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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Nutribullet does not activate – activators jammed

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/02/09

Even when keeping a Nutribullet clean, the activators can jam. One day the white lids activating the spinning mechanism were just stuck.

So below are some links that helped resolving it. They come down to get some liquid between the white lids and casing to loosen any staining.

Some people use WD-40, oil, water with vinegar or oil and vinegar. We just used some fairly hot water and a blunt knife to carefully push each white lid down.

I found most of the videos before getting the right search terms and bumping into the other links. For ease of reading, the videos are at the end.

–jeroen

Videos:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »

ups.com -> expensive; upstoday.com -> affordable

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/02/09

Reminder to self:

–jeroen

Posted in LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Scott Hanselman on Witter: “Why should I care about Kubernetes, Docker, and Container Orchestration?”

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/02/08

An important question for many people, so if you want to know more or get started: [WayBack] Scott Hanselman on Twitter: “Why should I care about Kubernetes, Docker, and Container Orchestration?” followed by:

Yes, AKS is Azure Container Services (go figure!).

Notes

  • For burning, Scott recommends [WayBack] Etcher: Burn images to SD cards & USB drives, safely and easily (which is now also available as experimental [WayBack] Etcher CLI), I tended to use a script like below since I’m a command-line person, but since Etcher does write and verify in one run, I’m considering switching:
    1. find where the SD card is mounted on your Mac: diskutil list
    2. sudo su -
    3. execute this from the directory where you downloaded filling in targetDevice with the value from diskutil list

    targetDevice="disk9"
    imageName="2017-11-29-raspbian-stretch-lite"
    unzip -o ${imageName}.zip
    diskutil umount "/dev/${targetDevice}s1"; \
    dd bs=1m of="/dev/r${targetDevice}" if=${imageName}; \
    sync; \
    diskutil list; \
    diskutil eject "/dev/${targetDevice}"

–jeroen

Posted in Cloud, Containers, Docker, Infrastructure, Kubernetes (k8n), Power User | Leave a Comment »

Mixing x64 Outlook with x86 Delphi: never a good idea…

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/02/07

Via [WayBack] Hi all,I’m a bit stuck here with a “simple” task.Looks like Outlook 2016 doesn’t supports “MAPISendMail”, at least, if i trigger this, Thunderbird… – Attila Kovacs – Google+:

Basically only MAPISendMail works cross architecture and only if you fill all fields.

This edited [WayBack] email – MAPI Windows 7 64 bit – Stack Overflow answer by [WayBack] epotter is very insightful (thanks [WayBack] Rik van Kekem – Google+):

Calls to MAPISendMail should work without a problem.

For all other MAPI method and function calls to work in a MAPI application, the bitness (32 or 64) of the MAPI application must be the same as the bitness of the MAPI subsystem on the computer that the application is targeted to run on.

In general, a 32-bit MAPI application must not run on a 64-bit platform (64-bit Outlook on 64-bit Windows) without first being rebuilt as a 64-bit application.

For a more detailed explanation, see the MSDN page on Building MAPI Applications on 32-Bit and 64-Bit Platforms

–jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Delphi x64, Development, Office, Outlook, Power User, Software Development, x86 | Leave a Comment »

Odroid-C1 (and likely others): fixing the textmode cursor on the physical console

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/02/05

Somehow the Odroid C1+ does not support a blinking hardware text cursor. Which means that when you logon to the console in text mode, it is really hard to edit the command-line or text files a there is no visual clue where the cursor is.

It took me to find out the cause, but odroid C1 console no “hardware cursor” got me there: [Archive.is] Arch Linux ARM • View topic – ODROID-C1: No hardware cursor in terminal. The odd thing is that sending escape sequences like mentioned in [WayBack] Cursor Appearance in the Linux Console LG #137 didn’t fix the problem either. For instance, these didn’t help at all:

echo -n -e '\e[?17;14;224c'
echo -e "\e[?16;0;64c"

I tried similar ones from [WayBack] VGA-softcursor.txt as well, but they failed too.

Since I usually ssh into the box, doing without a console cursor usually is no problem except when you run into network trouble and really need the console.

Fixing it took a bit longer to find out,  but refining to  “odroid C1” console no blinking cursor got this as first hit: [WayBack] ODROID Forum • View topic – fbcon cursor. And it came down to going to the second page of the first archived link above. So I had a kind of “duh” moment. Anyway, at [WayBack] Arch Linux ARM • View topic – ODROID-C1: No hardware cursor in terminal – pagee 2 is the below code which got me a nice large light-blue cursor:

infocmp >> ~/terminfo.txt
sed -i.bak -e 's/?0c/?112c/g' -e 's/?8c/?48;0;64c/g' terminfo.txt
tic terminfo.txt
tput cnorm

These are the commands used:

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, Linux, Power User, Ubuntu | Leave a Comment »

Changing the network from public -> private in Windows 10 is way to convoluted (works for 8.1, 8 and 7 too)

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/02/05

I often wonder why do they make changing the network location more difficult in each Windows version.

Anyway: for Windows 10, the secpol.msc way still works even though by default you now need to use a command prompt or the Windows-R key-combo to start it as typing it in the “Ask me Anything” search often gets you to bing (the search is too slow to figure out it is available locally even if you’re running a machine with SSD).

So from [WayBack] Top 10: Windows Firewall Netsh Commands (via: Windows Server content from Windows IT Pro), this still works in Windows 10:

a secpol.msc way that is easy:

  1. Press Win+R, then type secpol.msc
  2. Click on “Network List Manager Policies”
  3. Double-click on your network
  4. Optionally give your network another name
  5. Click on “Tab Network Location”
  6. Set “Location Type” to “Private”

Go back to Network and Sharing Center to check the result.

In Windows 10 there are half a dozen other ways: [WayBack] Network Location – Set to Private or Public in Windows 10 – Windows 10 Tutorials

  • Option One: To Change a Network Location in Settings app
  • Option Two: To Change a Network Location in Registry Editor
  • Option Three: To Change a Network Location Local Security Policy
  • Option Four: To Change a Network Location in PowerShell
  • Option Five: To Change Network Location of Current Network Connection in PowerShell
  • Option Six: To Change Network Location of Current Network Connection using a VBS file

I like this PowerShell script too via [WayBack] networking – How do I force Windows 10 to see a network as private? – Super User:

## Change NetWorkConnection Category to Private
#Requires -RunasAdministrator

Get-NetConnectionProfile |
  Where{ $_.NetWorkCategory -ne 'Private'} |
  ForEach {
    $_
    $_|Set-NetConnectionProfile -NetWorkCategory Private -Confirm
  }

–jeroen

 

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1 | Leave a Comment »

Is memory ballooning a thing from the past or still current?

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/02/02

I wonder with the current memory pricing and amounts of memory that host machines have: is memory ballooning a thing from the past?

–jeroen

[Archive.is] Virtualization: What is memory ballooning? – Quora

Posted in Hyper-V, Power User, Proxmox, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | 1 Comment »

Finding out when your domain password will expire :: Active Directory :: Admin Tips :: Windows 7 :: Windows Server 2012/2008/2003/2000/XP/NT Administrator Knowledge Base :: KBase Tips :: WindowsNetworking.com

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/02/02

Here’s how you can find out when your domain password will expire.

net user %USERNAME% /domain

It figures this out for the current logon domain (so it doesn’t work cross-domain) but it is a great help, especially when filtering out just the password information:

net user %USERNAME% /domain | findstr "Password"

This can be done in a more complex way with dsquery or adinfo that are tools to query

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 9, Windows Server 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, Windows Vista, Windows XP | Leave a Comment »

Does this company still exist today? ; DROP TABLE “COMPANIES”;– LTD

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/02/01

About a year ago, this company was incorporated: https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/10542519

; DROP TABLE “COMPANIES”;– LTD

[WayBack] ; DROP TABLE “COMPANIES”;– LTD – Overview (free company information from Companies House)

via: [WayBack] From the Trololo-Dept: https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/10542519 – Kristian Köhntopp – Google+

–jeroen

Posted in Database Development, Development, Power User, Security | Leave a Comment »

Happy “check your backups day”; does your restore process work? And how is the rest of your admin process doing?

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/02/01

Today is [WayBack] Check your backups Day! started by @CyberShambles in dedication of the @Gitlab outage on 20170201.

Please check your restoration process now. As people screw up and accidents happen (I know first hand from a client).

Why isn’t this date on January 31st? Long short story: the failure started that date, but restoration took most of 20170201. So February 1st it is.

Others will follow and GitLab wasn’t alone, as a few days before soup.io had to restore a 2015 database backup.

It all comes back to

Nobody wants backup.

Everybody wants restore.

which made it to the 2008 [WayBack] adminzen.org – The Admin Zen and has been attributed to various people including [WayBack] to Kristian Köhntopp and [WayBack] to Martin Seeger who told Kristian Köhntopp that it was coined by Sun’s Michael Nagorsnik at one of the early [WayBack] NuBIT. Martin was there; he knows (:

The oldest mention of the phrase I could find was in 2006 by Volker Bir at [WayBack] Spy Sheriff – so how do people get infected w/ this thing?.

Keeping clients in the loop

Since soup.io hosts their updates blog on their own platform, the restore resulted in the post prior to [Archive.is] Update after crash ;) – Soup Updates sort of ironically being the mid-2015 [WayBack] Give us your money! – Soup Updates. Usually dogfooding is a good thing though.

During such a downtime, it is crucial to stay in touch through alternative channels. Soup.io didn’t do a good job on their twitter account: they only announced the “update after crash”, not being down, why or progress.

They also deny the WayBack machine access to updates.soup.io because of [WayBack] robots.txt because how they redirect through /remotes, but luckily Archive.is doesn’t care about that and has less old updates.soup.io archived as recent as end of 2015.

GitLab did a much better job on their GitLabStatus account.

Postmortems and organisation culture.

Everybody can screw up, and usually a severe outage happens even when everybody tries to do the right thing. The only way to learn from it is to have [WayBack] Blameless PostMortems and a Just Culture – Code as Craft.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in DevOps, Power User | Leave a Comment »

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