Since these files got missing again: [WayBack] Does anybody know where to get ReservedWordsOP.txt and ReservedWordsC.txt for java2OP.exe in bin\converters\java2op for Delphi 10.1 Berlin upd2? It also… – Rik van Kekem – Google+
Here they are:
Archive for November, 2016
ReservedWordsOP.txt and ReservedWordsC.txt for use with java2op in Delphi
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/11/22
Posted in Delphi, Delphi 10 Seattle, Delphi 10.1 Berlin (BigBen), Development, Software Development | 2 Comments »
RMAing a Google Nexus 5X, dying in Account hell… – via +Kristian Köhntopp
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/11/22
Google does react:
Noted. Contacting the right teams. And now trying to find Kim :)
Thanks for the writeup +Kristian Köhntopp
Source: RMAing a Google Nexus 5X, dying in Account hell …
Full story (comments in the above thread):
Kristian Köhntopp
RMAing a Google Nexus 5X, dying in Account hell
I purchased my Google Nexus 5X on November 11, 2015, almost exactly one year ago. The device died on November 15, 2016 during the morning commute, when it froze. Right now, when I try to power it on, I get a single red LED blink from the lower grille.
When I bought that device, I have been living in Berlin, Germany. I am living now in a village close to Amsterdam, Netherlands. I am a GPMAA subscriber with a family subscription, and I am managing the play family setup for my family from my account.
I called the Netherlands support number, and got an agent almost immediately. She’s speaking excellent English.
We are going through the device validation routine and establish that the device is indeed broken. Then she’s trying to find my Google account, but me having the name I have, I have to spell it about five times.
She’s ready to RMA, but wants to validate my address. That’s the old Berlin address.
Easy to fix. New Tab. Go find your face in the upper right, click on it, click on “My Account” and… Nope. That’s a link to myaccount.google.com, and you can’t find or set your address there.
Ok, new attempt. Go to play.google.com, and hit Account. That’s “Account” in the left hand menu of Play, not “Account” on the top bar where your face is. It’s showing Payment methods, which has nothing to do at all with addresses. Edit payment methods.
That links to payments.google.com, which has nothing to do with account at all, and is also different from security.google.com, which has all the other account details, but has nothing to do with payments or addresses. Anyway, I disgress, in payments.google.com, there’s an address.
It has no country. Country is two lines higher. And while there is a pen next to my address so I could edit it, I can’t edit my country, because… Well, at least there is an info bubble.
It says:
»You can’t change your country because of the following reasons:
– One or more Google services you’re using does not allow you to change your country
– You manage a Google family account«I read that as “Because you are giving us money we won’t allow you to update your data so that in the future you can continue to give us money.” Well.
“Can we detach the current payments from you account, so I can migrate it to the Netherlands?” “No, you can’t, that will break the Family setup, disable all my Sonos boxes which are running on this account, and will kill several software subscriptions attached to my account. Also, there is money on it, because I am participating in the Survey program, and there is about 400 local guides points attached to it as well.”
Kim, the support specialist handling my case, has been on the phone with me at this point for 40 minutes now. She’s put me on hold half a dozen times and consulted with as many payment, account and security specialists. She’s awesome. She’s kicking ass. She’s not giving up.
“Ok, are you in front of a laptop of desktop machine running a Chrome browser” “Indeed, I am, Kim.” “Ok, please open an incognito tab, I am going to walk you through the process of creating a new Gmail account, and if you have a Netherlands payment method, adding that to it.” “Thanks, Kim, I know how to do this. Let me quickly do this, and get back to you.” I put the phone away and make me another Gmail, add NL and my address to it in Payment methods, and she’s now handling the RMA through that.
Yeah, so if all goes well I am getting a replacement phone this week, and am sending back my broken phone to Google.
But, Google, it’s not actually just the phone that is broken. Your maze of security, payments, play and so on, it does not just suck. It borders on the insane.
And the way you are totally not handling country-as-a-living-addess vs country-for-RIAA-and-MPAA-suckage as two different things, it’s really, really hurting you.
Also, not handling the EU as one country, that’s only going to hurt more in the future as well.
So, if you are reading this and are in a position to change this mess. Do so. I don’t care if it is hard, or what the actual factual reasons for ending up with mess are. It’s broken. Fix it. Now. That would actually almost be too late.
My call started at 09:19 and took 54 minutes and 26 seconds to resolve. And just for the record, Kim is awesome and should be given a pay rise. It the tools and processes she has to work with that suck.
–jeroen
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Copy-Paste from Website to Terminal – always paste via an intermediate text editor
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/11/22
Everybody surely knows about more and more software trying to smart replace straight double quotes " with opening ” and closing ” ones.
WordPress is no exception and when you forget to embed these quotes in code and/or pre tags, your source code won’t paste as such.
For terminal code (nx or Windows console doesn’t matter much): it’s much worse: you should not copy/paste code directly to the terminal.
I usually did this any way to get quotes corrected, but – via Daniela Osterhagen referring Dorin Duminica – recently came across a reason that’s much more important:
What’s on the clipboard might not be what you saw on the web site.
An elaborate example is at User iteraction based exploitation: WYSINWYC (What you see is not what you copy) but it comes down to:
- The clipboard is getting all text from a selection
- The browser hides some part of that text by cleverly using one more more
styletags.
So basically copy/pasting to the console is just as risky as piping curl through bash or another shell. You can actually detect that server-side (and abuse it)!
–jeroen
Source: Copy-Paste from Website to Terminal
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Posted in Console (command prompt window), Development, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Leave a Comment »
Coping with UTF-16 / UCS-2 little endian in Batch files: numbers from WMIC
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/11/22
A while ago, I needed to get the various date, time and week values from WMIC to environment variables with pre-padded zeros. I thought: easy job, just write a batch file.
Tough luck: I couldn’t get the values to expand properly. Which in the end was caused by WMIC emitting UTF-16 and the command-interpreter not expecting double-byte character sets which messed up my original batch file.
| What I wanted | What I got |
|---|---|
|
|
WMIC uses this encoding because the Wide versions of Windows API calls use UTF-16 (sometimes called UCS-2 as that is where UTF-16 evolved from).
As Windows uses little-endian encoding by default, the high byte (which is zero) of a UTF-16 code point with ASCII characters comes first. That messes up the command interpreter.
Lucikly rojo was of great help solving this.
His solution is centered around set /A, which:
- handles integer numbers and calls them “numeric” (hinting floating point, but those are truncated to integer; one of the tricks rojo uses)
- and (be careful with this as 08 and 09 are not octal numbers) uses these prefixes:
- 0 for Octal
- 0x for hexadecimal
Enjoy and shiver with the online help extract:
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in Algorithms, Batch-Files, Development, Encoding, Floating point handling, Scripting, Software Development, UCS-2, UTF-16, UTF16 | Leave a Comment »
When your browser extensions go rouge…
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/11/21
A while ago I suspected at least one of my Chrome extensions to do funny things.
In the end it appeared that “Live HTTP Headers 1.0.8” went rogue a while ago and has by now been removed from the store as this link is gone: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/iaiioopjkcekapmldfgbebdclcnpgnlo ()
It was part of a much larger set of extensions that went away and isn’t limited to Chrome: other browsers with extension mechanisms suffer from this too. More links about this at the bottom of this post.
Which means that by now you should be really careful which extensions you have installed and enabled.
So, browse through these and ensure you’ve disabled everything you don’t need permanently:
On my system, I removed these:
- “Live HTTP Headers 1.0.8” used to be at https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/iaiioopjkcekapmldfgbebdclcnpgnlo
- This extension contains malware.
- “JSONView 0.0.32.2” used to be at https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chklaanhfefbnpoihckbnefhakgolnmc
- This extension contains a serious security vulnerability.
- “Read Later Fast 1.6.18” used to be at https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/decdfngdidijkdjgbknlnepdljfaepji
- This extension violates the Chrome Web Store policy.
When you go from Chrome to these URLs through the extensions page, it usually appends an UTM tracker like utm_source to the URL.
So I dug into that as well and found these links explaining them:
- [WayBack] What Is “UTM_Source” And Should You Be Worried? – Make Tech Easier
- [WayBack] Understanding utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign | ByteFive Internet Marketing and Publishing
- [WayBack] How I use utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign from Google Analytics | Davin’s blog
References:
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Posted in Chrome, Chrome, Firefox, Google, Internet Explorer, Opera, Power User, Safari, Web Browsers | 3 Comments »
Hydrogen – a free and open source cross platform drum machine…
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/11/21
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Posted in About, LifeHacker, Music, Personal, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Some links to get WDS to work with Tomato
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/11/21
Just in case I ever need this: some links to get WDS working on Tomato based routers and have seamless WiFi handover.
- Configuring WDS to extend your wireless network | TCAT Shelbyville – Technical Blog.
- How To Extend Your Wireless Network with Tomato-Powered Routers.
- RT-N66U / RT-AC66U and WET/WDS under Tomato Shibby | LinksysInfo.org.
- WDS Tutorial (2x RT-N66U) with Tomato Shibby 115 | SmallNetBuilder Forums.
- Client Mode Wireless [OpenWrt Wiki].
- How to provide Wi-Fi Internet access for a 100 people conference? « Mind of Matt.
And if I want to do it with a few Fritz!Box devices:
–jeroen
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Opinion: The Internet of Shitty Things — Kommentar: The Internet of Shitty Things | heise online
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/11/20
I translated the heading and one quote; if you want to read further in English: Google translate does a good job on the text.
HVAC thermostats, bread baskets, coffee machines: The net is full of things, which make no sense at all and nobody needs. The Internet of Things is a huge pile of shit, says Clemens Gleich.
…
There are no error-free systems, there are maximum undetected errors.
German original:
Heizungsthermostate, Brotkörbe, Kaffeemaschinen: Das Netz ist voll mit Dingen, die da nur Quatsch machen. Braucht kein Mensch. Das Internet of Things ist ein riesiger Haufen Scheiße, meint Clemens Gleich.
…
Es gibt keine fehlerfreien Systeme, es gibt maximal unentdeckte Fehler.
[WayBack] Kommentar: The Internet of Shitty Things | heise online
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Rob Graham 🦃 on Twitter: “1/x: So I bought a surveillance camera https://t.co/HbmPzrZgFK”
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/11/20
Conclusions:
- Always put your IoT devices behind a firewall
- Isolate each IoT device into it’s own “world” that can communicate as little with the rest of your networks as possible
- Preferably isolate each set of IoT devices that do need to communicate in their LoT (Lan of Things)
- Use Ad-Blockers
“1/x: So I bought a surveillance camera”: [WayBack] Rob Graham 🦃 on Twitter: “1/x: So I bought a surveillance camera https://t.co/HbmPzrZgFK”
Interesting: [WayBack] Errata Security: Configuring Raspberry Pi as a router
Via: [WayBack] Plugging in a new IP webcam. 98 seconds. infected. Wow. https://twitter.com/E… – G+ Jan Wildeboer
Interesting: [WayBack] Errata Security: Configuring Raspberry Pi as a router
Of course Rob tried many webcams to find a vulnerable one. And putting telnet port 23 to the open is not the best idea, but people do that or get an indirect infection by some piece of JavaScript from an Ad-Network that searches for local vulnerable devices. That’s how the internet works!
Since Twitter and other social media ten to show the non-interesting part of a stream, here is the full one (no time to edit out the superfluous stuff):
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Posted in IoT Internet of Things, Network-and-equipment, Power User, Security | Leave a Comment »
How To Chromecast MKV, MP4, DVI Videos from Chrome (on a Mac, Windows or Linux machine)
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/11/18
There is a Chrome App called Videostream for Google Chromecast that lets you play your own local videos on your Chromecast from your PC with subtitles supported. Not like those Chrome Extensions, it’s a Chrome App that you can launch directly from your desktop through Chrome Launch.
Just launch the app, choose a video, select a Chromecast, and enjoy. Easy as 123.
via: [WayBack] How To Chromecast MKV, MP4, DVI Videos from Windows Computer | Next of Windows
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The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 