The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

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Archive for January, 2025

Converting Power Point

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/15

I have a lot of old Power Point slide decks that I want to reuse in current presentations. By now however, I learned prepare all my presentation stuff in either Markdown or reStructuredText: far easier to publish and put under version control.

After searching, I could only find one tool that is still maintained doing a decent job doing a PowerPoint to Markdown conversion: [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – ssine/pptx2md: a pptx to markdown converter. The tools which works great, in big part of PowerPoint content being highly structured with styles like title, subtitle and various heading levels and content types.

The thing it does not document is the prerequisites, which are these:

Future enhancements

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Posted in Development, Lightweight markup language, MarkDown, Office, Power Point, Power User, Python, Scripting, Software Development, venv | Leave a Comment »

Security through transparency: RP2350 Hacking Challenge results are in – Raspberry Pi

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/15

Wow, so many valuable lessons learned in [Wayback/Archive] Security through transparency: RP2350 Hacking Challenge results are in – Raspberry Pi

Plus another challenge that they will start in a week:

As a component of the broader RP2350 security architecture, we’ve been working to develop an implementation of AES which is hardened against side-channel attacks (notably differential power analysis), and we’ll be challenging you to defeat it. Check back next week for more details.

Plus of course the very important last sentence:

All vendors have security vulnerabilities in their chips. We are unusual because we talk about them, and aim to fix them, rather than brushing them under the carpet. Security through transparency is here to stay.

Via: [WaybackSave/Archive] RPi Spy on X: “Security through transparency: RP2350 Hacking Challenge results are in … #RaspberryPi”

--jeroen

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Classic iPod Dock Connector to Line-in / Line-out

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/15

For my link archive on the Apple 30-pin Dock Connector:

–jeroen

Posted in Cable TV/Radio, Development, Hardware, Hardware Development, Hardware Interfacing, Home Audio/Video, LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Delphi sorcery: Introducing Spring.Benchmark – a port of Google benchmark

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/14

On my list of tools to experiment with: [Wayback/Archive] Delphi sorcery: Introducing Spring.Benchmark – a port of Google benchmark

This got released while I was recovering from cancer procedures, to I totally missed it.

Interesting stuff, as I knew there was the Google benchmark library*, but since I hardly do any C++ work, I never used it.

* [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – google/benchmark: A microbenchmark support library

The source code for the Delphi based Spring.Benchmark library is at [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – spring4d/benchmark: Delphi port of Google Benchmark, especially [Wayback/Archive] benchmark/Spring.Benchmark.pas at master · spring4d/benchmark · GitHub.

Videos to watch before using it:

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Posted in C++, Delphi, Development, Profiling-Performance-Measurement, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Raymond Chen on The AArch64 processor (aka arm64) in many parts

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/14

For my link archive: below a series of articles my Raymond Chen on “The AArch64 processor (aka arm64)” in the order of appearance from a few years back and still very relevant today.

It is part of a few more series on processors that (were) supported by Windows. A good reference to find which version supported which processor architecture is the tables in List of Microsoft Windows versions – Wikipedia.

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Posted in AArch64/arm64, ARM, Assembly Language, Development, History, MIPS R4000, PowerPC, Software Development, The Old New Thing, Windows Development, x64, x86 | Leave a Comment »

Thread by @0gtweet on Thread Reader App – retrieve your BitLocker password, store the password in your password manager and make a backup of it!

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/13

Image[Wayback/Archive] Thread by @0gtweet on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App

A very friendly reminder, especially for non-corporate PCs protected with BitLocker: if you are not sure if you have your Recovery Password handy, you can display it any moment with “manage-bde -protectors -get c:”
Store the password in your password manager and make its backup!

Note: manage-bde.exe -protectors -get c: needs admin rights!

--jeroen

Posted in Microsoft Surface on Windows 7, Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2022 | Leave a Comment »

Manu Keirse: Raakt een mens het verdriet over een overleden dierbare ooit kwijt?

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/13

Voor op een tegeltje.

[Wayback/Archive] Andrea on Twitter: “Mooi. Uit een interview met Manu Keirse. Wat een prachtige quote. “

Manu Keirse: Raakt een mens het verdriet over een overleden dierbare ooit kwijt?

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Posted in About, Awareness, Health, Inclusion / inclusive society, LifeHacker, Personal, Power User | Leave a Comment »

VideoLAN on Twitter: “VLC automatic subtitles generation and translation based on local and open source AI models running on your machine working offline, and supporting numerous languages! Demo can be found on our #CES2025 booth in Eureka Park.” (video)

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/11

Weekend, so catching up on CES 2025 news.

If you are at CES, be sure to go visit the VideoLAN booth in Eureka Park to witness what I think is likely the most important CES 2025 AI news:

[Wayback/Archive] VideoLAN on X: “VLC automatic subtitles generation and translation based on local and open source AI models running on your machine working offline, and supporting numerous languages! Demo can be found on our #CES2025 booth in Eureka Park.”

In my opinion, though a remarkable statistic, their 6-billion downloads gimmick is just a teaser for the way more important news what this AI LLM is:

  • free / open-source
  • off-line
  • subtitles plus translations
  • 100 languages

Whisper already ran circles around the YouTube automatic subtitle generator, and their automatic translations are far below par (see video below), so having new contender is great!

VideoLAN tremendously raises the bar for all commercial vendors, and at the same time makes:

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Posted in AI and ML; Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Development, LLM, Media, Software Development, Video | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Laurens on X: “Heel goed item van Lubach over erfbelasting #Avondshow”

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/10

[Wayback/Archive] Laurens on X: “Heel goed item van Lubach over erfbelasting #Avondshow”:

[Wayback/Archive] Moet erfbelasting omhoog? | De Avondshow met Arjen Lubach (S6) – YouTube

Aan de andere kant heeft inmiddels een groot deel van hele generatie hun halve werkzame leven voor een flink deel besteed aan onbetaalde zorg om de gaten van de zorg dicht te lopen. Daarmee is een flink deel van die erfbelasting gewoon belasting op misgelopen inkomsten.

--jeroen

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Posted in About, Awareness, Personal | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

nixCraft on Twitter: “Here is how to check if you are affected by a known vulnerability in your hardware (CPU) when using Linux including mitigation status”

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/10

[Wayback/A] nixCraft on Twitter: “Here is how to check if you are affected by a known vulnerability in your hardware (CPU) when using Linux including mitigation status: grep -r . /sys/devices/system/cpu/vulnerabilities/

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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, grep, Linux, Power User | Leave a Comment »