Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/10
I mention dead links a lot, and always try to archive content before scheduling it in a blog post.
No different for [Wayback/Archive] Some URLs Are Immortal, Most Are Ephemeral, which provides background information about how the short lifespan of most URLs.
Their 2024 publication was a poster in PNG and PTTX format (linked below under the abstract), so I created this PDF out of it:
Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Event, Internet, LifeHacker, Power User, Web Browsers, WWW - the World Wide Web of information | Leave a Comment »
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:
Posted in .NET, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, SocialMedia, Software Development, Twitter, UWP (Universal Windows Platform), Windows Development | Leave a Comment »
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:
Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Excel, Office, Power User, Scripting, SocialMedia, Software Development, Twitter | Leave a Comment »
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.”
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:
Back to Julia’s post:
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 »
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 2026/02/12
From quite a while back but still very relevant today, especially when debugging problems (most people would post them in the order integers, floats, but Julia did it in the opposite way):
[Wayback/Archive] Julia Evans: “today I’m thinking about how floating point numbers can be treacherous — what are specific examples of when they’ve betrayed you?so far I have:…” – Mastodon
Usually I tend to explain integer versus floating point math as lossless versus lossy data compression (for instance WavPack and FLAC versus MP3 compression of PCM audio data, or BMP versus JPEG compression of 2D digital image data).
Either way: floating point and integer problems cause real harm. One interesting comment illustrating that was [Wayback/Archive] Ian Kirker on Twitter: “@b0rk I didn’t see this one in the list, which sticks in my memory: science.org – Fatal Error: How Patriot Overlooked a Scud”
[No wayback/Archive] Fatal Error: How Patriot Overlooked a Scud | Science
If you like listening instead of reading, then [Wayback/Archive] 452: Numbers on Computers Are Weird — Embedded is a great podcast episode where Julia gets interviewed by Christopher White, and Elecia White which I found via [Wayback/Archive] Julia Evans on Twitter: “was on the @embeddedfm podcast this week talking about our upcoming “How Integers and Floats Work” zine, plus some meta discussion about making zines”
Either way, be sure to read the other replies to b0rk’s posts too as many interesting tidbits did not make it in her underlying blog posts:
Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/01/06
Everytime when installing a pfSense router from scratch, I seem to re-learn a few of the below quirks. So it was finally time to document them (:
Quite a few of my pfSense configurations are just doing routing between various networks, should not provide DHCP leases and do not always need or have a WAN connected (i.e. they are LAN-only).
Posted in Communications Development, Conference Topics, Conferences, Cyberchef, Development, DHCP, Encoding, Event, Hardware, HTTP, Internet protocol suite, MikroTik, Network-and-equipment, pfSense, Power User, routers, Software Development, SSH, TCP, TLS, UDP | Tagged: 8846 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/12/25
This is actually the WireGuard package you can install on pfSense CE 2.5.2 and higher: [Wayback/Archive] rcmcdonald91/pfSense-pkg-WireGuard: This is a port of the original WireGuard UI bits as implemented by Netgate in pfSense 2.5.0 to a package suitable for rapid iteration and more frequent updating on future releases of pfSense.
Note that the source code mentions a lot of web-technologies but that is because the majority of the code is the pfSense plugin. Underneath it pulls the actual build from [Wayback/Archive] git.zx2c4.com/wireguard-freebsd/snapshot which is almost exclusively C code.
Like WireGuardNT on Windows, it uses a high performance kernel mode driver.
Some more links on it:
Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, Event, git, GitHub, Hardware, Network-and-equipment, pfSense, Power User, routers, Software Development, Source Code Management, Tailscale | Tagged: 11281, 73 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/12/16
[Wayback/Archive] version control – How can I see the changes in a Git commit? – Stack Overflow (thanks [Wayback/Archive] laktak, [Wayback/Archive] Nevik Rehnel, [Wayback/Archive] Juuso Ohtonen and [Wayback/Archive] User c z – Stack Overflow)
This looks like a valid question, but in reality it is not.
The thing is: in git, think of a commit not as a diff but as a snapshot*.
A diff is the difference between two commits.
Since most commits have just a single parent, so that’s why many people call a commit a diff. But that’s not true, especially not for merge commits that have at least two parents.
Anyway, the question, answer and comment from the link above already give some insight (note COMMIT everywhere below has to be replaced with the commit hash):
Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, Event, git, Software Development, Source Code Management | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 