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 »

Delphi documentation: GetIt Local files – Google Docs

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/11

This [Wayback/Archive] GetIt Local files – Google Docs is so much better than the [WayBack/Archive] DocWiki documentation for at least these reasons:

  • it is one coherent document
  • it is complete and does not cut away parts of the source code examples (especially the JSON in the DocWiki is bad)

I wish it had been a Markdown or reStructuredText document as that is far more version control friendly.

Hopefully it will stay on-line longer than [Archive] drive.google.com/file/d/1Pt0YOMfS1eJK7e-NyLrZ5dNOj6UlqN1U/view| or the DocWiki documentation of prior Delphi versions. For more on that, read this blog post: The Delphi documentation site docwiki.embarcadero.com has been down/up oscillating for 4 days is now down for almost a day..

If you are curious to the DocWiki documentation on the GetIt Local files, then read these:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Delphi, Development, GetIt, Software Development | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

Unix/MacOS: “rm: illegal option — b” or how to remove files that have their name starting with a minus sign.

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/11

I had to remove all text files including a -bar.txt from the current directory using bash, so I automatically typed rm *txt resulting in this nice error:

rm: illegal option -- b
usage: rm [-f | -i] [-dPRrvW] file ...
       unlink file

When there was just a file named -foo.txt in the directory, the error became more interesting:

rm: illegal option -- o
usage: rm [-f | -i] [-dPRrvW] file ...
       unlink file

Then it struck me: rm is one of those old tools where you can smack all options together. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Apple, bash, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Do This Before You Solder Anything – YouTube

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/10

Soldering steps and common problems - Adafruit

Soldering steps and common problems – Adafruit

These are nice references when you start to learn soldering:

The right part of the image from Adafruit is an almost 10 year old one that is heavily copied without reference. With reference, it is at¹

Adafruit also has this great link: [Wayback/Archive] Common Soldering Problems | Adafruit Guide To Excellent Soldering | Adafruit Learning System

The video:

  • Clean with isopropyl alcohol
    • Before soldering
    • After soldering

    Do not use (in the USA popular) rubbing alcohol, as that is only 70% (and 30% water) alcohol by volume: use at least 90%

    • Use a dispenser for alcohol to dose tiny bits
    • Use a non-woven tissue (large areas) or swab (small areas) for cleaning

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, Hardware Development, Soldering | Leave a Comment »

MacOS and Windows: sorting – Simple to enter Unicode character that would sort after Z in most cases? – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/10

TL;DR: There is no simple character that works on both MacOS and Windows.

[Wayback/Archive] sorting – Simple to enter Unicode character that would sort after Z in most cases? – Stack Overflow (thanks [Wayback/Archive] sorin and [Wayback/Archive] degenerate):

A

On Windows, none of these options work because they all sort before A.

A solution I ended up using is an Arabic character:

ٴ This folder comes after z in windows

Source

According to [Wayback/Archive] What Unicode character is this ?, the above mentioned character is U+0674 : ARABIC LETTER HIGH HAMZA.

Note that on Windows the ٴ character displays at the start of the filename, but on MacOS in Finder it ends up behind the extension (as Arabic script is right-to-left) and is very hard to remove. On the MacOS Terminal it ends up on the left and is easy to modify.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Apple, Encoding, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Power User, Unicode, Windows | Leave a Comment »

Solving OKI Errors while printing “544: Invalid Y C”, “545: Invalid M C”, “546: Invalid C C”, “547: Invalid K C”, or “544:Y Invalid C”, “545: M Invalid C”, “546: C Invalid C”, “547: K Invalid C”

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/09

If any of the below OKI error codes occur during printing then first re-seat (unlock, then lock) the corresponding toner cartridge.

When the error reoccurs, then wear a mask (toner spills can be dangerous to your lungs), then: unlock the toner cartridge, remove it, vacuum away any of the toner spill in the printer and on the cartridge, reinsert it and lock it.

The cause is a mechanical issue that happens both when only using original OKI toner cartridges and OEM or third party ones: wear of the parts over time will spill more and more toner causing the locked cartridge detection to cause a faulty result due to excessive spilled toner build-up.

For me this mostly happens on the colour cartridges and far less often on the black cartridge.

Error code list for the message at [Wayback/Archive] Troubleshooting | OKI “Check Toner Cartridge. Improper Lock Lever Position. Error: 544, 545, 546, 547”:

  • 544: Yellow (abbreviated as Y)
  • 545: Magenta (abbreviated as M)
  • 546: Cyan (abbreviated as C)
  • 547: Black (abbreviated as K, but sometimes as B)

On the above page self the solution lists as

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Hardware, OKI C332, OKI MC363/MC363DNW, OKI Printers, Power User, Printers | Leave a Comment »

Installing Poppler on Windows via Chocolatey, which includes pdfimages for lossless extraction of images from PDF files

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/09

At the time of writing there was an almost 3 year old [Wayback/Archive] Chocolatey Software | Poppler 0.89.0 version so I filed the issue [Wayback/Archive] poppler 23.03 has been out for a few weeks, can you please update the build? · Issue #88 · chtof/chocolatey-packages mentioning [Wayback/Archive] Pull requests · oschwartz10612/poppler-windows

Poppler 23.03.0

Since that did not get really solved, I finally found out that after installing scoop, then scoop install poppler did work and installed version 23.08.0 (which I documented in [Wayback/Archive] Poppler version out of date · Issue #75 · chtof/chocolatey-packages installs from the most recent [Wayback/Archive] Releases · oschwartz10612/poppler-windows).

A very different approach is to install Poppler inside Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) as explained in [Wayback/Archive] Poppler On Windows. Python, PDFs, and Window’s Subsytem for… | by Matthew Earl Miller | Towards Data Science.

I needed Poppler (or actually the Windows equivalent of poppler-utils) of two reasons:

  1. I wanted to experiment with pdftotext as it has these very compelling command-line switches.
  2. I needed to export images for which pdfimages is the poppler tool to go.

pdftotext

Let’s start with qoutes from [Wayback/Archive] pdftotext: Portable Document Format (PDF) to text converter (version 3.03) | poppler-utils Commands | Man Pages | ManKier:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Chocolatey, man/manual pages, mankier, PDF, Power User, Windows | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

Solved: CPU Xeon E5-1620 v.4 does not allow Windows 11 upgrade – HP Support Community – 8645349

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/06

I might need this: [Wayback/Archive] Solved: CPU Xeon E5-1620 v.4 does not allow Windows 11 upgrade – HP Support Community – 8645349

You don’t download the ISO file to a USB stick.

You download it to your PC and use the free Rufus utility that I zipped up and attached in that discussion link I posted to transfer the ISO file to a DVD so that it is bootable.

You have to use the version I attached 3.18 because the newer Rufus versions removed the W11 hardware check bypass hack.

Try it again in the morning when you are ‘bright eyed and bushy tailed’ as we say in the USA.:

Related:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11 | Leave a Comment »

HelgaDulfer on Twitter: “@zorgenzo Probeer form op te slaan en dan met Adobe Fill&Sign in vullen en ondertekenen; vervolgens kun je ingevulde exempl. mailen of weer opslaan” / Twitter

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/06

[Wayback/Archive] HelgaDulfer on Twitter: “@zorgenzo Probeer form op te slaan en dan met Adobe Fill&Sign in vullen en ondertekenen; vervolgens kun je ingevulde exempl. mailen of weer opslaan”

I took a quick look, but the mobile Fill & Sign apps on Android and iOS are even harder to use for filling out forms than using Acrobat Reader on PC or MacOS Preview.

–jeroen

Posted in Adobe, Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Reader, Android Devices, iOS, PDF, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Delphicon 2023 – Day 2 – YouTube

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/05

Forgot to schedule this post: [Wayback/Archive] Delphicon 2023 – Day 2 – YouTube

–jeroen

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

UTF-8, Explained Simply – YouTube

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 »

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