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 »
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):
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 »
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:
Posted in CommandLine, Development, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development | Tagged: possible | Leave a Comment »
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:
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 »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/24
LLM eat a lot of energy and are their hallucination are bad: [Wayback/Archive] LLM-generated passwords ‘fundamentally weak,’ experts say • The Register
Your AI-generated password isn’t random, it just looks that way
…
AI security company Irregular looked at Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini, and found all three GenAI tools put forward seemingly strong passwords that were, in fact, easily guessable.
…
Basically they are almost as good as the 2007 XKCD “four” number generator, the 2013 XKCD “I’m So Random” or the 2001 Dilbert “nine” number generator further below (don’t read the latter if you dislike Scott Adams)
Is it a coincidence or are these two using two small squared numbers?
Anyway: avoid LLM whenever possible, as most often they do more bad than good.
And for passwords, better use the blog post that was already scheduled for tomorrow: 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?”
Via [Wayback/Archive] Eloy.: “LLMs are centrist randomness: not useful for anything that requires truth but neither for password generation” – HSNL Social
Below this post, there are some great responses as well.
Posted in AI and ML; Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, C++, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Internet, InternetArchive, LLM, Pingback, Power User, Python, Scripting, Software Development, Stackoverflow, WayBack machine | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/24
I needed to document how to install sed on Windows (which I did a long time ago after writing Plastic SCM: show the current changeset abstract (without files) on the commandline) and recently for some more scripting work(which I will blog on that later this week).
At the time of writing it was [Wayback/Archive] Chocolatey Software | GNU sed 4.8, but this Chocolatey command will install or upgrade to the most recent available version:
choco upgrade --yes sed
Of course, like yesterday’s post Installing OpenSSL on Windows, you could use winget or scoop for this as well. Finding out the commands is left as an exercise to the reader (;
Query: [Wayback/Archive] chocolatey sed – Google Search
–jeroen
Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Chocolatey, Development, Power User, Scoop, Scripting, sed, Software Development, Windows, Windows Development, winget | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/19
Missed Schedule 2020/02/19 at 6:00 pm
Yesterday evening, WordPress.com did it again: “missed schedule” – that bug still is not fixed, so I posted it manually today.
In the time when people create a lot of technical debt, the [Wayback/Archive] Manifesto for Agile Software Development turned 25 years. Happy birthmonth!
Birthmonty you say, not birthday? Yes, it took a few days for the Agile Manifesto to get written – you can read about it at [Wayback/Archive] History: The Agile Manifesto which starts with
On February 11-13, 2001, at The Lodge at Snowbird ski resort in the Wasatch mountains of Utah, seventeen people met to talk, ski, relax, and try to find common ground—and of course, to eat. What emerged was the Agile ‘Software Development’ Manifesto. Representatives from Extreme Programming, SCRUM, DSDM, Adaptive Software Development, Crystal, Feature-Driven Development, Pragmatic Programming, and others sympathetic to the need for an alternative to documentation driven, heavyweight software development processes convened
I got reminded to it [Wayback/Archive] Agile Manifesto co-author ‘smitten’ with vibe coding • The Register which shows that vibe coding only can work when all people involved know exactly what they are doing. More often than not they don’t, and just increase their technical debt which was something that working in an agile way tries to solve. So better re-read this 25 year piece of work before you start using LLM to generate code.
Related blog posts:
Posted in Agile, Development, Extreme Programming (X), Missed Schedule, Power User, Software Development, WordPress | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/19
For my link archive: [Wayback/Archive] Enabling TRIM on an external SSD on a Raspberry Pi | Jeff Geerling
Printing to large format paper or displaying it on large screens introduces a lot of whitespace resulting in the listings having horizontal scrollbars. That was easier to circumvent in CSS than I initially thought, so I wrote [Wayback/Archive] Thread by @jpluimers on Thread Reader App:
Posted in CSS, Development, Hardware, HTML, Power User, Software Development, SSD, Trim, Web Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/18
Every now and then I end up in arguments with people at what bound an array index should start. The usual options are one-based or zero-based indexing, but there are enough languages that allow defining a different starting index of an array.
In my opinion, in language where you can define the starting index, it should depend on the problem to be solved. I prefer languages that allowing for an arbitrary starting index as they allow specifying the problem domain best.
Often the argument used by others is “zero” as starting index is that it is more efficient. My counter arguments usually are that
I usually forget the last list, so below here are a few links with sources and discussions.
Before reading the list, always remember: code is about representing problem domains and problem domains are not about math, compilers are.
Oh, and on the concept of zero, this is a good read: [Wayback/Archive] What Is the Origin of Zero? | Scientific American
Posted in Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/18
While researching floating point representation, I found that two versions of Microsoft Pascal which was ISO 7185 Pascal compliant.
These versions are at bitsavers:
There are more tidbits in the [Wayback/Archive] Index of /bits/SeattleComputerProducts directory all from the Seattle Computer Products days (and Tim Paterson fame).
–jeroen
Posted in Development, History, Pascal, Software Development, Standard Pascal | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 