The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

  • My badges

    Mastodon

  • Twitter Updates

  • My Flickr Stream

    20140508-Delphi-2007--Project-Options--Cannot-Edit-Application-Title-HelpFile-Icon-Theming20140430-Fiddler-Filter-Actions-Button-Run-Filterset-now20140424-VMware-Fusion-6.0.3.-no-reclaimable
    More Photos

  • Pages

  • All categories

  • Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 1,854 other subscribers

Archive for the ‘Scripting’ Category

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »

JavaScript bookmarklet to replace part of the archive.li fixing: not possible 

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/05/31

Quite often while saving a URL in the WayBack Machine, the response often is headed “Sorry” with non-descriptive “Job failed”. In the background however, at least half of th…

Related: JavaScript bookmarklet to replace part of the WayBack machine URL

For instance, a while ago for instance http://archive.fo/search/?q=nu.nl, https://archive.fo/search/?q=nu.nl and similar URLs redirected to https://archive.li/search/?q=nu.nl, which in turn redirected to itself:

This page isn’t working

archive.li redirected you too many times.

ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS

This isn’t a cookie thing as it happens in an anonymous window on several browsers as well. Most redirect checkers return a 429, as Archive Today has quite strict rate limiting:

I tried these bookmarklets to go to a good archive.is link from the above replacing http://archive.fo/search/?q=nu.nl,  https://archive.fo/search/?q=nu.nl, http://archive.li/search/?q=nu.nl and https://archive.li/search/?q=nu.nl with https://archive.is/search/?q=nu.nl (with the same above bolded parts):

javascript:(function() {window.location=window.location.toString().replace(/^http.?:\/\/archive\.[is|li]\//,'https://archive.is/');})()

It can even be simpler (but maybe not fully conformant to specs):

javascript:location=location.href.replace(/^http.?:\/\/archive\.[is|li]\//,'https://archive.is/')

These both fail!

Even a simple bookmarklet like this fails too:

javascript:alert('hello world!');

It took me a bit of thinking to figure out why, but then figured out that any JavaScript requires a page context to run, and when no page is displayed, there is no context to run on.

And indeed:

–jeroen

Posted in Bookmarklet, Development, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Web Browsers | Leave a Comment »

JavaScript bookmarklet to replace part of the WayBack machine URL

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/05/23

Quite often while saving a URL in the WayBack Machine, the response often is headed “Sorry” with non-descriptive “Job failed”.

In the background however, at least half of those times the job actually succeeded.

Some periodes that success rate was way lower as the archival job didn’t start with a GET request. The workaround was to use a POST request, see I want to check out how to do POST requests using bookmarklets in order to save URLs to the WayBack machine and [Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers on Twitter: “Does anyone why the @waybackmachine has a lot of job failed and 404 errors over the last few days? … and … just returned a 404; most of my archivals the last few days failed or had to be retried at least half a dozen times to succeed. …” / Twitter

The error message in both “Job failed” cases is the same, so it makes sense to differ between the first case (job started and complete, but web interface failed to get that) and the latter (job didn’t even start) by doing the below URL replacement with a bookmarklet:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Bookmarklet, Development, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Web Browsers | Leave a Comment »

Windows 10 and 11: installing WSL2 does not require winget, Chocolatey or Scoop

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/05/18

After using Chocolatey for a long time and writing about it, I have written a few articles on other Windows package managers like winget and Scoop.

Part of the reason was that I wanted to install new systems in a semi-automatic way including WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux 2).

As I have spent quite some time getting treated against metastasised rectum cancer, I missed part of the evolvement of WSL into WSL2 and of the winget evolvement.

The good news is that this simplified the scripted installation of WSL2 a lot, as over time, this got very easy, as confirmed in these posts/messages I found via [Wayback/Archive] winget wsl2 – Google Search:

I even found back this was announced when I was still in hospital: during the Build 2020 conference. A summary is at [Wayback/Archive] The Windows Subsystem for Linux BUILD 2020 Summary – Windows Command Line describing the introduction of wsl.exe --install and that it defaults to install WSL 2 as back-then already most Windows Insider build users using WSL had switched from WSL 1 to WSL 2.

Back to installing

Yesterday, in  Windows “equivalents” for bash backticks in cmd and PowerShell, I showed how to get the wsl.exe information:

C:\temp>PowerShell -Command "SigCheck "$((Get-Command -CommandType Application wsl).Path)""

Sigcheck v2.82 - File version and signature viewer
Copyright (C) 2004-2021 Mark Russinovich
Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com

c:\windows\system32\wsl.exe:
        Verified:       Signed
        Signing date:   09:24 15/10/2021
        Publisher:      Microsoft Windows
        Company:        Microsoft Corporation
        Description:    Microsoft Windows Subsystem for Linux Launcher
        Product:        Microsoft« Windows« Operating System
        Prod version:   10.0.19041.1320
        File version:   10.0.19041.1320 (WinBuild.160101.0800)
        MachineType:    64-bit

This was on one of my Windows 10 systems with version 21H2.

The installation progress was as follows and took ome 3 minutes on a 50 Mibit/s fiber connection:

C:\temp>wsl.exe --install
Installing: Virtual Machine Platform
Virtual Machine Platform has been installed.
Installing: Windows Subsystem for Linux
Windows Subsystem for Linux has been installed.
Downloading: WSL Kernel
Installing: WSL Kernel
WSL Kernel has been installed.
Downloading: Ubuntu
The requested operation is successful. Changes will not be effective until the system is rebooted.

Time to play around (:

–jeroen

Posted in Batch-Files, Chocolatey, Development, Power User, Scoop, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows Development, winget, WSL Windows Subsystem for Linux | Leave a Comment »

Windows “equivalents” for bash backticks in cmd and PowerShell

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/05/17

A while ago, I needed the file information of wsl.exe on one of my Windows systems.

On Linux, I would do something like file `which bash` where file will give the file details and which gets you the full path to bash.

The file equivalent on Windows for me is [Wayback/Archive] Sigcheck – Windows Sysinternals | Microsoft Docs, which is part of [Wayback/Archive] File and Disk Utilities – Windows Sysinternals | Microsoft Docs.

The which equivalent on Windows for me is [Wayback/Archive] where | Microsoft Docs.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in bash, Batch-Files, CommandLine, Development, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development | 1 Comment »

Bookmarklet-Youtube: Add all subscriptions to watch-later

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/05/16

Saved because I want to learn how to save a YouTube URL into a [Wayback/Archive] YouTube: Watch later play list, as doing it by hand takes at least 10 seconds per URL.

[Wayback/Archive] Bookmarklet-Youtube: Add all subscriptions to watch-later

–jeroen

Posted in Bookmarklet, Development, GoogleBookmarks, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Web Browsers | Leave a Comment »

Disabling the Windows 10 news (and weather) feeds

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/05/11

I finally got annoyed enough to figure out how to disable the Windows 10 news (and weather) feeds.

At first I thought the solution in this post worked for Windows 11 as well, but re-testing in Windows 11 it does not or does not (or not any more: given so many new Windows 11 releases with ever changing functionality I’m not surprised).

Disable Windows news feeds for current user

Failure: just disabling the news feed will automatically get it reset by explorer.exe

Based on the below sources, I made this small batch file:

Read the rest of this entry »

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

Restart Windows explorer with an UAC administrator token

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/05/10

Sometimes, you want to restart the Windows explorer. This is already an exception case which you want to do when explorer hangs (for instance when taskbar icons do not respond any more), or has files locked which need to be modified. I described the latter in Inno Setup: Program Folder not showing up In Start > All Programs , with this very simple restart script:

taskkill /F /IM explorer.exe
start explorer

Even more exception is wanting to run explorer with a UAC elevated administrative token. I sometimes do this when moving around stuff from other users on the same computer without having them logged on (as that would lock the files or directories to be moved around).

The risk of running explorer under UAC elevation, is that any program you start will also start UAC elevated, so beware what you ask for…

This is how you start explorer under UAC elevation:

pwsh.exe -nol -noni -nop -w hidden -c "taskkill /f /im explorer.exe; start explorer -v runas -a /nouaccheck"

or if you run an older Windows version of PowerShell:

PowerShell.exe -nol -noni -nop -w hidden -c "taskkill /f /im explorer.exe; start explorer -v runas -a /nouaccheck"

These command-line options and verbs are used:

Time to explain a few:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Batch-Files, CommandLine, Development, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows 7, Windows 8.1 | 1 Comment »

Some more links on bookmarklets: this time ones that operate on (selection of text on) the current page

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/05/04

As a continuation of the various bookmarklet posts, here is one with information on bookmarklets that operate on the current page, for instance when you already got text selected.

All via [Wayback/Archive] bookmarklet that works on link of current selection – Google Search

–jeroen

Posted in Bookmarklet, Development, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Web Browsers, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

The Wordle word list is in the source JavaScript file (via Isotopp)

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/05/03

Oh well: [Archive] Kris on Twitter: “L> add AI there and you’ve got a paper R> I just had a look, and that thing is pretty much completely offline. the JS contains the entire dictionary C> well would you look at that, might want to use the actual dictionary then “

Actually, it was dead easy to copy the sources to a gist and host the gist:

And of course someone distilled the wordle word solutions list into some statistics:

More was done at [Wayback/Archive] Reverse Engineering Wordle | Robert Reichel.

Which got updated to the statistics of the union of solution and accepted words list

Another tool that helps solving is [Wayback/Archive] willthames/wordle-guesses which I found via [Archive] Will Thames on Twitter: “I spent some of my New Year’s Day writing a program to generate the best first two guesses for Wordle. Time well spent, I think: …”.

Jilles then posted a video on how to view the source [Archive] Jilles🏳️‍🌈 on Twitter: “How to cheat on #wordle …”.

To make Wordle even harder, there is Absurdle, an adversorial version of Wordle that decides the word upon your input until it runs out of decisions:

A Dutch and German version were added as Woordle and Wordle (which missed being called WorDeL and Wortle):

Shortly followed by another German version (always the Austrians setting themselves apart), and a French one (which messed Le Word as perfect name):

There is also a four-letter word edition, actually two of them:

There is a Prime version too:

Felienne posted a cool analysis bot that watches Wordle tweets and uses them to estimate the correct Wordle solution:

Oh, there is a single Letterle, which on average takes you some 13 tries when disregarding letter frequencies (which likely should not matter):

When you think Absurdle was going far, look at what happened Wordlinator:

Two search tools that are very useful:

If you are desperate, these solvers can help; the second one is more flexible, the first one faster, and the last one is pure cheating:

  1. [Wayback/Archive] Ruining the fun: a Wordle auto-solver – by Tom
  2. [Wayback/Archive] Wordle Helper – Suggestion and Solver Tool – Gamer Journalist
  3. [Wayback/Archive] Wordle Answers (February 2022) – Today’s Solution

I tried referencing all posts in the somewhat broken thread at:

Some links that did not make it into that thread (yet):

Having good start words and an on-line dictionary help:

And there is always a really fast way: [Wayback/Archive] Wordle Solver | Not Fun at Parties (explained in [Wayback/Archive] Ruining the fun: a Wordle auto-solver – by Tom)

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, JavaScript/ECMAScript, LifeHacker, Natural Languages, Power User, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

I want to check out how to do POST requests using bookmarklets in order to save URLs to the WayBack machine

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/04/27

I want to check out how to do POST requests using bookmarklets in order to save URLs to the Wayback machine.

The reason is that every few months or so, saving a page the normal way through a something like https://web.archive.org/save/URL fails for one reason or the other, but going to https://web.archive.org/save, then entering URL, and pressing “SAVE PAGE” button works fine:

The the failing way above is using a GET request, the succeeding workaround will open https://web.archive.org/save/URL  using the below POST request (where I omitted some HTTP cookies and HTTP header fields for brevity).

  • POST request using PowerShell:
    $session = New-Object Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.WebRequestSession
$session.UserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/96.0.4664.110 Safari/537.36"
Invoke-WebRequest -UseBasicParsing -Uri "https://web.archive.org/save/URL" `
-Method "POST" `
-WebSession $session `
-Headers @{
"method"="POST"
  "origin"="https://web.archive.org"
  "referer"="https://web.archive.org/save"
} `
-ContentType "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" `
-Body "url=URL&capture_outlinks=on&capture_all=on&capture_screenshot=on"
  • POST request using cURL on bash:
    curl 'https://web.archive.org/save/URL' \
  -H 'origin: https://web.archive.org' \
  -H 'content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded' \
  -H 'referer: https://web.archive.org/save' \
  --data-raw 'url=URL&capture_outlinks=on&capture_all=on&capture_screenshot=on' \
  --compressed
  • POST request using the fetch API in JavaScript:
    fetch("https://web.archive.org/save/URL", {
  "headers": {
    "content-type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded",
  },
  "referrer": "https://web.archive.org/save",
  "body": "url=URL&capture_outlinks=on&capture_all=on&capture_screenshot=on",
  "method": "POST",
  "mode": "cors"
});

BTW: Yes, I know that URL is not a valid URL, so it will return a page with “http://url/ URL syntax is not valid.“.

All links below via [Wayback/Archive] bookmarklet post request – Google Search:

I tried to put createFormSubmittingBookmarklets/createFormSubmitBookmarklets.js in a bookmarklet using both userjs.up.seesaa.net/js/bookmarklet.html and skalman.github.io/UglifyJS-online. That failed: somehow this code does not want to run as bookmarklet.

Running it from the console is fine though, and gave me this basic bookmarklet template:

javascript:function sf(ur,ty,fd){function me(tg,pr){var el=document.createElement(tg);for(const[nm,vl]of Object.entries(pr)){el.setAttribute(nm,vl);}return el}const fm=me("form",{action:ur,method:ty,style:"display:hidden;"});for(const[nm,vl]of Object.entries(fd)){fm.appendChild(me("input",{name:nm, value:vl}))}document.body.appendChild(fm);fm.submit()}sf("https://web.archive.org/save","post",{"url":"URL","capture_outlinks":"on","capture_all":"on","capture_screenshot":"on","wm-save-mywebarchive":"on","email_result":"on","":"SAVE PAGE"});

There bold URL there is the URL to be saved. I need to test this, then rework it to become parameterised.

–jeroen

Posted in Bookmarklet, Development, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Web Browsers, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »