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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Some more links on bookmarklets: this time ones that operate on (selection of text on) the current page

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/05/04

As a continuation of the various bookmarklet posts, here is one with information on bookmarklets that operate on the current page, for instance when you already got text selected.

All via [Wayback/Archive] bookmarklet that works on link of current selection – Google Search

–jeroen

Posted in Bookmarklet, Development, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Web Browsers, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

The Wordle word list is in the source JavaScript file (via Isotopp)

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/05/03

Oh well: [Archive] Kris on Twitter: “L> add AI there and you’ve got a paper R> I just had a look, and that thing is pretty much completely offline. the JS contains the entire dictionary C> well would you look at that, might want to use the actual dictionary then “

Actually, it was dead easy to copy the sources to a gist and host the gist:

And of course someone distilled the wordle word solutions list into some statistics:

More was done at [Wayback/Archive] Reverse Engineering Wordle | Robert Reichel.

Which got updated to the statistics of the union of solution and accepted words list

Another tool that helps solving is [Wayback/Archive] willthames/wordle-guesses which I found via [Archive] Will Thames on Twitter: “I spent some of my New Year’s Day writing a program to generate the best first two guesses for Wordle. Time well spent, I think: …”.

Jilles then posted a video on how to view the source [Archive] Jilles🏳️‍🌈 on Twitter: “How to cheat on #wordle …”.

To make Wordle even harder, there is Absurdle, an adversorial version of Wordle that decides the word upon your input until it runs out of decisions:

A Dutch and German version were added as Woordle and Wordle (which missed being called WorDeL and Wortle):

Shortly followed by another German version (always the Austrians setting themselves apart), and a French one (which messed Le Word as perfect name):

There is also a four-letter word edition, actually two of them:

There is a Prime version too:

Felienne posted a cool analysis bot that watches Wordle tweets and uses them to estimate the correct Wordle solution:

Oh, there is a single Letterle, which on average takes you some 13 tries when disregarding letter frequencies (which likely should not matter):

When you think Absurdle was going far, look at what happened Wordlinator:

Two search tools that are very useful:

If you are desperate, these solvers can help; the second one is more flexible, the first one faster, and the last one is pure cheating:

  1. [Wayback/Archive] Ruining the fun: a Wordle auto-solver – by Tom
  2. [Wayback/Archive] Wordle Helper – Suggestion and Solver Tool – Gamer Journalist
  3. [Wayback/Archive] Wordle Answers (February 2022) – Today’s Solution

I tried referencing all posts in the somewhat broken thread at:

Some links that did not make it into that thread (yet):

Having good start words and an on-line dictionary help:

And there is always a really fast way: [Wayback/Archive] Wordle Solver | Not Fun at Parties (explained in [Wayback/Archive] Ruining the fun: a Wordle auto-solver – by Tom)

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, JavaScript/ECMAScript, LifeHacker, Natural Languages, Power User, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Some links on measuring CO2 and Volatile Organic Compounds in the air

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/05/02

Some links on measuring these:

I was triggered by some messages in a thread:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, ESP32, Hardware Development, Hardware Interfacing, IKEA hacks, LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Some links on the JVC RX-7020V Audio Video Control Receiver/Amplifier

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/05/01

I’ve had a JVC RX-7020V Audio Video Control Receiver/Amplifier for quite a while, but forgot to post links, so here they are:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Hardware, Home Audio/Video, JVC, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Kevin Beaumont on Twitter: “Folks, we named blue team and red team wrong. https://t.co/eWKCSH8lqQ” / Twitter

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/04/28

[Archive] Kevin Beaumont on Twitter: “Folks, we named blue team and red team wrong. ” / Twitter

–jeroen

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Posted in Fun, Power User, Security | Leave a Comment »

I want to check out how to do POST requests using bookmarklets in order to save URLs to the WayBack machine

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/04/27

I want to check out how to do POST requests using bookmarklets in order to save URLs to the Wayback machine.

The reason is that every few months or so, saving a page the normal way through a something like https://web.archive.org/save/URL fails for one reason or the other, but going to https://web.archive.org/save, then entering URL, and pressing “SAVE PAGE” button works fine:

The the failing way above is using a GET request, the succeeding workaround will open https://web.archive.org/save/URL  using the below POST request (where I omitted some HTTP cookies and HTTP header fields for brevity).

  • POST request using PowerShell:
    $session = New-Object Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.WebRequestSession
$session.UserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/96.0.4664.110 Safari/537.36"
Invoke-WebRequest -UseBasicParsing -Uri "https://web.archive.org/save/URL" `
-Method "POST" `
-WebSession $session `
-Headers @{
"method"="POST"
  "origin"="https://web.archive.org"
  "referer"="https://web.archive.org/save"
} `
-ContentType "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" `
-Body "url=URL&capture_outlinks=on&capture_all=on&capture_screenshot=on"
  • POST request using cURL on bash:
    curl 'https://web.archive.org/save/URL' \
  -H 'origin: https://web.archive.org' \
  -H 'content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded' \
  -H 'referer: https://web.archive.org/save' \
  --data-raw 'url=URL&capture_outlinks=on&capture_all=on&capture_screenshot=on' \
  --compressed
  • POST request using the fetch API in JavaScript:
    fetch("https://web.archive.org/save/URL", {
  "headers": {
    "content-type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded",
  },
  "referrer": "https://web.archive.org/save",
  "body": "url=URL&capture_outlinks=on&capture_all=on&capture_screenshot=on",
  "method": "POST",
  "mode": "cors"
});

BTW: Yes, I know that URL is not a valid URL, so it will return a page with “http://url/ URL syntax is not valid.“.

All links below via [Wayback/Archive] bookmarklet post request – Google Search:

I tried to put createFormSubmittingBookmarklets/createFormSubmitBookmarklets.js in a bookmarklet using both userjs.up.seesaa.net/js/bookmarklet.html and skalman.github.io/UglifyJS-online. That failed: somehow this code does not want to run as bookmarklet.

Running it from the console is fine though, and gave me this basic bookmarklet template:

javascript:function sf(ur,ty,fd){function me(tg,pr){var el=document.createElement(tg);for(const[nm,vl]of Object.entries(pr)){el.setAttribute(nm,vl);}return el}const fm=me("form",{action:ur,method:ty,style:"display:hidden;"});for(const[nm,vl]of Object.entries(fd)){fm.appendChild(me("input",{name:nm, value:vl}))}document.body.appendChild(fm);fm.submit()}sf("https://web.archive.org/save","post",{"url":"URL","capture_outlinks":"on","capture_all":"on","capture_screenshot":"on","wm-save-mywebarchive":"on","email_result":"on","":"SAVE PAGE"});

There bold URL there is the URL to be saved. I need to test this, then rework it to become parameterised.

–jeroen

Posted in Bookmarklet, Development, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Web Browsers, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

VMware fixes critical zero-day Workstation/Player/Fusion exploit revealed at Pwn2Own

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/04/26

A less clickbaity title than most articles today as the below only applies to the VMware hypervisors running on MacOS and Windows.

The last Pwn2Own Zero Day Initiative revealed two major issues that allow a virtual machine to either execute code or read hypervisor memory on the VMware Workstation/Player/Fusion host:

  1. [Wayback/Archive] NVD – CVE-2023-20869

    VMware Workstation (17.x) and VMware Fusion (13.x) contain a stack-based buffer-overflow vulnerability that exists in the functionality for sharing host Bluetooth devices with the virtual machine.

  2. [Wayback/Archive] NVD – CVE-2023-20870

    VMware Workstation and Fusion contain an out-of-bounds read vulnerability that exists in the functionality for sharing host Bluetooth devices with the virtual machine.

Both issues have been fixed now, so be sure to deploy the fixes or, if you can’t, apply the workarounds.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Fusion, Power User, Security, Virtualization, VMware, VMware Player, VMware Workstation | Leave a Comment »

So long and thanks for all the fish: PC Engines apu platform EOL (in 2024, but still)

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/04/24

It was great while it lasted, so be sure to order within the next 12 months as  [Wayback/Archive] PC Engines apu platform EOL:

PC Engines apu platform EOL
The end is near ! After a long production run, AMD will accept last orders for the SOC used in our apu2/3/4/5/6 boards by end of June 2023.
apu phase-out We will do a life-time buy for a quantity of the AMD SOC and some other key components. We are willing to schedule customer shipments through end of June 2024. There is a 26 week lead time on the AMD SOC, expect limited supply until late 2023.

First ordered, first served. Binding orders may be required for large quantities.
New products ? Despite having used considerable quantities of AMD processors and Intel NICs, we don’t get adequate design support for new projects. In addition, the x86 silicon currently offered is not very appealing for our niche of passively cooled boards. After about 20 years of WRAP, ALIX and APU, it is time for me to move on to different things.
Thank you ! I would like to thank all of our customers for their business, and sometimes patience.

–jeroen

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

Need to rethink which Windows package managers to use

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/04/24

Triggered by last week’s post Need to take a look a Scoop (as a long time Chocolatey user), I need to re-think which Windows package managers to use and in what order.

Basically there are two challenges:

  • User level (scoop) versus system level (winget and chocolatey) installations
  • Availability of packages in each package manager

Since I hardly used winget, I need to get started at Windows Package Manager – Wikipedia.

A good example of unavailability is at [Wayback/Archive] Scott’s Ultimate Tools via Winget – DVLUP (which has the ID values for winget or chocolatey of [Wayback/Archive] Scott Hanselman’s 2021 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows – Scott Hanselman’s Blog)

–jeroen

Posted in Chocolatey, Power User, Scoop, Windows, winget | Leave a Comment »

Towards a work setup on a hardened host and doing everything in VMs

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/04/21

SwiftOnSecurity posted this interesting tweet in 2021: [Archive] SwiftOnSecurity on Twitter: “Lenovo P1 Gen3 with 12core Xeon, 64GB RAM, two 1TB M.2 SSDs. Running Windows Server 2022 with the Hyper-V role. All hardening applied to host OS, almost nothing happens here except managing guest VMs. On the second SSD I then have Win10 VMs joined to the corporate domain.” / Twitter.

I wonder if a similar setup can be done using an Apple M1 based machine as host and running all work in virtual machines.

Swift had some issues getting cameras and microphones to work: [Archive] SwiftOnSecurity on Twitter: “The problem here is Teams. If I want to pass through my webcam and microphone that could get a bit dicey, despite HyperV Enhanced Session being essentially an RDP session. For now I’m using my phone for Teams microphone. Also I’m not sure how well thermal management will work….” / Twitter

This resulted in some answers and interesting links:

Some more interesting tweets in that thread:

–jeroen

Posted in Apple, M1 Mac, Mac, Power User, Windows | Leave a Comment »

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