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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in About, Cancer, LifeHacker, Personal, Power User, Rectum cancer | Leave a Comment »

Some notes on finding a USB-C dock for my MacBook Pro M1 Max with multiple USB-C / Thunderbolt monitor outputs

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/11/09

I had two desk places at home: one smaller “overflow” desk on the first floor (north side) where guests can temporarily work and which my better half and me use during very hot days, and the main desk in my office at the top floor (my better half has their own on the same floor) for autumn through start of summer.

The smaller desk has a two 30-inch WQXGA (2560 * 1600) monitor setup (of which one – a trusty Dell 3008WFP supports all my retro hardware as it has so many display connections ¹, the other a Iiyama ProLite XB3070WQS with better CCFL but less connections ²)

Since I didn’t want to have to plug in many connectors at once in my Apple Silicon based M1 Max powered MacBook Pro, I needed a dock.

The cool thing: the dock doesn’t need additional drivers, like the DisplayLink ones mentioned below, on my MacBook model.

These were the contenders:

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Posted in Dell 3008WFP, Displays, Hardware, Iiyama ProLite XB3070WQS, LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Afschepen as a Service – Tilaa

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/11/09

[Wayback/Archive] Afschepen as a Service – Tilaa

U krijgt waarschijnlijk regelmatig ongevraagd telefonisch “aantrekkelijke aanbiedingen” of kunt “vrijblijvend informatie ontvangen” voor zaken die u niet nodig heeft. Telemarketeers zijn getrained om de leiding in het gesprek te nemen en u zo lang mogelijk aan de lijn te houden met als doel u iets te verkopen.

Maakt u of uw bedrijf gebruik van een telefooncentrale? Dan kunt u een intern nummer reserveren en deze koppelen aan het afscheep-telefoonnummer: +31853033033

Via: [Wayback/Archive] Hans Kruse on Twitter: “@jpluimers 1 van. de comments Afschepen As a service. briljant!”

–jeroen

Posted in LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Finally Someone Did What Apple Couldn’t… – YouTube

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/11/06

TL;DW – FlexBar: a touch bar that works, contrary to the Mac touch strip 10 years ago.

[Wayback/Archive] Finally Someone Did What Apple Couldn’t… – YouTube

Interesting. Product and documentation links:

--jeroen

[Wayback/Archive] Finally Someone Did What Apple Couldn’t… – YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOhpkyOu2WU

Posted in Apple, Hardware, KVM keyboard/video/mouse, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Old domains, especially defunct “secure” file sharing servies, are a risk (and a red team vector)

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/11/06

Interesting opinion to which I agree: [Wayback/Archive] Greg Linares (Laughing Mantis) on Twitter: “@SwiftOnSecurity Legit great tip One of the best vectors for this are old “secure” file sharing services that seem to have disappeared in the last 5 to 10 years which hosted files to be shared from corp to corp. Files are often white listed from these are several services such as EDR & web”

From this Twitter thread:

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Posted in Blue team, Power User, Red team, Security | Leave a Comment »

Cleaning <!– wp:* comment elements from the WordPress Gutenberg editor

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/11/05

The only reason the very keyboard unfriendly WordPress Gutenberg editor can be a block editor is that it inserts tons of HTML comment elements starting with <!-- wp: in the code like for instance <!-- wp:paragraph -->…<!-- /wp:paragraph -->.

That makes the HTML even heavier than it already is, and getting rid of it wasn’t easy to find but is easy to do.

I wanted a JavaScript based solution, but could not find any quickly enough so for now these website based solutions work OK-ish when enabling the “clean comments” checkbox and then perform a clean action:

More links:

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Posted in Classic editor, Development, Gutenberg editor, HTML, SocialMedia, Software Development, Web Development, WordPress, WordPress | Leave a Comment »

Git files hidden in plain sight 🫥 – Tyler Cipriani

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/11/05

Infinite magic awaits the intrepid developer willing to abuse git plumbing. After all, git is just a database with a terrible interface.

From [Wayback/Archive] Git files hidden in plain sight 🫥 – Tyler Cipriani

I wonder how various endpoint security solutions handle this (:

Via:

–jeroen

Posted in Blue team, Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, git, GitHub, Power User, Red team, Security, Software Development, Source Code Management | Leave a Comment »

Volledig Post-Quantum Cryptografie website

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/11/04

Voor mijn link archief als ik er aan toe kom om ook een PQC web-site in te richten: [Wayback/Archive] Volledig Post-Quantum Cryptografie website, een mooi artikel van [Wayback/Archive] Harld (@harld@masto.ai) – Mastodon die sommigen kennen van een of meer van deze sites:

Via

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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Apache2, Certificates, Development, Encryption, HTTPS/TLS security, PKI, Power User, PQC, Public Key Cryptography, Security, Software Development, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

twitter/communitynotes: Documentation and source code powering Twitter’s Community Notes

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/11/04

Is it OK to help with [Wayback/Archive] twitter/communitynotes: Documentation and source code powering Twitter’s Community Notes?

Some of the involved Twitter accounts (various languages now have their own accounts):

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

Today 10 years ago; SQlite reversed their temp file prefix into etilsq_ from sqlite_; why? Harassement.

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/11/03

Choose your prefixes by default, especially if you name them after someone else’s product.

In this case, SQLite suffered from McAfee starting to use sqlite_ as prefix for temporary files in 2016.

SQLite had been using that prefix for a long time, and properly cleaned up these files during application shutdown.

McAfee didn’t cleanup after themselves which, after a long track record of dissatisfying users – [Wayback/Archive] The McAfee update mess explained | Reuters – wasn’t an incident, didn’t surprise techies, but prompted regular users to blame SQLite, some even tracking down their developers and call harass them.

McAfee apparently was deaf for a warning that then had been present for more than 10 years, as this got changed change in 20040522:

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Posted in C, Database Development, Development, Software Development, SQLite | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

datetime – What is the difference between UTC and GMT? – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/11/03

[Wayback/Archive] datetime – What is the difference between UTC and GMT? – Stack Overflow

TL;DR: they used to be different but have been the same for a while now.

The difference is summarised in [Wayback/Archive] Hans Kruse on Twitter: “TIL; I should use OffsetDateTime in Java. An interesting discussion on UTC vs GMT and the historical differences was posted on Stackoverflow. – UTC has leap seconds – GMT had stretched seconds Nowadays they are the same.”

The historic difference however means that when handling past timestamps, you need to be aware that the differ between GMT and UTC.

Which means it is worth to read the whole Stack Overflow question with the most important answers: a trip down memory lane.

–jeroen

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

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