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 ‘Google’ Category

Exporting Chrome History (with the “new” configuration and state file structure), and Epoch dates on various systems

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/05/02

Quite a while ago, Chrome moved from a structure based on “Current Session“, “Current Tabs“, “Last Session” and “Last Tabs” into “Session_#################” and “Tabs_#################” stored in a “Sessions” folder (and similar migrations for other state and configuration files).

The numbers in the “Session_*” and “Tabs_*” files are time stamps of those sessions, for instance one needs to figure out what the “13310808970819630” in “Session_13310808970819630” and “Session_13310808970819630” means.

Lot’s of web-pages with tips and tricks around the old structures are still around, often surfacing high in Google Search results.

I was interested in a particular trick to export Google Chrome browsing history and had a hard time figuring out the easiest solution.

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Posted in Apple, Batch-Files, Chrome, Chrome, Database Development, Development, Google, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, NirSoft, Polyglot, Power User, Scripting, SQLite, Web Browsers, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11 | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

GitHub – randomaccess3/googleURLParser: parser for Google search strings

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/05/01

Back when I observed the Google Search sei parameter which I hadn’t seen before yet, I bumped into [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – randomaccess3/googleURLParser: parser for Google search strings

It covers a truckload of parameters, including the sei one, which isn’t as new as I thought, as it was at least 2017 old: [Wayback/Archive] [Neat URL] Yet another Google parameter… · Issue #25 · Smile4ever/firefoxaddons · GitHub

Links referred from the parser tool for further reading:

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Posted in Development, Google, GoogleImageSearch, GoogleSearch, Perl, Power User, Python, Scripting, Software Development | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

DB Browser for SQLite: cross platform, reasonably sized, versatile

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/29

I found [Wayback/Archive] DB Browser for SQLite via [Wayback/Archive] In z’n leren frakske | Tech45 Podcast (thanks [Wayback/Archive] Toon Van de Putte (@toonvandeputte)!).

It is a standalone reasonably sized database browser for the single-process SQLite database (which is itself a file storage replacement for highly table structured data, see below).

With SQLite gaining more and more popularity in standalone application usage (you can even host it inside a web browser session!), I bump in it more often to fix things (more on that in a future blog post), which means that besides the standard console support in SQLite, having a versatile browser is really useful.

DB Browser for SQLite, or in short sqlitebrowser, fulfills that need better than I expected. It’s cross-platform so it works on Mac OS, Windows and Linux (and sort of on WSL2 on Windows, see links below).

Hopefully I can show you how I used it in future blog-posts. For now, and for my link archive, below are just some links to get started.

Oh and the comment: as always with files containing structured data that is randomly accessed you should be really careful when opening them over file-shares or virtual drives like cloud storage.

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Posted in Chrome, Chrome, Database Development, Development, Google, Power User, Software Development, SQLite, Web Browsers | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Chrome suddenly reported “Unsupported extensions” – need to find a Chromium browser that will long-time support Manifest V2

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/14

Chrome warned me of a list of extensions that it thought were unsupported pointing me towards [Wayback/Archive] Install and manage extensions – Chrome Web Store Help: Unsupported extensions.

It included ones important to me like [Wayback/Archive] Pushbullet – Chrome Web Store and [Wayback/Archive] ClearURLs – Chrome Web Store.

My full local list was at the bottom of chrome://extensions/ where you have to both “keep it” to get them re-installed in the “This extension was turned off because it is no longer supported” state, and after keeping them switch them on plus conforming the switch on to be able to use them.

A quick search revealed this likely has to do with Manifest V2 support: [Wayback/Archive] Why is my Chrome saying the Pushbullet Extension is no longer supported? : PushBullet (that post was 9 months ago, so it looks Chrome is spreading the nagging period over a long time).

This means I need to find a Chromium based browser that plans to support Manifest V2 for a long time. For now Brave indicates that it wants to: [Wayback/Archive] What Manifest V3 means for Brave Shields and the use of extensions in the Brave browser | Brave

Some however think Brave won’t: [Wayback/Archive] If it’s chromium based, they will need to remove manifest v2 at some point… | Hacker News

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Posted in Chrome, Chrome, Chromium, Google, Power User, Web Browsers | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Chrome on Windows: Keyboard – Move focus to the shortcuts bar – Google Chrome Community

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/31

[Wayback/Archive] Keyboard – Move focus to the shortcuts bar – Google Chrome Community was a great question that I had myself for a long time.

TL;DR: On Windows, you can either cycle focus using F6, Alt + Shift + b to use the keyboard for getting focus to the bookmarks bar.

This is not officially documented for Windows/Linux at [Wayback/Archive] Chrome keyboard shortcuts – Computer – Google Chrome Help:

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Posted in Chrome, Google, Hardware, Keyboards and Keyboard Shortcuts, KVM keyboard/video/mouse, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Any YouTube ID is a YouTube ID which means you can use any shorts ID and music ID to watch as a YouTube URL (adding functionality shorts and music URLs lack)

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/24

YouTube has diversified its content separating out YouTube Shorts and YouTube Music.

The main YouTube viewing experience has a few advantages over the other two experiences:

  1. content can be monetised
  2. content can arranged into lists (including Watch Later)
  3. auto-play can be turned off

All below links have the same ID, but the ones with checkmarks can use all the above features whereas the ones with crosses cannot.

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Posted in Development, Google, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Web Development, YouTube, YouTubeMusic | Leave a Comment »

How Discord Supercharges Network Disks for Extreme Low Latency

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/12/27

A while ago there was an interesting point of using tiered md to both obtain low read latency and write safety on the Google Cloud Platform in [Wayback/Archive] How Discord Supercharges Network Disks for Extreme Low Latency

It is an interesting approach to universally tune performance within the sketched boundaries, but raised some questions as their aim was improving ScyllaDB performance and Unix-like platforms on Google Cloud Platform can supports ZFS.

In this case Discord wanted to improve their ScyllaDB that was already read/written from GCP Persistent Storage and used tiered md to improve that.

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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Cloud, GCP Google Cloud Platform, Google, Hardware, Infrastructure, NVMe, Power User, RAID, SSD | Leave a Comment »

Some notes as I need to perform contact syncing between various Google accounts

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/12/13

Consolidating and splitting contacts between Google accounts because of family affairs has been on my wish list for a long time.

Somehow this is far more difficult than I expected.

So here is a link dump that hopefully will help me later on.

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Posted in Google, GoogleAccount, GoogleContacts, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Not just on a new tab: MacOS chrome crashes when command + shift + i is pressed on a new tab [333424895] – Chromium

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/11/23

April 2024 this bug was reported: [Wayback/Archive] chrome crashes when command + shift + i is pressed on a new tab [333424895] – Chromium

That one was fixed, but it looks shortcuts like Command (⌘) + Shift + I still break Chrome when used on a tab pointing to a web-site.

Hopefully the original fix at [Wayback/Archive] Fix crash in sharing menu (5449679) · Gerrit Code Review will help people fixing the standing issue as well.

Related (I plan to file a bug report when the number of my open tabs is closer to zero from the current 200+):

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Posted in Apple, Chrome, Google, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Windows: Will the new Google Chat PWA for Chrome ever have system tray support? : gsuite

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/11/11

About 2 years after Google switched every Google Hangouts user over to Google Chat, I still wonder about [Wayback/Archive] Will the new Google Chat PWA for Chrome ever have system tray support? : gsuite:

Chrome _right now_ can be sustained as a background process with the Chrome-ball in the system tray. This is the vehicle with which Hangouts remains open at all time, so why not Chat, too?

I’m left with no option but to have Chat running on a mobile device so I have always on access. Perhaps this is the angle. I nunno.

Your support page link I’ve seen already and it doesn’t answer the Why question.

It is absolutely a bizzarotown implementation.

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Posted in Chat, Google, GoogleChat, GoogleHangouts, Power User, SocialMedia | Leave a Comment »