The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

  • My badges

    Mastodon

  • Twitter Updates

  • My Flickr Stream

    20140508-Delphi-2007--Project-Options--Cannot-Edit-Application-Title-HelpFile-Icon-Theming20140430-Fiddler-Filter-Actions-Button-Run-Filterset-now20140424-VMware-Fusion-6.0.3.-no-reclaimable
    More Photos

  • Pages

  • All categories

  • Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 1,861 other subscribers

Archive for 2023

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »

Mysk 🇨🇦🇩🇪 on Twitter: “Google has just updated its 2FA Authenticator app and added a much-needed feature: the ability to sync secrets across devices. TL;DR: Don’t turn it on. The new update allows users to sign in with their Google Account and sync 2FA secrets across their iOS and Android devices.…”

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/05/10

Do not use the Google 2FA Authenticator to to sync secrets across devices.

The why is explained in the (long) tweet by [Wayback/Archive] Mysk on Twitter: “Google has just updated its 2FA Authenticator app and added a much-needed feature: the ability to sync secrets across devices. TL;DR: Don’t turn it on. The new update allows users to sign in with their Google Account and sync 2FA secrets across their iOS and Android devices.…”

For similar reasons, you might not want to use Authy by Twilio to sync between devices either, though that is less insecure as it enforces you to use a backup-password in order to sync these through the cloud: in the past that backup-password had few security restrictions so it was easy to use a relatively insecure password.

Related (most in Dutch):

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in 2FA/MFA, Authentication, Google, GoogleAuthenticator, Power User, Security | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Restart Windows explorer with an UAC administrator token

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/05/10

Sometimes, you want to restart the Windows explorer. This is already an exception case which you want to do when explorer hangs (for instance when taskbar icons do not respond any more), or has files locked which need to be modified. I described the latter in Inno Setup: Program Folder not showing up In Start > All Programs , with this very simple restart script:

taskkill /F /IM explorer.exe
start explorer

Even more exception is wanting to run explorer with a UAC elevated administrative token. I sometimes do this when moving around stuff from other users on the same computer without having them logged on (as that would lock the files or directories to be moved around).

The risk of running explorer under UAC elevation, is that any program you start will also start UAC elevated, so beware what you ask for…

This is how you start explorer under UAC elevation:

pwsh.exe -nol -noni -nop -w hidden -c "taskkill /f /im explorer.exe; start explorer -v runas -a /nouaccheck"

or if you run an older Windows version of PowerShell:

PowerShell.exe -nol -noni -nop -w hidden -c "taskkill /f /im explorer.exe; start explorer -v runas -a /nouaccheck"

These command-line options and verbs are used:

Time to explain a few:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Batch-Files, CommandLine, Development, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows 7, Windows 8.1 | 1 Comment »

I dug into scoop a tiny bit: some thoughts and links

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/05/09

Last month, I wrote Need to take a look a Scoop (as a long time Chocolatey user).

So I did, and started with a list of my Chocolatey installs grouped by functionality in order to expand the table towards winget and [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – ScoopInstaller/Scoop: A command-line installer for Windows.

This was a good way to start learning, and by already doing this, got learned this:

  • Whereas Chocolaty has a global searchable community package index at [Wayback/Archive] Chocolatey Software | Packages  which is moderated too.
  • Scoops works differently. There are many buckets you can get your applications from, and there is no Scoop maintained index of them.

Let’s focus on the latter for a bit:

From the above, I got a feeling that Scoop is way more like the Linux Package Managers than WinGet and Chocolatey are.

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Chocolatey, Development, Power User, Scoop, Software Development, Windows, Windows Development, winget | Leave a Comment »

MXbord.nl – live kaart met matrixborden en portalen met snelheid/kruisen

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/05/08

Cool:

Was op 6 januari 2022 handig vanwege totale afsluiting A2 door een politieactie.

Via:

Gerelateerd:

–jeroen

Posted in LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Pasjes op creditkaartgrootte: hulpkaart, toiletpas voor darmklachten, autipas, zonnebloem lan yard

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/05/05

Met name met een onzichtbare handicapt, maar ook met een zichtbare handicap, kan het handig zijn om een pasje te overhandigen of een lan yard te dragen als je hulp of noden hebt.

Ze zijn een beetje vergelijkbaar met (meest voor vrouwen) aan de bar vragen om een “Angel shot” of “is Angela er ook” om je uit noodsituaties te helpen.

Via:

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

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

Some more links on bookmarklets: this time ones that operate on (selection of text on) the current page

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/05/04

As a continuation of the various bookmarklet posts, here is one with information on bookmarklets that operate on the current page, for instance when you already got text selected.

All via [Wayback/Archive] bookmarklet that works on link of current selection – Google Search

–jeroen

Posted in Bookmarklet, Development, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Web Browsers, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

How long will the free GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 based ChatGPT exist?

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/05/03

For a while now, there has been a free [Wayback/Archive] ChatGPT which works around the paid barriers by relaying the chat through 3rd parties.

I wonder how long it will exist.

The cease and desist letter was from OpenAI to the repository owner which – paraphrased – maintains the stance that the 3rd parties pay license fees to OpenAI, and that if these parties have issues with his tool basically scraping them, should contact the repository owner to work things out.

This is all part of a bigger discussion on license and copyright of what AI based LLMs (Large Language Models) which are sourced from a large corpus of text that we all publish for free on the internet without a way to track back from ChatGPT responses to which texts were used.

Links:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in AI and ML; Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, ChatGPT, Development, GPT-3, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

The Wordle word list is in the source JavaScript file (via Isotopp)

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/05/03

Oh well: [Archive] Kris on Twitter: “L> add AI there and you’ve got a paper R> I just had a look, and that thing is pretty much completely offline. the JS contains the entire dictionary C> well would you look at that, might want to use the actual dictionary then “

Actually, it was dead easy to copy the sources to a gist and host the gist:

And of course someone distilled the wordle word solutions list into some statistics:

More was done at [Wayback/Archive] Reverse Engineering Wordle | Robert Reichel.

Which got updated to the statistics of the union of solution and accepted words list

Another tool that helps solving is [Wayback/Archive] willthames/wordle-guesses which I found via [Archive] Will Thames on Twitter: “I spent some of my New Year’s Day writing a program to generate the best first two guesses for Wordle. Time well spent, I think: …”.

Jilles then posted a video on how to view the source [Archive] Jilles🏳️‍🌈 on Twitter: “How to cheat on #wordle …”.

To make Wordle even harder, there is Absurdle, an adversorial version of Wordle that decides the word upon your input until it runs out of decisions:

A Dutch and German version were added as Woordle and Wordle (which missed being called WorDeL and Wortle):

Shortly followed by another German version (always the Austrians setting themselves apart), and a French one (which messed Le Word as perfect name):

There is also a four-letter word edition, actually two of them:

There is a Prime version too:

Felienne posted a cool analysis bot that watches Wordle tweets and uses them to estimate the correct Wordle solution:

Oh, there is a single Letterle, which on average takes you some 13 tries when disregarding letter frequencies (which likely should not matter):

When you think Absurdle was going far, look at what happened Wordlinator:

Two search tools that are very useful:

If you are desperate, these solvers can help; the second one is more flexible, the first one faster, and the last one is pure cheating:

  1. [Wayback/Archive] Ruining the fun: a Wordle auto-solver – by Tom
  2. [Wayback/Archive] Wordle Helper – Suggestion and Solver Tool – Gamer Journalist
  3. [Wayback/Archive] Wordle Answers (February 2022) – Today’s Solution

I tried referencing all posts in the somewhat broken thread at:

Some links that did not make it into that thread (yet):

Having good start words and an on-line dictionary help:

And there is always a really fast way: [Wayback/Archive] Wordle Solver | Not Fun at Parties (explained in [Wayback/Archive] Ruining the fun: a Wordle auto-solver – by Tom)

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, JavaScript/ECMAScript, LifeHacker, Natural Languages, Power User, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Some links on measuring CO2 and Volatile Organic Compounds in the air

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/05/02

Some links on measuring these:

I was triggered by some messages in a thread:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, ESP32, Hardware Development, Hardware Interfacing, IKEA hacks, LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Some links on the JVC RX-7020V Audio Video Control Receiver/Amplifier

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/05/01

I’ve had a JVC RX-7020V Audio Video Control Receiver/Amplifier for quite a while, but forgot to post links, so here they are:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Hardware, Home Audio/Video, JVC, Power User | Leave a Comment »

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »