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 »

Reflection Frame: is there a public API yet?

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/09

The display quality of [Wayback/Archive] Reflection Frame is nice, but the there was no public API at the time of writing, so I wonder if there is now.

Public API request initially denied at [WaybackSave/Archive] Reflection Frame: Digital Photo Prints by Creative Design Worx — Kickstarter:

  1. Would you expose some simple REST API that would accept a jpeg or similar? It’s fine if it needs to be pre-dithered. Only interested in this if it can be controlled from Home Assistant, not interested in manually using any smartphone app.
  2. … At this time, we don’t have plans to open-source the connection protocol, as our hardware and firmware are designed as a proprietary system. …

Via [Wayback/Archive] Colour E-Ink Picture Frame – The Reflection Frame – YouTube.

--jeroen

Posted in Development, Hardware, Hardware Interfacing, IoT Internet of Things, Power User, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Only available on Window, but sometimes useful, the Excel FILTERXML function

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/09

Some links on the [Wayback/Archive] FILTERXML function – Microsoft Support.

It is only available on Windows (because of the underlying XPath libraries used, I think it is MSXML), and “only” as of Excel 2013, but still can be useful.

Some links below on FILTERXML and related XPath information so I can more easily find their content back.

Notes:

  • FILTERXML only supports XPath 1.0
  • The quotes are huge, for one because I don’t use Excel enough to be an expert, but have enough software experience to sometimes want to use complex concepts in Excel. Having all this in one place helps me with that goal.
  • You need to ensure your data is either XML in a well-formed document format, or you can translate your data to well-formed XML.

The links and quotes starting with the question that sparked my interest:

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Posted in Development, Excel, Office, Office 2013, Office 2016, Office VBA, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, XML, XML/XSD, XPath | Leave a Comment »

GitHub – D00Movenok/BounceBack: ↕️🤫 Stealth redirector for your red team operation security

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/08

Not just for red teamers (:

[Wayback/Archive] GitHub – D00Movenok/BounceBack: ↕️🤫 Stealth redirector for your red team operation security

Via [WaybackSave/Archive] Florian Roth ⚡️ on X: “This is a legitimate part of red teaming”

[Wayback/Archive] Tom Dörr on X: “Reverse proxy hides infrastructure from scanners …”

--jeroen

Posted in Communications Development, Development, Go (golang), Power User, Red team, Security, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Disabling the Windows News and Interests fly-out widget through the registry

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/08

I could not find a reliable per-user setting that works with just logoff/logon for Windows 11 like I found for Windows 10 in Disabling the Windows 10 and Windows 11 news (and weather) feeds.

So (for now?) there is only a global Globally which needs admin rights and a logoff/logon sequence:

:: requires admin
reg add "HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Dsh" /v "AllowNewsAndInterests" /t REG_DWORD /d "0" /f
echo logoff/logon to apply the change, or restart Explorer

Via:

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Posted in Batch-Files, Development, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11 | Leave a Comment »

Copilot – Terms of Use: “Copilot is for entertainment purposes only.”

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/07

Now you know it from the update of the Microsoft [Wayback/Archive] Copilot – Terms of Use: “Copilot is for entertainment purposes only.”

Via [Wayback/Archive] Post by @doublepulsar.com — Bluesky “What happened to the world daddy?” “We destroyed it, but for one beautiful moment in time, we had copilot entertainment” using a blurred image which I found the source for in my past blog post Yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders. – Finding back the source.

The blurred image: [Wayback/Archive] bafkreibc4wqxxv5hjfs2fuv5ccuc2bobqj3ysx7t7ca5vndzzmiy3ouzfu (730×636)

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Posted in AI and ML; Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Development, GitHub Copilot, LLM, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Steven Murdoch on Twitter: “However, the new “more secure” Universal Windows Platform (UWP) sandboxes the file picker in a separate process, allowing neat features like capability-based access control. It returns a file handle which, if the selected file exists, will not overwrite the existing content! 3/9”

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/07

Windows had its own aCropalypse in the Snipping tool, but other UWP based applications are vulnerable of that too because of this:

[Wayback/Archive] Steven Murdoch on Twitter: “However, the new “more secure” Universal Windows Platform (UWP) sandboxes the file picker in a separate process, allowing neat features like capability-based access control. It returns a file handle which, if the selected file exists, will not overwrite the existing content! 3/9”

It is part of this interesting [Wayback/Archive] Thread by @sjmurdoch on Thread Reader App with these two parts just after the above Tweet:

The old Win32 API for saving a file was (roughly) to show a file picker, get the filename the user selected, and then open the file. To open a file, the programmer must specify whether to overwrite the file or not, and example code usually does overwrite the file.
However, the new “more secure” Universal Windows Platform (UWP) sandboxes the file picker in a separate process, allowing neat features like capability-based access control. It returns a file handle which, if the selected file exists, will not overwrite the existing content!

The tread continued supporting this statement, that in the new situation you need to manually truncated the file, and referenced these links:

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Posted in .NET, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, SocialMedia, Software Development, Twitter, UWP (Universal Windows Platform), Windows Development | Leave a Comment »

“Your YouTube Comments” is part of “Google – My Activity”

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/06

It took me a while to find, but the canonical URL is Source: [Wayback/Archive] Google – My Activity – Your YouTube Comments

It was a relatively short queste:

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Posted in Google, Power User, SocialMedia, YouTube | Leave a Comment »

Vandaag om 12:00 waren wel de kerkklokken, maar niet de sirenes te horen. Het is onduidelijk wanneer ze wel te horen zullen zijn.

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/06

Op [Wayback/Archive] Sirenes – Brandweer staat dit:

👉 Geen testalarm!

Op maandag 6 april (2e paasdag) en op maandag 4 mei (dodenherdenking) is er geen test-alarm. De sirene zal dan niet te horen zijn.

Ze vergeten daar de vervolgvraag: wanneer gaan de sirenes dan wel af?

Met andere woorden: wordt het uitgesteld tot een week later, of wordt het maar liefst twee maanden overgeslagen tot maandag 1 juni? Of pas als de voorraden fossiele brandstoffen op zijn en er chaos uitbreekt?

Dit is een iets aangepaste versie van mijn toot [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers: “Vandaag om 12:00 waren wel de …” – Mastodon

--jeroen

Posted in LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Pumpkin soup recipe

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/06

Recipe for pumpkin soup that I got from a friend quite a while ago and further below a Dutch recipe from another friend.

I posted it a while ago in a Dutch pompoensoep thread a few years back: [Wayback/Archive] Thread by @jpluimers on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App

Start message: [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers @wiert@mastodon.social on Twitter: “@Marjo_Sl @Dinsdal85174312 Dit is het enige pompoenrecept wat ik heb: kreeg ik ooit van een vriend. De truc is 45 minuten in de oven op 200 graden. Dan komt het vel er makkelijk af en is de pompoen ook al flink gaar, dus gaat snijden veel makkelijker. Recept over de alt-text van beide plaatjes verdeeld.”

English recipe

Text OCR-ed from image, then fixed:

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

keyboard – Shortcut to apply header style 4 (and 5, 6…) – Ask Different

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/03

[Wayback/Archive] keyboard – Shortcut to apply header style 4 (and 5, 6…) – Ask Different (thanks [Wayback/Archive] bouke!):

Found it, although I did not expect the solution to be this simple. To do this, follow these steps:
  1. Right-click the Heading 4 style in the ribbon and choose ‘Modify’ (Or through Layout > Styles > Heading 4 > Modify
  2. In the left hand bottom corner, select ‘Shortcut’
  3. Assign shortcut ⌘⌥4
  4. Repeat for Heading 5, 6…
  5. Done!

Query: [Wayback/Archive] macos microsoft word shortcut for heading levels – Google Suche

More: [Wayback/Archive] Keyboard shortcuts in Word – Microsoft Support: MacOS

--jeroen

Posted in Apple, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Office, Office 2021, Power User | Leave a Comment »