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 »

Some notes on the The Internet Archive command-line interface (CLI) and Python API tools

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/05/20

Few people realise that in addition to uploading through the Internet Archive web user interface at [Wayback/Archive] Upload to Internet Archive, you can also upload through the command-line.

Fewer people know using the CLI is more reliable, as the web UI often has trouble with recovery from upload interruptions (but it is better than the Wayback Machine archiver which seems to have no recovery options at all).

Jason Scott responded to a really rude comment of an uploader, but the Internet Archive does not really advocate the CLI uploader much. I added a comment, but doubt that has changed: it regrettably is an organisation that has a track record of being quite reluctant to publicly show improvement.

The whole thread is at [Wayback/Archive] Post by @textfiles.com — Bluesky: Regarding large-size uploads, especially over, let’s say, 750mb to the Internet Archive, I highly suggest the ia command-line client, which has a separate pathway not dealing with weird browser oddities and behavior.… and archived for posterity.

TL;DR

  • you can batch upload to the base Internet Archive
  • you cannot  batch upload to the Wayback Machine of the internet archive

First, a list on how you can find the CLI tooling the normal way:

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Posted in Development, Python, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

A source for many batch-file tricks: ghidra/launch.bat at master · NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/05/20

If you want to improve your batchfile-fu, this might be your start: [Wayback/Archive] ghidra/launch.bat at master · NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra

After a quick look, I already recognised these tricks:

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Posted in Development, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

the 90 day disclosure policy is dead :: Himanshu Anand :: Threat Notes

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/05/19

15 minute important read: [Wayback/Archive] the 90 day disclosure policy is dead :: Himanshu Anand :: Threat Notes

TL;DR: (not sugar coated; read the full post and their follow-ups on the why and how)

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Posted in AI and ML; Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Blue team, Development, LLM, Power User, Red team, Security, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

You thought Windows drivers from 2006 were old, wait’ll you see the Intel drivers from 1968! – The Old New Thing

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/05/19

ImageInteresting strategy that driver vendors use to prevent their drivers to be installed when newer versions are installed [Wayback/Archive] You thought Windows drivers from 2006 were old, wait’ll you see the Intel drivers from 1968! – The Old New Thing

Or in other words: with this mechanism drivers can be a generic alternative to be installed when no more specific or newer driver is available.

Via [Wayback/Archive] ⚜ 8-bit Hero (aka Sven) ⚜ on Twitter: “Wow, Intel has been writing windows divers for a long time! Had no idea.”

Related

Intel Drivers dated 1970 shown by [Wayback/Archive] Kevlin Henney (@KevlinHenney) in his Keynote streamed at around the 1200 second mark: [Wayback/Archive] KotlinConf’23 – Effectenbeurszaal Day 2 – YouTube.

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Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Java Platform, Kotlin, Power User, Software Development, Windows | Leave a Comment »

Some notes on Nikon cameras and HDR (I have F-lenses)

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/05/18

Still using Nikon F-mount DSLRs here, though I might upgrade to Nikon Z-mount and appropriate Z-mount adapter to continue using my F-lenses.

Anyway: some links on HDR, as for older bodies that require extra steps.

--jeroen

Posted in About, Nikon, Personal, Photography, Photography, Power User | Leave a Comment »

TrueNAS ZFS: on my list of things to tinker with

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/05/18

I totally missed that FreeNAS has been renamed into TrueNAS CORE. Since FreeNAS had been on my list to tinker with, now is TrueNAS – Wikipedia.

Relate/via:

Tweets:

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Posted in *nix, BSD, FreeBSD, Power User, ZFS | Leave a Comment »

Ein Blick zurück – das beste Auto der 70er Jahre – YouTube – W116 450SEL 6.9 aus der Schweiz

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/05/15

As a memory to our almost identical Swiss W116 450SEL 6.9 a video in Swiss German about it: [Wayback/Archive] Ein Blick zurück – das beste Auto der 70er Jahre – YouTube.

This one with fabric, white headlights and ABS, ours with leather, yellow headlights plus headlight wipers, and no ABS (it took around chassis numbers ending around 750 until ABS was available: ours was slightly earlier)

--jeroen

Posted in About, cars, LifeHacker, Personal, Power User, W116 | Leave a Comment »

SocialGrep – Social Media Analytics for Reddit

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/05/15

Though I have no Reddit account, it has much useful content, so I wish I had known his query site like 15 years ago [Wayback/Archive] SocialGrep – Social Media Analytics for Reddit

It looks like very few people mentioned me on Reddit too. Is that a good thing?

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Posted in Power User, SocialMedia | Leave a Comment »

When you bump into Mojibake in your development, don’t use table-based solutions to solve it

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/05/14

A while ago I bumped into [Wayback/Archive] Unicode weirdness – VCL – Delphi-PRAXiS [en].

This sketched a mojibake problem where PDF to text converted files had odd looking character sequences.

The solution – replacing these sequences with more correctly looking text – worked at first, but then failed because the underlying source code got “corrected” from containing the Mojibake character sequences into the correct Unicode text.

A better solution is to figure out what series of encoding/decoding steps will give the correct text.

This is where – again – [Wayback/Archive] Home – ftfy: fixes text for you comes up: a still indispensable tool.

–jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Development, Encoding, Mojibake, PDF, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Beeper — All your chats in one app

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/05/13

[Wayback/Archive] Beeper — All your chats in one app

Via a friend that mentioned Beeper to me.

On the list to try out somewhere during the year.

It is open source; some more links:

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Posted in Chat, Development, Discord, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, Facebook, git, GoogleChat, IRC, LinkedIn, Power User, Signal messenger, SocialMedia, Software Development, Source Code Management, Telegram, Twitter, WhatsApp | Leave a Comment »

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