The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

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Archive for August 22nd, 2025

Inside a cheap set of eBay digital calipers – YouTube

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/22

The innards of these devices and how those work are so cool: [Wayback/Archive] Inside a cheap set of eBay digital calipers – YouTube

It should be noted that the quiescent current of these devices is around 18uA, even when off (the display goes off until movement is detected).
Some users are reporting a very short battery life, but a typical 100mAh (0.1Ah) button cell should be able to supply 0.00002A for a very long time. (Theoretically 100’s of days.)

The linear capacitive encoder in these units is very impressive. The physical encoder is seemingly very simple, with the bulk of the work being done by the ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit). It’s very similar in its cost optimisation to the cheap, but super-accurate weighing scales.

I’m really impressed by the accuracy of these units for their price. They are very common on eBay for as little as £5 (about $7 USD).

Via [Wayback/Archive] Discord | #3d-print-cnc-kleien-figuurzagen | Angrynerds Podcast

--jeroen

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Posted in DIY, LifeHacker, Power User | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

ArchiveTeam has finished archiving all goo.gl short links – hckrnws

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/22

Need to figure out where the ArchiveTeam will be uploading the below archive, as this will help me figure out which links in post blogs I will need to update.

Also, Google never got back to me with an answer what to do with various map and image related shortened URLs for which they themselves also use the goo.gl domain.

[Wayback/Archive] ArchiveTeam has finished archiving all goo.gl short links – hckrnws

Related:

Query: [Wayback/Archive] ArchiveTeam goo.gl at DuckDuckGo

--jeroen

Posted in Google, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Privacy Policy – Bluesky: august 2025 update on personal data collected including unencrypted Direct Messages

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/22

[Wayback/Archive] Privacy Policy – Bluesky

8. Personal Data We Collect

We process, or our third-party providers may process for us, different kinds of Personal Data:
  1. Personal Data you provide
    1. …
    1. Your Direct Messages. We store and process your direct messages so you can communicate directly with other users on the Bluesky App. These are unencrypted and can be accessed for Trust & Safety purposes.
    2. …

…

was part of an update set including these:

I tried using the Wayback Machine to compare these to previous versions, but that did not succeed. Check for instance this comparison.

--jeroen

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Fix a “Automatic Repair couldn’t repair your PC” on an UEFI system: when Windows cannot be located

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/22

I got the below error when booting a Dell Optiplex 7060 Micro, a machine not just supporting supporting UEFI but preferring it, on which I had copied a backed-up disk image, then moved the hidden Recovery partition to the end of the physical disk (to make room to extend either the OS or DATA partitions).

Fixing it lead me to a trip that was on the boundary of software archaeology, so this blog post has a truckload of archived links to information that is still relevant, but for which the original links have long vanished due to link rot or (often worse) part of the historic information got lost because of migration to new tooling forgot to cover important additions (especially in comments).

One thing that I had to unlearn was MBR disk basics, for instance the fact that on GPT disks a partition can be active (they can only be on MBR disks, but despite UEFI supporting both MBT and GPT, GPT disks are way more common and required). The same holds for partitions having a boot flag: that too only applies to MBR disks. For the same reason, bootrec is only useful for MBR disks. More details towards the end of this blog post. CSM (Compatibility Support Module) booting is the UEFI way to simulate BIOS boot for operating systems that do no support UEFI.

Back to the error at hand:

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Posted in Development, History, link rot, Power User, Software Archeology, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, Windows XP, WWW - the World Wide Web of information | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »