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 ‘Power User’ Category

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Inside a cheap set of eBay digital calipers – YouTube

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/22

The innards of these devices and how those work are so cool: [Wayback/Archive] Inside a cheap set of eBay digital calipers – YouTube

It should be noted that the quiescent current of these devices is around 18uA, even when off (the display goes off until movement is detected).
Some users are reporting a very short battery life, but a typical 100mAh (0.1Ah) button cell should be able to supply 0.00002A for a very long time. (Theoretically 100’s of days.)

The linear capacitive encoder in these units is very impressive. The physical encoder is seemingly very simple, with the bulk of the work being done by the ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit). It’s very similar in its cost optimisation to the cheap, but super-accurate weighing scales.

I’m really impressed by the accuracy of these units for their price. They are very common on eBay for as little as £5 (about $7 USD).

Via [Wayback/Archive] Discord | #3d-print-cnc-kleien-figuurzagen | Angrynerds Podcast

--jeroen

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Posted in DIY, LifeHacker, Power User | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

ArchiveTeam has finished archiving all goo.gl short links – hckrnws

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/22

Need to figure out where the ArchiveTeam will be uploading the below archive, as this will help me figure out which links in post blogs I will need to update.

Also, Google never got back to me with an answer what to do with various map and image related shortened URLs for which they themselves also use the goo.gl domain.

[Wayback/Archive] ArchiveTeam has finished archiving all goo.gl short links – hckrnws

Related:

Query: [Wayback/Archive] ArchiveTeam goo.gl at DuckDuckGo

--jeroen

Posted in Google, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Fix a “Automatic Repair couldn’t repair your PC” on an UEFI system: when Windows cannot be located

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/22

I got the below error when booting a Dell Optiplex 7060 Micro, a machine not just supporting supporting UEFI but preferring it, on which I had copied a backed-up disk image, then moved the hidden Recovery partition to the end of the physical disk (to make room to extend either the OS or DATA partitions).

Fixing it lead me to a trip that was on the boundary of software archaeology, so this blog post has a truckload of archived links to information that is still relevant, but for which the original links have long vanished due to link rot or (often worse) part of the historic information got lost because of migration to new tooling forgot to cover important additions (especially in comments).

One thing that I had to unlearn was MBR disk basics, for instance the fact that on GPT disks a partition can be active (they can only be on MBR disks, but despite UEFI supporting both MBT and GPT, GPT disks are way more common and required). The same holds for partitions having a boot flag: that too only applies to MBR disks. For the same reason, bootrec is only useful for MBR disks. More details towards the end of this blog post. CSM (Compatibility Support Module) booting is the UEFI way to simulate BIOS boot for operating systems that do no support UEFI.

Back to the error at hand:

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Posted in Development, History, link rot, Power User, Software Archeology, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, Windows XP, WWW - the World Wide Web of information | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Ioan Popovici @ MEM.Zone on X: “The Inno setup uninstall switches are the funniest thing ever. SILENT, /VERYSILENT I knew about this but didn’t think that the silent uninstall registry keys would be just SILENT. I’ve fixed that in the bulk uninstall tool but man microsoft should have forced”

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/21

For my link archive: [WaybackSave/Archive] Ioan Popovici @ MEM.Zone on X: “The Inno setup uninstall switches are the funniest thing ever. SILENT, /VERYSILENT I knew about this but didn’t think that the silent uninstall registry keys would be just SILENT. I’ve fixed that in the bulk uninstall tool but man microsoft should have forced”

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, Inno Setup ISS, InnoSetup, Installer-Development, Power User, Software Development, Windows, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »

Jeroen Wiert Pluimers @wiert@mastodon.social on X: “@_ObomheseR Since JavaScript is in the group of curly based programming languages influenced by the B programming language, integer constants starting with zero are tried first in octal base. 017 octal is 15 decimal 018 octal is not possible, so becomes 18.”

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/20

With the constant influx of JavaScript programmers, it keeps worth repeating that you should always run JavaScript in strict mode via "use strict"; (like in the past Visual Basic 6 developers should use option strict and option explicit) to forget risky JavaScript syntax like implicit ocal constants (which were removed from the documentation in the 2009 ECMAScript 5 specification for JavaScript), and every codeline should have a test code covering it, especially for comparisons involving non-strict behaviour like the use of leading zeros.

As of the succeeding 2015 standard (ECMAScript 6), octal numbers in JavaScript start with 0o or 0O followed by a series of octal digits.

Oh, and the history of octal in computing of course has to do with 6-bit systems and also lead to 6-six bit character codes including BCD character encoding..

My tweet back earlier this year: [WaybackSave/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers @wiert@mastodon.social on X: “@_ObomheseR Since JavaScript is in the group of curly based programming languages influenced by the B programming language, integer constants starting with zero are tried first in octal base. 017 octal is 15 decimal 018 octal is not possible, so becomes 18.”

Inhteritence:

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Posted in B, BASIC, C, Development, JavaScript/ECMAScript, MarkDown, Retrocomputing, Scripting, Software Development, VB6, Visual BASIC | Leave a Comment »

When Delphi cannot output the .exe file because it is locked

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/20

Sometimes Delphi cannot output the .exe file because it is locked. In even rarer times, Delphi itself keeps the .exe file locked (this has done it for decades and I think this is caused by a bug in the debugger).

A long time ago, I answered how to figure out where the lock comes from. A decade later a comment was added (thanks [Wayback/Archive] Server Overflow) with a command-line tool you can use for that too (but sometimes returns less results). Both are in [Wayback/Archive] compilation – Delphi does not generate any exe file – Stack Overflow Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Delphi, Development, Power User, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »

4-digit Dell Optiplex models – Difference between model-series – Dell Community

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/18

A while ago I bumped into the below post but forgot which Google Search query brought me to it. Very to the point info at [Wayback/Archive] Optiplex models – Difference between model-series – Dell Community (thanks [Wayback/Archive] Philip_Yip – Dell Community!) Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Dell Optiplex 3060/5060/7060 Micro, Hardware, Power User | Leave a Comment »

If I have not found pfSense hardware by now: Gowin R86S mini PC offers 2.5GbE and 10GbE networking for $310 and up – CNX Software

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/15

I have been contemplating on pfSense hardware as there has been a large shortage on that market especially for having more than 2 ports (similar to for instance Mikrotik PoE router unavailability).

If by now I have not found any, I might want to revisit [Wayback/Archive] Gowin R86S mini PC offers 2.5GbE and 10GbE networking for $310 and up – CNX Software has 3 RJ45 ports and 2 SFP+ cages.

They found it via this 4 page review:

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Posted in Ethernet, Hardware, MikroTik, Network-and-equipment, pfSense, Power User, routers | Leave a Comment »

In case I need a small 5-port managed switch that can do port-mirroring: GS305E | Easy Smart Managed Essentials Switch | NETGEAR Support

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/13

[Wayback/Archive] GS305E | Easy Smart Managed Essentials Switch | NETGEAR Support which can do many-to-one port mirroring.

This is a newer and cheaper hardware revision than the:

  • GS105Ev2 (which is managed and can do port-mirroring, and is confusingly sold as GS105E-200) which in Germany already is end-of-life
  • GS105Ev1 (which is unmanaged and cannot do port-mirroring and is confusingly sold as GS105E-100) which is end-of-life but still sold

Via [Wayback/Archive] Everyone Should Have One of These – EASY Packet Capture! – YouTube who explains very well why you need a switch that can do port-mirroring, then recommends the GS105E but forgets to mention:

  • there are different revisions of the GS105E with the above drawbacks
  • there is GS305E

Related:

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Posted in Blue team, Communications Development, Development, Ethernet, Hardware, Internet protocol suite, Network-and-equipment, Power User, Red team, Security, Software Development, TCP, UDP | Leave a Comment »

10 years ago, Toru Iwatani showed his original drafts for Pac-Man : gaming

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/12

I missed this back then, so here is a reminder: [Wayback/Archive] Toru Iwatani shows his original drafts for Pac-Man : gaming

Of course these had a big red stamp on them marking them classified. The detailed game experience and sprite transformations in just a few pages really shows how great Toru Iwatani was.

Images were posted first on [Wayback/Archive] Toru Iwatani shows his original drafts for Pac-Man – Imgur:

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Posted in History, Retrocomputing | Leave a Comment »

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