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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Max Schrems on Twitter: “WTF?! So the “solution” of #Facebook, #Goolge or #Microsoft for #GDPR is to claim they have a “legitimate interest” to take all the data they can get their hands on and use it for any of their “products” (incl. ads)… 😧😭 #BeggingForThe4Percent”

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/05/18

Interesting thread at [WayBack] Max Schrems on Twitter: “WTF?! So the “solution” of #Facebook, #Goolge or #Microsoft for #GDPR is to claim they have a “legitimate interest” to take all the data they can get their hands on and use it for any of their “products” (incl. ads)… 😧😭 #BeggingForThe4Percent”.

For instance for Google at [WayBack] Privacy Policy – Privacy & Terms – Google:

This updated version of our Privacy Policy takes effect on May 25, 2018. See the current version of the policy

…

When we’re pursuing legitimate interests

We process your information for our legitimate interests and those of third parties while applying appropriate safeguards that protect your privacy. This means that we process your information for things like:

  • Providing, maintaining, and improving our services to meet the needs of our users
  • Developing new products and features that are useful for our users
  • Understanding how people use our services to ensure and improve the performance of our services
  • Customizing our services to provide you with a better user experience
  • Marketing to inform users about our services
  • Providing advertising to make many of our services freely available for users
  • Detecting, preventing, or otherwise addressing fraud, abuse, security, or technical issues with our services
  • Protecting against harm to the rights, property or safety of Google, our users, or the public as required or permitted by law
  • Performing research that improves our services for our users and benefits the public
  • Fulfilling obligations to our partners like developers and rights holders
  • Enforcing legal claims, including investigation of potential violations of applicable Terms of Service

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in GDPR/DS-GVO/AVG, LifeHacker, Power User, Privacy | 1 Comment »

dzComputerInfo: a small tool that shows a window on top of all other windows displaying the computer name and currently logged on user.

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/05/18

Interesting as bgInfo does not support top most windows or overlay: it only does the Desktop background, and you need to go through hoops to recreate the background on each logon:

Enter dzComputerInfo. It’s a small tool that I wrote the evening after the above incident which does exactly one thing: It shows a window on top of all other windows displaying the computer name and currently logged on user. Since the window is so small and it places itself automatically just above the start button, it does not really become a nuisance.

The tool and the source code is available from sourceforge, if anybody else thinks he has a use for it.

The G+ thread also the interesting comment by Gaurav Kale:

The Classic Shell Start button supports environment variables in its tooltip. So just specify: %username% on %computername% for the Setting called “Button Tooltip”. Then to see the currently logged on user and computer name, you just have to HOVER over the Start button!

–jeroen

Posted in Power User, SysInternals, Windows | Leave a Comment »

kryo.se: iodine (IP-over-DNS, IPv4 over DNS tunnel)

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/05/18

iodine is a free (ISC licensed) tunnel application to forward IPv4 traffic through DNS servers (IP over DNS). Works on Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Mac OS X.

In light of

–jeroen

Posted in Power User, Security | Leave a Comment »

Local Guides Connect – Big news about reviews: now they’re worth 10 point… – Local Guides Connect

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/05/18

Reminder to check if it already rolled out on my smartphone: [WayBack] Local Guides Connect – Big news about reviews: now they’re worth 10 point… – Local Guides Connect .

It seems to work both on mobile and on maps.google.com/localguides/home

–jeroen

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Posted in Google, GoogleMaps, Local Guides, Power User | Leave a Comment »

State.of.dev

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/05/15

Reminder to self: more than a year later, see the progression of [Archive.is] State.of.dev, a project that visualizes the current state of development split by key topics.

Or basically a split graph of the one on the side into various graphs by topic.

Current state: Home – State.of.dev

Past state: WayBack (hopefully it got the graphs archived by now).

The author is Yvo Schaap – Medium who also wrote the very interesting post [WayBack] Why your business needs a good downturn – CTO Insights – Medium.

–jeroen

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Posted in Development, Power User, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Ubuntu: Fixing the myserious “Failed to stop apt-daily.timer: Connection timed out”

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/05/14

Ubuntu is the only Linux system I had that – after installing a text-mode console setup – gets itself in the below state with only running apt update and apt-get upgrade.

Preparing to unpack .../archives/apt_1.2.19_armhf.deb ...
Failed to stop apt-daily.timer: Connection timed out
See system logs and 'systemctl status apt-daily.timer' for details.
Failed to get load state of apt-daily.timer: Connection timed out
dpkg: warning: subprocess old pre-removal script returned error exit status 1

I could not find meaningful search results for the above thing, nor did systemctl status apt-daily.timer return anything better than

Failed to get properties: Failed to activate service 'org.freedesktop.systemd1': timed out

Heck, it doesn’t even reboot any more (no helpful search results either):

# reboot
Failed to start reboot.target: Failed to activate service 'org.freedesktop.systemd1': timed out
See system logs and 'systemctl status reboot.target' for details.
Failed to open /dev/initctl: No such device or address
Failed to talk to init daemon.

Nor did systemctl status reboot.target return anything better than

Failed to get properties: Failed to activate service 'org.freedesktop.systemd1': timed out

From the ubuntu-16.04-minimal-odroid-c1-20160817.img.xz base system, it only had these extra packages installed:

  • etckeeper
  • tmux
  • speedtest-cli
  • sendemail

Workaround found, but still unsure why this happened in the first place

Despite the workaround below, I still don’t know why I got into this situation and this leaves me with a very uncomfortable feeling.

Too bad some systems (like ODroid) only have Ubuntu based distributions as sorting out stuff like above took me way too much effort.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, Development, etckeeper, Hardware Development, Internet, Linux, Odroid, Power User, SpeedTest, Ubuntu | 2 Comments »

When Windows suddenly starts mixing up keys for various applications.

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/05/14

Since:

  • many people use the left-alt key as it as it is more accessible
  • development tools uses a lot of Alt-Shift based keyboard shortcuts
  • Windows by default has the Left Alt+Shift shortcut enabled to switch language+keyboard layout combinations
  • In most countries, Windows by default has more than one language+keyboard combination installed
  • Windows remembers per application instance which language+keyboard combination is used

every now and then you will get strange characters in only your development tools.

You can change this Windows setting, but be aware that every now and then, various Windows versions will re-enable the Left Alt+Shift even if you have previously disabled it. As of Windows 7 this occurs far less often, but still seems to occur.

Source: Question: Does anyone else have instances in the IDE (Berlin but has happened…

Comments at https://plus.google.com/+JeroenPluimers/posts/ektRa2qW92L

 

Posted in internatiolanization (i18n) and localization (l10), Keyboards and Keyboard Shortcuts, Power User, Windows | Leave a Comment »

When you loose your Google Guides level, still can post reviews, but do not have access to the forums any more…

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/05/11

Via a private share: If you ever loose your Google Guides level for no apparent reason, still can post reviews, but cannot post to the Google Guides forums, then just mail Google. They can usually fix the situation.

–jeroen

Posted in Google, GoogleMaps, Local Guides, Power User | Leave a Comment »

How to Add Your Gmail Account to Outlook 2013 and 2016 Using IMAP

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/05/11

If you use Outlook to check and manage your email, you can easily use it to check your Gmail account as well. You can set up your Gmail account to allow you to synchronize email across multiple machines using email clients instead of a browser.

Oh: you need to lower your Gmail security for Outlook 2013 as the latter isn’t up to par on security. For that, follow similar steps like in “the user name or password for imap.gmail is incorrect” – iPad, iPod or iPhone with iOS < 7.

–jeroen

Posted in GMail, Google, Office, Office 2013, Office 2016, Outlook, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Some Raspberry Ideas via Tweakers.net

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/05/11

via: [WayBack] Raspberry Pi Zero W met wifi en bluetooth kost 10 dollar – Computer – Nieuws – Tweakers

  • LibreELEC (media player OS for Kodi); if your PC is recent enough and supports CEC, you can even use the remote control of your TV to controle the KODI user interface
  • EmulationStation; play old NES/SNES/PS1/etc games on your TV
  • Pi Hole, alternative DNS server that blocks ads even on devices that do not support an ad blocker
  • Domoticz to support device and protocols like Klik-aan-klik-uit, Z-Wave, HVAC, thermostats, smart electricity meters, and make your home “smart”
  • Build Robotjes and control with your smartphone
  • Install Rasbian and replace simple desktop machine usage
  • Sick Beard
  • Sonarr
  • SABnzbd+
  • Couch Potato
  • Retropie
  • http://makezine.com/proje…ode-raspberry-pi-cluster/

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, Debian, Development, Hardware Development, Linux, Power User, Raspberry Pi, Raspbian | Leave a Comment »

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