The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for February, 2019

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Berlin 10.1.2 Vcl.RibbonConsts removed, so now Vcl.ScreenTips compilation fails – Pascal Today

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/02/12

The Ribbon controls got removed since Delphi 10.1 Berlin, but the dependency in Vcl.ScreenTips remained, so:

After installing the official Delphi Berlin Update 2 I have faced nasty problem. One of my unit was using the Vcl.ScreenTips unit (for TScreenTipsWindow). And when you compile such a project you ge…

Source: Berlin 10.1.2 Vcl.ScreenTips compilation fail – Pascal Today

In the mean time however, it has been moved to GetIt: [WayBack] Ribbon Controls in RAD Studio 10.1 Berlin.

Note that the XE8 introduced [Archive.is] GetIt package manager is under the Tools menu, which is not covered by [Archive.is] IDE Insight – RAD Studio.

Anyway: here you can get it in Delphi 10.1 Berlin (now also in 10.2 Tokyo, where at first it was not available through GetIt):

—jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Delphi 10.1 Berlin (BigBen), Delphi 10.2 Tokyo (Godzilla), Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Build a Power Bank in $2: 7 Steps (with Pictures)

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/02/12

Cool: [WayBack] Build a Power Bank in $2: 7 Steps (with Pictures)

Via:

TL;DR:

  1. salvage 18650 batteries from laptop battery packs
  2. test to separate good ones from bad ones
  3. assemble together the good ones
    1. put them in a holders
    2. solder plusses to plusses and minuses to minuses
  4. add charger electronics
  5. test
  6. put acrylic plate on front/back

Stuff you need:

–jeroen

 

Posted in 18650, Batteries, Development, Hardware Development, Hardware Interfacing, Li-Ion, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Raspberry Pi and relays – follow up on Having one Raspberry Pi reset another Raspberry Pi through relay or transistor

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/02/12

I did some more research because of Having one Raspberry Pi reset another Raspberry Pi through relay or transistor.

  • [WayBack] How To Add a Reset Switch To Your Raspberry PiRemoving and replacing the USB power cable puts undue wear and tear on your Raspberry Pi, particularly the power port itself. What the system really needs is a reset switch, but sadly none was included.
  • Grove Relay board:
    • has two versions; the V1.2 schematic adds a XC6206P302MR voltage regulator to regulate 3V through the relay coil and an extra 47k Ohm pull-down resistor.
    • has a trigger on high supporting a voltage of 3V, so it works with the Raspberry Pi 3.3V GPIO pins.
    • is “normal open”, so suits the reset scenario (connect on trigger) well.
    • has no “normal closed” header, so if you need that, you’re out of luck
    • does not have optocouplers:
      • Be careful with high voltages on supplies that differ from the one powering your Raspberry Pi
        • It’s fine for resetting another Raspberry Pi powered from the same source
      • The relay is rated 250V ~ but I’d be careful (I’m not sure if this is mains electricity 250V RMS or 250V peak; if the latter, it would be suitable to 175V RMS (approximately 250/1.42 volt).
  • An excellent description (sans optocoupler) on how to connect a relay to power, ground, signal-input and both outputs is at [WayBack/Archive.is] gpio – How to add isolation between raspberry pi and relay board? – Raspberry Pi Stack Exchange (thanks [WayBack] ppumkin).
  • Many 5V optocoupler (or optical-isolator, see video below) based relay boards work fine with the 3.3V GPIO pins from the Raspberry Pi.
    If they don’t, then there are two basic solutions:

    1. Easiest: solder an extra resistor next to the signal input of about the same value (so the voltage drop over it halves), see for instance [WayBack] Controlling a relay board from your RPi · foosel/OctoPrint Wiki
    2. Harder: put an extra transistor in between to pump up the voltage to 5V, see one of the schematics below.

Details of the above can be found from the below links and images from those links.

There is also an Android App with a RaspberryPi distribution that allows you to operate relays:

Finally there are USB relays, shown way down in this post.

Often these are part of some home automation (domotica), IoT, or other, so these are relevant too:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, Hardware Development, Raspberry Pi | Leave a Comment »

2018 Hard Drive Reliability Stats by Manufacturer and Model

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/02/11

We look at the hard drive failure rates for the data drive models in operation in our data centers in 2018 (now totaling over 750 petabytes and 100,000 drives). In addition, we’ll see how the new hard drive models we added during the year did, including our 12 TB HGST and 14 TB Toshiba drives.

Full article: [WayBack] 2018 Hard Drive Reliability Stats by Manufacturer and Model

Statistical data at [WayBack] Backblaze Hard Drive Stats:  Hard Drive test data from the Backblaze data center. Backblaze is affordable, easy-to-use cloud storage.

Via [WayBack] 2018 Hard Drive Reliability Stats by Manufacturer and Model https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-2018/ – DoorToDoorGeek “Stephen McLaughlin” – Google+

–jeroen

Posted in Backup, Hardware, History, LifeHacker, Power User, Storage | Leave a Comment »

shared folders not visible · Issue #276 · stascorp/rdpwrap

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/02/11

Reminder to self: check if this rdpwrap issue [WayBack] shared folders not visible · Issue #276 · stascorp/rdpwrap has been resolved by now.

–jeroen

Posted in Power User, Remote Desktop Protocol/MSTSC/Terminal Services, Windows | Leave a Comment »

Amsterdam Nieuw West: parkeren Osdorpplein en omgeving

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/02/11

[WayBack] Amsterdam Nieuw West

Vergelijking parkeertarieven:

AH XL     AH XL         Qpark        Op straat * 

(Klanten)

1 uur              € 2,50       gratis         gratis              € 2,40

1,5 uur           € 5,–         gratis         gratis             € 3,60

2 uur             € 5,–         € 2,50        € 2,–               € 4,80

2,5 uur          € 7,50       € 5,–          € 4,–               € 6,–

3 uur             € 7,50       € 5,–          € 6,–               € 7,20

4 uur            €  10,–       € 7,50        € 10,–              € 9,60

24 uur          € 25,–       € 25,–       € 25,–              € 36,–

* sommige dagen/dagdelen zijn gratis

De conclusie is dat parkeergarage Osdorpplein van Qpark het meest goedkoop is, met name als je voor < 1,5 uur vrij bent om waar dan ook boodschappen op het Osdorpplein te gaan doen. Deze parkeergarage is ook geschikt voor bezoekers van de Meervaart. Het is mogelijk om 24/7 uit te rijden. Let wel op de inrijtijden

Een ander belangrijk verschil is het afrekenen per minuut of per uur. Bij de parkeergarages betaal je bij de AH XL per uur, bij Qpark per half uur en op straat per minuut.

De parkeergarage AH XL is goedkooop voor klanten die in minder dan 1,5 uur boodschappen doen bij de AH XL en mogelijk ook nog even snel het Osdorpplein willen gaan bezoeken.

–jeroen

Posted in LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Di Cleverly – Google+: on 42 and geek stuff

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/02/11

Since it is the 42th day of this year: Via [WayBack] Di Cleverly – Google+

  • Adrian Colley
    For a slightly more serious answer, asterisk is most commonly used (in computing) to mean “repeat the previous pattern zero or more times”. In HHGttG, it’s suggested that if the Question and the Answer were known at the same time, the universe would vanish and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is a theory that this has happened several times. Zero or more times, you might say.
  • Perry Winkle (Shy Geek)

    pedant powers activated !

    in regex * is zero or more of the preceding character, but there is no preceding character

    as a file glob * is zero or more anything

    as an operator * is multiplication, but there are no operands

    in sports * next to a stat flags possible cheating

    there will be others if I go looking, but I think the point is that the question was ill defined with lack of context, therefore the answer is also ill defined with lack of context, at least that is how I interpreted the answer when I first saw the tv series (it was a radio show before that, but I never heard it)

    saying the answer is * is also ill defined and lacks context (i.e. is * a regex or a glob or an operator or …)

    also ASCII is not computer software, let alone the most basic computer software, ASCII is simply an agreed mapping from numbers to symbols eg 01000001 = 65 = 0x41 = A

    so if 42 was actually hexadecimal, then 42 = B and maybe the question was multi-choice (aka multi-guess), therefore my answer is 44 = D = all of the above

  • Martin Krischik
    +Perry Winkle not ever regular expression. And as i said the books predates regex.
  • Perry Winkle (Shy Geek)

    +Martin Krischik in sed, vi, awk, Perl, Python, Posix and many others it is, any exceptions would be painful regex engines to work with IMO

    also, I think you’ll find regex is actually older than HHGttG. HHGttG was first a radio play in 1978, regex was coined in the early 1950s for algebra and used in unix in the early 1970s

  • Jeroen Wiert Pluimers

    Sorry to spoil it: groups.google.com – Why 42 ? where in 1993, Douglas Adams writes:

    <<
    The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an
    ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations,
    base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk,
    stared into the garden and thought ’42 will do’ I typed it out. End of story.

    Best,

    Douglas Adams
    London, UK | d…@dadams.demon.co.uk (dormant)
    Currently in Santa Fe, NM | ada…@nic.cerf.net (current)
    >>

  • Mr. Firestone

    The first time someone handed me an iPhone with Siri, I asked the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Siri simply gave me information on those specific search terms. (More recently I asked the question again, and Siri answered 42)

    Google responded with a reference to Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, “Be excellent to each other”.

    I need someone to ask Alexa and report back.

    I’m using this to gauge where we are in the possibility of having AI overthrow humanity in the immediate future. 😁

  • Di Cleverly
    +Martin Krischik he played the guitar left handed! Wow! You really do learn something new everyday!
  • Matt Osbun

    +Adrian Colley You’re mixing regex with “everything in computing”

    +Martin Krischik And Douglas Adams worked mainly with Apple and Unix. Apple ripped off the * wildcard from Unix, CPM ripped it off from Apple, and MS-Dos ripped it off from CPM. The fact that DOS used it isn’t relevant. And regex started in 1951. A quick Google search confirmed that. So yes, it was in existence in 1979. GREP was using regex long before 1979. And yes, DA’s programming experience would have exposed him to all this. You seem to be conflating degrees with actual ability.

  • Perry Winkle (Shy Geek)

    FYI (geek alert) Unix was popular as a document printing/typesetting system early on hence tools like latex and nroff/troff (especially for printing formulas in computer science papers etc)

    (trivia alert) grep comes from the ed (or sed) command g/re/p where re is short for regular expression, it translates kind of as “globally in the file/stream, if the re matches, then print the line”

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Fun, History | Leave a Comment »

No thank you, Mr. Pecker – Jeff Bezos – Medium

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/02/09

If this is the norm inside world wide politics and business, what is outside the norm?

[WayBack] No thank you, Mr. Pecker – Jeff Bezos – Medium

Via:

Related:

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Opinions | Leave a Comment »

Quantum Computing for Computer Scientists – YouTube

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/02/08

On my list of videos to watch:

Via: [WayBack] Quantum computing for computer scientists, explained by Microsoft. Despite the pop lecturing style the explanation is deep enough. I’ve wondered before… – Sergey Kasandrov – Google+

–jeroen

Posted in Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Link archive: ASUS MN78 PRO URLs

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/02/08

Since my brother has this motherboard: M4N78 PRO GREEN.

It does WOL, but doesn’t always wake up when powered down.

–jeroen

ASUS Serial 93M0AI195747; Part 90-MIB7C0-G0EAY00Z; M4N78 PRO GREEN; UPC 61083916977; EAN 4719543169773

Posted in Ethernet, Hardware, Mainboards, Network-and-equipment, Power User, Wake-on-LAN (WoL) | Leave a Comment »

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