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 »

floating point representation

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/07/15

Like many programmers, in my early days I was totally unaware how floating point values were stored. Even seemingly simple data structures are worth explaining, especially when debugging.

So I was glad getting referenced to [Wayback/Archive] Float Exposed and to [Wayback/Archive] Floating Point Visually Explained which I will quote a few bits below.

About bits: did you notice you can flick on the float.exposed bits to flip them? Try it!

The references came from replies to [Wayback/Archive] Julia Evans on Twitter: “floating point representation”

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Posted in 8087, Algorithms, Conference Topics, Conferences, Debugging, Development, Event, Floating point handling, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

ASCII Table (Code page 437 – IBM PC) – hexadecimal/decimal – HardwareHacking/ascii.pdf at main · jillesdotcom/HardwareHacking · GitHub

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/07/15

One of the best ASCII tables I have ever come across: [Wayback/Archive] HardwareHacking/ascii.pdf at main · jillesdotcom/HardwareHacking · GitHub is a PDF extended ASCII Table (Code page 437IBM PC) – with hexadecimal/decimal markers.

Of course the PDF prints best, but the GitHub [Wayback/Archive] Render below is also quote useful:

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Posted in ASCII, Development, Encoding, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

GitHub – breakzplatform/downloader.notx.blue

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/07/14

Interesting, as this seems to handle all actions client-side: [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – breakzplatform/downloader.notx.blue

Hosting is at two sites:

The code is a tiny HTML wrapper around about 1000 lines of JavaScript (plus a few hundred lines of minified [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – ffmpegwasm/ffmpeg.wasm: FFmpeg for browser, powered by WebAssembly JavaScript code). Impressive!

Via [Wayback/Archive] notx.blue – Projetos do Joselito para o Bluesky

--jeroen

Posted in BlueSky, CSS, Development, ffmpeg, HTML, HTML5, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Media, Scripting, SocialMedia, Software Development, Video, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

Scotland’s Secret Bunker – Visitor attraction of Scotland’s best kept secret

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/07/14

Hopefully we can visit here someday: [Wayback/Archive] Scotland’s Secret Bunker – Visitor attraction of Scotland’s best kept secret

Via:

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Posted in Development, Hardware Development, Hardware Interfacing, LifeHacker, Power User, USB | Leave a Comment »

IEEE Spectrum: Old Smartphones Get New Life as Tiny Data Centers Even 15-year-old phones can still outperform IoT-specific devices

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/07/13

[Wayback/Archive] IEEE Spectrum: Old Smartphones Get New Life as Tiny Data Centers Even 15-year-old phones can still outperform IoT-specific devices

Via: [Wayback/Archive] Joaquim Homrighausen on X: “”Old Smartphones Get New Life as Tiny Data Centers” 🤔 🧐 https://t.co/rWWwCe7nBU #smartphones #datacenter #devops #hacking #clustercomputing #computing #research”

--jeroen

Posted in Hardware, LifeHacker, Power User, Raspberry Pi | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Voorraad problemen met fexofenadine en andere hooikoortsmediciatie bij apotheken

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/07/13

Ik las dit, na een dramatisch slecht begin van het hooikoortsseizoen wat bij mij van maart tot en met oktober loopt, te laat: [Wayback/Archive] Mogelijk minder voorraad van hooikoortsmedicijnen bij jouw apotheek – VND

De tekorten gaan om deze medicijnen tegen allergie:

  • Levocetirizine (tablet 5 mg)
  • Promethazine (tablet 25 mg)
  • Acrivastine (capsule 8 mg)
  • Fexofenadine (tablet 180 mg)

Ook nog steeds tekort aan salbutamol

Wat apotheken niet doen, ik heb er meerdere gehad, is behalve vertellen dat een medicijn besteld moet worden, wat de globale levertijd gaat zijn.

Twee dingen die ik ga doen:

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Posted in LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Some links on BMW E61/E60 side mirror repair

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/07/10

While avoiding someone colliding in me, I damaged the cap of the passenger side mirror.

Some links I used to get it off and replaced/repaired:

Video links (full videos below the post signature):

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Posted in cars, E61 530xd touring, LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »

The ridiculous efficiency of induction cooktops and pressure cookers – 64Wh to cook some rice! – YouTube

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/07/10

This is cool: [Wayback/Archive] The ridiculous efficiency of induction cooktops and pressure cookers – 64Wh to cook some rice! – YouTube

Cooker used:

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

One Winder to Rule Them All – Bambu Filament? No Problem! – YouTube

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/07/09

Interesting, I am going to try to make one with help of Viskip: [Wayback/Archive] Post by @viskip.bsky.social — Bluesky

Wil je deze ook? Ik heb nog een op maat gemaakte as waar ik niets mee doe.

This is the device: [Wayback/Archive] One Winder to Rule Them All – Bambu Filament? No Problem! – YouTube

Maybe at the time of publication, I already made it.

The cool thing: it also winds other things like electromagnetic coils – you can see that towards the end of the video.

Related links, including the 3D model files:

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Posted in 3D printing, DIY, Power User | Leave a Comment »

A bit of perl trickery (or why you don’t should just execute any code you find on-line)

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/07/09

[Wayback/Archive] A bit of perl trickery shows a great example why you should only code you understand.

It explains the innards of a classic trap luring people into execute some obfuscated code, in this case Perl based.

Which makes it yet another testament to not blindly download and execute stuff from the internet.

So be aware when you see obfuscated scripts and things luring you into:

Be even more alert when these require elevated access (like running under sudo).

Via: [Wayback/Archive] Leo Bicknell on Twitter: “@jpluimers @IanColdwater Executes “rm -rf /”. This is ancient Perl monks way of teaching people not to run programs they don’t understand as root. … But hey, these days people “curl -o – url | bash”. It’s surprising that isn’t exploited more.”

Which was response to me asking what the below code did that was fully misunderstood by ChatGPT (which is Large Language Model based on a large corpus of natural language, not a small corpus of evil red-team programming language code snippets) to a series of Tweets by Ian Coldwater.

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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, ash/dash, bash, bash, CommandLine, Development, Perl, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Python, RegEx, Scripting, sh, Software Development | Leave a Comment »