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 ‘Scripting’ Category

If you develop web-sites, be sure their basics work without JavaScript, as JavaScript is a security risk

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/12/18

I have had JavaScript disabled by default for years now, which means that:

  • if your site requires JavaScript, I will opt for an alternative
  • I will block anything ad related, even if it means I cannot use your site

The reasons are simple:

  1. JavaScript has become a big security threat over time. Be it tracking (hello fingerprinting!), data leakage, direct attacks, supply chain attacks, sloppy code or other risks, JavaScript is not vulnerable just by itself, but especially the eco systems (hello npm – 2 attacks in September 2025 alone – and advertising networks) using it. Just a few references:
    1. [Wayback/Archive] The perils of JavaScript: How we’ve broken the internet’s security
    2. [Wayback/Archive] Most Common Security Vulnerabilities Using JavaScript – SecureCoding
    3. [Wayback/Archive] Supply Chain Security Alert: Popular Nx Build System Package Compromised with Data-Stealing Malware – StepSecurity
    4. [Wayback/Archive] Wormable Malware Causing Supply Chain Compromise of npm Code Packages – Arctic Wolf
    5. [Wayback/Archive] FingerprintJS | Identify Every Web Visitor & Mobile Device
  2. JavaScript has become a huge resource hog. Disabling JavaScript by default increased the snappiness and battery life of my laptops and smartphones significantly. In addition, it makes it way easier to read region-blocked content. Double win!

The below thread by [Wayback/Archive] Dr. Christopher Kunz (@christopherkunz@chaos.social) – chaos.social sparked me to finally write why and add some relevant links.

Thread:

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Posted in Development, Infosec (Information Security), JavaScript/ECMAScript, Power User, Scripting, Security, Software Development, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

Get it while it lasts: Led-pixel display (various Action EU stores)

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/12/11

A cool LED display that is programmable through Python (see [Wayback/Archive] Action led paneel – Boekenwuurm’s blog) made me realise how big Action has grown:

About EUR 20 or CHF 24 in the order of the below query:

There is also a square one, but that one does not remember it’s content during a power off/on cycle.

The above blog mentions this library which sees regular updates: [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – lucagoc/pypixelcolor: A Python library to control iPixel Color devices.

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Posted in Development, Hardware Interfacing, Python, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

When you get an error 103 establishing an SFTP

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/12/10

A while ago I got an error 103 using both Beyond Compare. That did not whos the connection log or error reason, but WinSCP did: it mentioned unexpected output during the logon.

I got reminded that I had already solved this error before via [Wayback/Archive] SSH login works but SFTP login doesn’t – Server Fault (thanks [Wayback/Archive] qreon and [Wayback/Archive] Paulus):

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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, bash, bash, Beyond Compare, Communications Development, Development, Internet protocol suite, Power User, Scripting, SFTP, Software Development, SSH, TCP, Windows, WinSCP | Leave a Comment »

How do you disable these thumbnails that pop up near the end of videos!? : r/youtube

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/12/09

Since a few years, YouTube puts annoyingly overlays on top of like the last 5 to 10 seconds of videos often covering valuable content.

Lately – while preparing for concerts – I have watched a lot of score music videos where the end really is very important to me (see the example below), for instance when rehearsing [Wayback/Archive] La Alhambra – Llano – YouTube until the final end.

The solution came from [Wayback/Archive] How do you disable these thumbnails that pop up near the end of videos!? : r/youtube

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Posted in Chrome, Chromium, CSS, Development, Edge, HTML, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Power User, Scripting, SocialMedia, Software Development, Web Development, WebAssembly, YouTube | Leave a Comment »

How could i get a permanent link for raw file? · community · Discussion #22537 · GitHub

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/12/04

I used [Wayback/Archive] How could i get a permanent link for raw file? · community · Discussion #22537 · GitHub to go

The reason I needed it is that for quite a while now, GitHub has started to display PDF files as preview, and modified the download behaviour to get a blob: link instead of the actual raw file download location.

On the to do list:

  1. figure out the same for raw files in gists
  2. figure out the same for GitLab
  3. convert these into Bookmarklets (fiddle with the bold parts in the above URLs)

Thanks [Wayback/Archive] Lotaristo (Czeslaw Meyer) and [Wayback/Archive] byrneh (Hugh Byrne)

--jeroen

Posted in Bookmarklet, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, Event, gist, git, GitHub, GitLab, Hosting, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Source Code Management | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

camerahacks/rpilocator-rss-feed: rpilocator RSS Feed Notifications

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/12/04

On my list to experiment with is [Wayback/Archive] camerahacks/rpilocator-rss-feed:

This is the official rpilocator.com and hwlocator.com RSS feed reader and push notification scripts and Node-RED flows. The RSS feed is checked every minute and the script/flow sends a push notification when a product comes in stock.

Send ntfy, Pushbullet, Pushover or Gotify notifications to your device.

I only knew one of the above services, so here I have listed links to all of them:

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Posted in Development, Python, RSS, Scripting, SocialMedia, Software Development, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

Launch Settings Pages using ms-settings URL shortcuts » Winhelponline

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/12/03

This post from 2023 [Wayback/Archive] Launch Settings Pages using ms-settings URL shortcuts » Winhelponline

This list will tremendously help me quickly navigating directly to Windows settings pages.

In case the list is not complete, there are others lists – like [Wayback/Archive] Windows 11 ms-settings Commands (Settings URI Shortcuts) – which I found via the second query.

Maybe one day, I will merge the results of a few of those results. If so, a new blog post will follow.

Got the first via a late edit of my blog post gsudo (sudo for windows).

Queries:

--jeroen

Posted in CommandLine, Development, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11 | Leave a Comment »

Is this the ultimate XKCD “Dependency” derivative?

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/11/29

xkcd modern digital infrastructure torn down by a satisfied looking cat

Besides the August 2025 XKCD infrastructure dependency inspired cartoon on the right, the more recent and great [Wayback/Archive] XCKD: Dependency derivative below is a monumental piece as it combines the recent:

  • fiber outage of the Internet Archive
  • DoS of Cloudflare by itself
  • AWS us-east-1 dependencies outage
  • Crowdstrike DoS of Windows machines
  • framework-du-jour mentality in the JavaScript world
  • many more¹

Image [Wayback/Archive] 36247840bf294a9d.png (1080×1389) from [Wayback/Archive] xyla 🐀🪇: “someone pls alt text this shit…” – buy shitpost cheap:

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Posted in *nix, Amazon.com/.de/.fr/.uk/..., AWS Amazon Web Services, C, CDN (Content Delivery Network), Cloud, Cloudflare, cURL, Development, Fun, Hardware, Infrastructure, ISP, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Network-and-equipment, Node.js, npm, Power User, Rust, Scripting, Software Development, Web Development | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

The Marvin the Paranoid Android 404-text

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/11/27

A while ago, I mentioned a 404-text simulating the Marvin the Paranoid Android as a side-line on a PlantUML post.

While categorising my ASCII art posts, I came across it, and it was published before I started archiving blog links in the Wayback Machine and Archive.is as much as possible.

Back during categorising, I added a few of those archived links, then made a note to research deeper.

So later, I got to that digging and did some digital spelunking, restored the text from an archived page and the underlying JavaScript code that simulated the text being typed on a “terminal”.

Then I did some more spelunking to the oldest usage I could find.

Here are the results:

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Posted in ASCII art / AsciiArt, Development, Fun, HTML, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Meme, Scripting, Software Development, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

EU Code Week on X: “🎨 Creative Corner: ASCII Art Challenge! 🎨 Let’s explore ASCII art! Use your coding skills to create a fun image using text characters. Share your masterpiece in the comments! Check out this guide to get started: Ready, set, create! #CreativeCoding”

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/11/26

This was a nice idea, but apparently not reaching the target audience:

[Wayback/Archive] EU Code Week on X: “🎨 Creative Corner: ASCII Art Challenge! 🎨 Let’s explore ASCII art! Use your coding skills to create a fun image using text characters. Share your masterpiece in the comments! Check out this guide to get started: … Ready, set, create! #CreativeCoding”

It pointed to step 4 in this Raspberry Pi project challenge: [Wayback/Archive] About me: ASCII art – Python challenge

Image via [WaybackSave/ArchiveTweet JSON / [Wayback/Archive] GVfE-_EXAAAv4R6.jpg:orig (1080×1080)

--jeroen

Posted in ASCII art / AsciiArt, Development, Fun, Python, Scripting, Software Development | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »