The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

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Archive for the ‘Software Development’ Category

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Online tools to test JSONPath Queries (plus a small list of Amazon top level domains)

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/15

I wanted to parse some JSON being sent back during an XMLHttpRequest (what a wrongly named call is that!) of which I grabbed the content using the web development tools of my Chromium based browser.

Input

I got this list of amazon top level domain names from research I did for my blog post Download your Kindle books soon, because Amazon will block them after February 25, 2025 . The source is [Wayback/Archive] Amazon operating domains by country. · GitHub [Wayback/Archive] in the file amazon-domains.json:

{
    "us": "https://www.amazon.com",
    "uk": "https://www.amazon.co.uk",
    "ca": "https://www.amazon.ca",
    "de": "https://www.amazon.de",
    "es": "https://www.amazon.es",
    "fr": "https://www.amazon.fr",
    "it": "https://www.amazon.it",
    "jp": "https://www.amazon.co.jp",
    "in": "https://www.amazon.in",
    "cn": "https://www.amazon.cn",
    "sg": "https://www.amazon.com.sg",
    "mx": "https://www.amazon.com.mx",
    "ae": "https://www.amazon.ae",
    "br": "https://www.amazon.com.br",
    "nl": "https://www.amazon.nl",
    "au": "https://www.amazon.com.au",
    "tr": "https://www.amazon.com.tr",
    "sa": "https://www.amazon.sa",
    "se": "https://www.amazon.se",
    "pl": "https://www.amazon.pl"
}

The list is far from complete, so tomorrow I will post some more sources in Some pages that have lists of Amazon toplevel domains.

The queries and results show you that the original JSONPath (2007) and its RFC 9535 definition (2024, just 2 years ago) do not support getting the key names of the above list the ~ part in the first query below fails, and only the second query works.

This means that finding the right tooling is important.

Example

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Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Development, Event, JavaScript/ECMAScript, JSON, JSONPath, PHP, Python, Scripting, Software Development, TypeScript, Web Development | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Need to find a “smart” broken/404 link checker

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/15

Most of the links from my blog get accompanied with Wayback or Archive.today links, but some don’t.

For those, I need to find a broken/404 link checker which I already hinted at in scr.im « Share your email in a safe way. Get less spam.

Some links that hopefully help me:

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Posted in Development, HTTP, Internet protocol suite, Power User, Software Development, TCP, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

Google Sheets actually has a ton of Excel compatible functions; wish the User Experience was better though

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/14

I have been using Microsoft Excel since it beat the Quattro Pro limitation of rows and columns with the version 12.0, on Windows more commonly named Excel 2007 (which also introduced a fully new user experience including the vertical screen estate eating Ribbon – the main reason I like 16:10 monitors over 16:9 ones) and on Mac as Excel 2008.

It means I have like 20 years of Excel experience not just on what it can technically can do (see my Excel posts) but especially on the user experience bit.

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Posted in Development, Excel, Google, GoogleDocs, GoogleSheets, Office, Office 2007, Power User, Software Development, User Experience (ux) | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Reflection Frame: is there a public API yet?

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/09

The display quality of [Wayback/Archive] Reflection Frame is nice, but the there was no public API at the time of writing, so I wonder if there is now.

Public API request initially denied at [WaybackSave/Archive] Reflection Frame: Digital Photo Prints by Creative Design Worx — Kickstarter:

  1. Would you expose some simple REST API that would accept a jpeg or similar? It’s fine if it needs to be pre-dithered. Only interested in this if it can be controlled from Home Assistant, not interested in manually using any smartphone app.
  2. … At this time, we don’t have plans to open-source the connection protocol, as our hardware and firmware are designed as a proprietary system. …

Via [Wayback/Archive] Colour E-Ink Picture Frame – The Reflection Frame – YouTube.

--jeroen

Posted in Development, Hardware, Hardware Interfacing, IoT Internet of Things, Power User, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Only available on Window, but sometimes useful, the Excel FILTERXML function

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/09

Some links on the [Wayback/Archive] FILTERXML function – Microsoft Support.

It is only available on Windows (because of the underlying XPath libraries used, I think it is MSXML), and “only” as of Excel 2013, but still can be useful.

Some links below on FILTERXML and related XPath information so I can more easily find their content back.

Notes:

  • FILTERXML only supports XPath 1.0
  • The quotes are huge, for one because I don’t use Excel enough to be an expert, but have enough software experience to sometimes want to use complex concepts in Excel. Having all this in one place helps me with that goal.
  • You need to ensure your data is either XML in a well-formed document format, or you can translate your data to well-formed XML.

The links and quotes starting with the question that sparked my interest:

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Posted in Development, Excel, Office, Office 2013, Office 2016, Office VBA, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, XML, XML/XSD, XPath | Leave a Comment »

GitHub – D00Movenok/BounceBack: ↕️🤫 Stealth redirector for your red team operation security

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/08

Not just for red teamers (:

[Wayback/Archive] GitHub – D00Movenok/BounceBack: ↕️🤫 Stealth redirector for your red team operation security

Via [WaybackSave/Archive] Florian Roth ⚡️ on X: “This is a legitimate part of red teaming”

[Wayback/Archive] Tom Dörr on X: “Reverse proxy hides infrastructure from scanners …”

--jeroen

Posted in Communications Development, Development, Go (golang), Power User, Red team, Security, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Disabling the Windows News and Interests fly-out widget through the registry

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/08

I could not find a reliable per-user setting that works with just logoff/logon for Windows 11 like I found for Windows 10 in Disabling the Windows 10 and Windows 11 news (and weather) feeds.

So (for now?) there is only a global Globally which needs admin rights and a logoff/logon sequence:

:: requires admin
reg add "HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Dsh" /v "AllowNewsAndInterests" /t REG_DWORD /d "0" /f
echo logoff/logon to apply the change, or restart Explorer

Via:

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Posted in Batch-Files, Development, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11 | Leave a Comment »

Copilot – Terms of Use: “Copilot is for entertainment purposes only.”

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/07

Now you know it from the update of the Microsoft [Wayback/Archive] Copilot – Terms of Use: “Copilot is for entertainment purposes only.”

Via [Wayback/Archive] Post by @doublepulsar.com — Bluesky “What happened to the world daddy?” “We destroyed it, but for one beautiful moment in time, we had copilot entertainment” using a blurred image which I found the source for in my past blog post Yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders. – Finding back the source.

The blurred image: [Wayback/Archive] bafkreibc4wqxxv5hjfs2fuv5ccuc2bobqj3ysx7t7ca5vndzzmiy3ouzfu (730×636)

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Posted in AI and ML; Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Development, GitHub Copilot, LLM, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Steven Murdoch on Twitter: “However, the new “more secure” Universal Windows Platform (UWP) sandboxes the file picker in a separate process, allowing neat features like capability-based access control. It returns a file handle which, if the selected file exists, will not overwrite the existing content! 3/9”

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/07

Windows had its own aCropalypse in the Snipping tool, but other UWP based applications are vulnerable of that too because of this:

[Wayback/Archive] Steven Murdoch on Twitter: “However, the new “more secure” Universal Windows Platform (UWP) sandboxes the file picker in a separate process, allowing neat features like capability-based access control. It returns a file handle which, if the selected file exists, will not overwrite the existing content! 3/9”

It is part of this interesting [Wayback/Archive] Thread by @sjmurdoch on Thread Reader App with these two parts just after the above Tweet:

The old Win32 API for saving a file was (roughly) to show a file picker, get the filename the user selected, and then open the file. To open a file, the programmer must specify whether to overwrite the file or not, and example code usually does overwrite the file.
However, the new “more secure” Universal Windows Platform (UWP) sandboxes the file picker in a separate process, allowing neat features like capability-based access control. It returns a file handle which, if the selected file exists, will not overwrite the existing content!

The tread continued supporting this statement, that in the new situation you need to manually truncated the file, and referenced these links:

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Posted in .NET, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, SocialMedia, Software Development, Twitter, UWP (Universal Windows Platform), Windows Development | Leave a Comment »

Excel: operations involving the last occurence of a substring (with examples getting the current Worksheet, Workbook and file/directory path)

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/02

Last month I wrote about CELL function looks interesting but beware: language nightmares coming up….

There I mentioned both formulas from [Wayback/Archive] Get sheet name only – Excel formula | Exceljet and [Wayback/Archive] Insert the current Excel file name, path, or worksheet in a cell – Microsoft Support failing to deliver the expected results

an official Microsoft example of obtaining the Worksheet name which I suspected would not work on systems allowing ] in path names. And indeed it is true: that case fails on both MacOS and Windows in the same way.

Here you see the failures of both the ExcelJet function and the ones from Microsoft Support on two operating systems:

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Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Excel, Office, Power User, Scripting, SocialMedia, Software Development, Twitter | Leave a Comment »

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