Posted by jpluimers on 2026/05/15
As a memory to our almost identical Swiss W116 450SEL 6.9 a video in Swiss German about it: [Wayback/Archive] Ein Blick zurück – das beste Auto der 70er Jahre – YouTube.
This one with fabric, white headlights and ABS, ours with leather, yellow headlights plus headlight wipers, and no ABS (it took around chassis numbers ending around 750 until ABS was available: ours was slightly earlier)
--jeroen
Posted in About, cars, LifeHacker, Personal, Power User, W116 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/05/15
Though I have no Reddit account, it has much useful content, so I wish I had known his query site like 15 years ago [Wayback/Archive] SocialGrep – Social Media Analytics for Reddit
It looks like very few people mentioned me on Reddit too. Is that a good thing?
Posted in Power User, SocialMedia | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/05/14
A while ago I bumped into [Wayback/Archive] Unicode weirdness – VCL – Delphi-PRAXiS [en].
This sketched a mojibake problem where PDF to text converted files had odd looking character sequences.
The solution – replacing these sequences with more correctly looking text – worked at first, but then failed because the underlying source code got “corrected” from containing the Mojibake character sequences into the correct Unicode text.
A better solution is to figure out what series of encoding/decoding steps will give the correct text.
This is where – again – [Wayback/Archive] Home – ftfy: fixes text for you comes up: a still indispensable tool.
–jeroen
Posted in Delphi, Development, Encoding, Mojibake, PDF, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/05/13
[Wayback/Archive] Beeper — All your chats in one app
Via a friend that mentioned Beeper to me.
On the list to try out somewhere during the year.
It is open source; some more links:
Posted in Chat, Development, Discord, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, Facebook, git, GoogleChat, IRC, LinkedIn, Power User, Signal messenger, SocialMedia, Software Development, Source Code Management, Telegram, Twitter, WhatsApp | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/05/13
The Scoop repository lists this first time Scoop install command at [Wayback/Archive] ScoopInstaller/Scoop: A command-line installer for Windows. – installation:
Run the following command from a non-admin PowerShell to install scoop to its default location
C:Users<YOUR USERNAME>scoop.iwr -useb get.scoop.sh | iex
[Wayback/Archive] ScoopInstaller/Install: 📥 Next-generation Scoop (un)installer is very similar:
Run this command from a non-admin PowerShell to install scoop with default configuration, scoop will be install to
C:Users<YOUR USERNAME>scoop.irm get.scoop.sh | iex # You can use proxies if you have network trouble in accessing GitHub, e.g. irm get.scoop.sh -Proxy 'http://<ip:port>' | iex
The Scoop homepage at [Wayback/Archive] Scoop.sh is not much better:
Posted in Batch-Files, CommandLine, Development, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scoop, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/05/11
Few places have the configuration for various platforms on how to prevent Google Chrome from installing the 4GB LLM model that got traction over the last few days. Luckily it is at [Wayback/Archive] default settings – How do I disable all AI features in Chrome? – Super User (thanks [Wayback/Archive] A-Tech and [Wayback/Archive] cachius):
Posted in AI and ML; Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Chrome, Development, Google, LLM, Power User, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/05/08
This is a cool device as explained in the below video: [Wayback/Archive] SABRENT USB Charging Station 252 W 8-Port PD 3.0 with LCD Display – GaN Charger Charger – Fast Charging Station for USB-C & USB-A Devices, Laptops, Smartphones – PPS, Overcharge Protection: Amazon.de: Computer & Accessories
Despite good, I put this comment below the video:
Posted in ElectricPower, Hardware, LifeHacker, Power User, PSU, USB, USB-C | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/05/08
Boy have I been living under a stone, I wish I had known Little Snitch 2 decades ago (:
Little Snitch is a host-based application firewall for macOS. It can be used to monitor applications, preventing or permitting them to connect to attached networks through advanced rules. It is produced and maintained by the Austrian firm Objective Development Software GmbH.
At the time of writing, it was at version 5.x, and it was introduced early this century.
Site and other links:
Posted in Apple, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/05/07
A few years back this trick was shown to screw up %windir%\system32 [Wayback/Archive] Patrick Doyle on Twitter: “@SwiftOnSecurity @RoseAreaZero Delete any file in three easy steps: > takeown /F "example.ext" > icacls "example.ext" /grant "%USERNAME%":F > del "example.ext"“.
Like [Wayback/Archive] SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) / Twitter (see the long thread further below), I was expecting that Windows would either prevent you from doing this at all, or allow for easy recovery with System File Protection (now Source: Windows File Protection).
That didn’t prevent or recover it back then.
I wonder if that has been changed by now.
From the above Tweet:
Delete any file in three easy steps:> takeown /F "example.ext" > icacls "example.ext" /grant "%USERNAME%":F > del "example.ext"
Posted in Batch-Files, Development, Power User, Scripting, Security, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/05/06
Cool to see what 3D printing plus a Raspberry Pi emulating a C64 can do [Wayback/Archive] I Built a Commodore 64 Laptop That Never Existed (PI + EMULATION) – The Portable 64 Concept Design – YouTube.
The Portable 64 with an original Commodore 64 joystick
However, published in December 2025 after Commodore had been resurrected from the C= brands, it would have been way cooler if was based on new Commodore 64 Ultimate hardware.
Maybe someone will do such a portable computer based on that hardware, or even better that it becomes available at [Wayback/Archive] Home | Commodore.
--jeroen
Posted in 3D printing, 6502, C64, Commodore, Development, Hardware Development, History, Power User, Retrocomputing | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 