The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

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Archive for 2026

Why octal is important (via @jpluimers on Twitter: “@b0rk @jilles_com Acids vs bases.”)

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/03

A few years back I tweeted [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers @wiert@mastodon.social on Twitter: “@b0rk @jilles_com Acids vs bases.”

Ph scale of acids vs bases.

It was a kind of tongue-in-cheek reaction (with a way better picture below) to a very valuable post by b0rk (Julia Evans) on both Twitter and Mastodon [Wayback/Archive] Julia Evans on Twitter: “bases” / [Wayback/Archive] Julia Evans: “bases title: bases # we usually…” – Mastodon for two reasons:

  1. There are various interpretations of bases
  2. Octal is very important to educate as errors introduced by its support are hard to spot even if you do know about octal.

Back to Julia’s post:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, 68k, 8086, Assembly Language, bash, bash, C, C++, Chemistry, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, EPS/PostScript, Event, Haskell, History, Java, Java Platform, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Jon Skeet, LifeHacker, Mathematics, PDP-11, Perl, PHP, Power User, Python, science, Scripting, Software Development, x86 | Leave a Comment »

Why does every book come from the same country? – YouTube

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/02

On the history of ISBN and their representation in EAN codes: [Wayback/Archive] Why does every book come from the same country? – YouTube.

TL;DR: EAN unique country codes (now GS1 country codes) 978 and 979 are Bookland.

--jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

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

Changing default page view in Adobe Acrobat

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/02

Being so used to open PDF files using MacOS Preview – which remembers the last view settings and re-applies that when opening a new document, it took me a while to figure out that in both Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader (formerly Acrobat Reader) you have to set it in the preferences using Ctrl-K as explained in [Wayback/Archive] Changing default page view in Adobe Acrobat

When you open a PDF in Adobe Acrobat Reader, the default page view may not be to your liking. For example, it may show a full page when you really need to see part of a page in full width.

To change these settings follow the steps below.

  1. Edit, Preferences (or Control-K).
  2. Choose Page Display in the Categories section.
  3. In the Default Layout and Zoom section (top of page), change the Page Layout and Zoom selections to your preference. “100%” and “Fit Page” are most commonly used in the Zoom selection.
  4. Click OK to save your settings.

Contrary to the above, the defaults for both my Acrobat Reader both the “Paye Layout” and “Zoom” settings were “Automatic”. I just changed the “Page Layout” to “Two-Up” and am much happier now (:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Power User, Adobe, Adobe Reader, Adobe Acrobat | Leave a Comment »

#ColonCancerAwarenessMonth – Please use the back entrance for the lecture “Alarm in the colon” – Für den Vortrag „Alarm im Darm” bitte Hintereingang benutzen AOK – #Darmkrebsmonat #Darmkankermaand

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/01

Colonoscopy humor: [Wayback/Archive] G0BtrUFWkAA41LM.jpg:orig (550×385)

Für den Vortrag „Alarm im Darm

Für den Vortrag „Alarm im Darm” bitte Hintereingang benutzen

Via: [WaybackSave/Archive] Daemon Resurrected on X: “@ChristelHanauer …”

Queries:

Lecture example: [Wayback/Archive] Medizin vor Ort: Alarm im Darm | Klinikverbund Südwest

--jeroen

Posted in About, Cancer, Health, LifeHacker, Personal, Power User, Rectum cancer | Leave a Comment »

The 20g and 50g mystery solder showdown – YouTube

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/27

AliExpress aggressive acidic flux solder has remarkably heavy reels:

 
Total Reel Solder % Solder/Total
100 gram 67 gram 33 gram 33 %
51 gram 32 gram 19 gram 37 %
20 gram 10 gram 10 gram 50 %

--jeroen

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

Is there an RSS feed for my publication? – Substack, Inc

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/27

Reading SubStack via RSS skips the nag screens and other annoying steps.

If you sign in to your.substack.com/feed then you get redirected to your own RSS feed link.

Even easier if you want to read from a link:

  • if you see a Subtack URL hosted at domain.substack.com
  • then the accompanying RSS feed URL is domain.substack.com/feed

Via [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Baert on Twitter: “Tip voor mensen die substacks lezen: elke substack heeft een RSS-feed onder https:// whatever . substack . com / feed – Inladen in je RSS-lezer, en geen nag screens of gedoe, gewoon de content.”

Related:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Power User, RSS, SocialMedia, Substack | Leave a Comment »

GitHub – dessant/web-archives: Browser extension for viewing archived and cached versions of web pages, available for Chrome, Edge and Safari (plus Firefox and Opera too)

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/26

The description of [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – dessant/web-archives: Browser extension for viewing archived and cached versions of web pages, available for Chrome, Edge and Safari is missing Firefox and Opera, but in the meantime the extension is available in these stores for:

As a great example of how to write a browser plugin for all these architectures, it shows how to write this in mostly JavaScript with Vue.js with a tiny bit of play HTML.

Web Archives is a plugin that lets you search either the URL from the current browser tab, or a URL you type, within various archival sites (all Wikipedia links):

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Archive Today controversy, archive.is / archive.today, Archiving, Chrome, Development, Edge, Firefox, Internet, InternetArchive, Opera, Power User, Safari, Software Development, WayBack machine, Web Browsers, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

Some links on getting the most recent defragmentation time of a Windows volume

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/25

This worked on the built-in Windows PowerShell to get the recommendation status:

$volume = Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Volume -Filter "DriveLetter = 'C:'"
$analysis = $volume.DefragAnalysis()
$analysis.DefragAnalysis
$analysis.DefragRecommended

Without elevation token, $analysis.DefragAnalysis will be empty and $analysis.DefragRecommended will return False, but elevated it will return the analysis data and  $analysis.DefragRecommended will return False or True depending on the analysis result.,

And this gets the most recent defragmentation action from the event-log:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in CommandLine, Development, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Airco’s massaal gebruikt voor verwarming, TNO waarschuwt voor gevolgen stroomnet (airco’s hebben een COP hefboom van 3.5-5)

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/25

[Wayback/Archive] Airco’s massaal gebruikt voor verwarming, TNO waarschuwt voor gevolgen stroomnet

Via [Archive/Archive] Post by @ruudholswilder.bsky.social — Bluesky

Ruud Holswilder‬
‪@ruudholswilder.bsky.social‬

In feite is een moderne airco een lucht-lucht warmtepomp met een COP van 3,5 tot 5.
1 kWh elektriciteit wordt omgezet in 3,5 tot 5 kWh warmte.
Geen aandacht hiervoor in het artikel van NOS.

--jeroen

Posted in LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Generating random strings for passwords and uuids/guids on both Windows and Linux using base64 and hex encoding, plus: “Hive Systems: Are Your Passwords in the Green?”

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/25

Often I need to generate passwords or uuids (on some systems called guids). I usually try to do that in a relatively platform agnostic way as I use MacOS, Windows and Linux in various mixes for many reasons (for instance that I have had developed quite hefty RSI in the early 1990s of the and the best keyboard/pointing-device combination for is the MacBook built in keyboard/touchpad combination so basically MacBooks are my window to all other operating systems).

Generating randomly with a good random number generator them makes sense as for most usage, it is important that both passwords and uuids are hard to guess which means having an entropy that is as high as possible.

A cool thing about OpenSSL is that:

  1. most of not all systems have it installed (it was no coincidence I published Installing OpenSSL on Windows a few days ago)
  2. it has a very good pseudo-random number generator and as of [Wayback/Archive] OpenSSL version 1.1.1 first released in 2018 has solved the problem around [Wayback/Archive] Random fork-safety – OpenSSLWiki, see [Wayback/Archive] Our Review of the OpenSSL 1.1.1 Random Number Generation Update – OSTIF.org.
  3. it supports various useful output formats hex (hexadecimal) and base64 (next to the default of octet – or by today’s naming convention byte – output)

The easiest to generate are passwords. Yes I know that password managers can do this too, but there are some systems I cannot use them on or sync between them (don’t you love the corporate world) so my aim is to use a random password generator in a platform agnostic way which usage is easy to remember. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Apple, base64, bash, bash, Batch-Files, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Encoding, Event, HEX encoding, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, MacBook, OpenSSL, Power User, Python, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Leave a Comment »