “Code” view in my Classic WordPress editor (did I ever tell you much I dislike – especially the accessibility of – the not so new but still haughty named Gutenberg editor?), copied the HTML encoded form and wanted to convert it to unencoded XML text.
Well, here I got to naming confusion land, on which I will talk further below, but first two of the potential solutions:
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Cyberchef, Development, Encoding, HTML, Software Development, URL Encoding, Web Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/03
A few years back I tweeted [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers @wiert@mastodon.social on Twitter: “@b0rk @jilles_com Acids vs bases.”
It was a kind of tongue-in-cheek reaction (with a way better picture below) to a very valuable post by b0rk (Julia Evans) on both Twitter and Mastodon [Wayback/Archive] Julia Evans on Twitter: “bases” / [Wayback/Archive] Julia Evans: “bases title: bases # we usually…” – Mastodon for two reasons:
- There are various interpretations of bases
- Octal is very important to educate as errors introduced by its support are hard to spot even if you do know about octal.
Back to Julia’s post:
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, 68k, 8086, Assembly Language, bash, bash, C, C++, Chemistry, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, EPS/PostScript, Event, Haskell, History, Java, Java Platform, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Jon Skeet, LifeHacker, Mathematics, PDP-11, Perl, PHP, Power User, Python, science, Scripting, Software Development, x86 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/02
Being so used to open PDF files using MacOS Preview – which remembers the last view settings and re-applies that when opening a new document, it took me a while to figure out that in both Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader (formerly Acrobat Reader) you have to set it in the preferences using Ctrl-K as explained in [Wayback/Archive] Changing default page view in Adobe Acrobat
When you open a PDF in Adobe Acrobat Reader, the default page view may not be to your liking. For example, it may show a full page when you really need to see part of a page in full width.
…
To change these settings follow the steps below.
- Edit, Preferences (or Control-K).
- Choose Page Display in the Categories section.
- In the Default Layout and Zoom section (top of page), change the Page Layout and Zoom selections to your preference. “100%” and “Fit Page” are most commonly used in the Zoom selection.
- Click OK to save your settings.
Contrary to the above, the defaults for both my Acrobat Reader both the “Paye Layout” and “Zoom” settings were “Automatic”. I just changed the “Page Layout” to “Two-Up” and am much happier now (:
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Adobe, Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Reader, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/27
AliExpress aggressive acidic flux solder has remarkably heavy reels:
| Total |
Reel |
Solder |
% Solder/Total |
| 100 gram |
67 gram |
33 gram |
33 % |
| 51 gram |
32 gram |
19 gram |
37 % |
| 20 gram |
10 gram |
10 gram |
50 % |
--jeroen
Posted in DIY, LifeHacker, Power User, Soldering | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/27
Reading SubStack via RSS skips the nag screens and other annoying steps.
If you sign in to your.substack.com/feed then you get redirected to your own RSS feed link.
Even easier if you want to read from a link:
- if you see a Subtack URL hosted at
domain.substack.com
- then the accompanying RSS feed URL is
domain.substack.com/feed
Via [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Baert on Twitter: “Tip voor mensen die substacks lezen: elke substack heeft een RSS-feed onder https:// whatever . substack . com / feed – Inladen in je RSS-lezer, en geen nag screens of gedoe, gewoon de content.”
Related:
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Power User, RSS, SocialMedia, Substack | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 