Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/17
More than 10 years ago, I needed a MIME decode for Windows as I was developing some software which implemented S/MIME could sign automatically generated emails and verify incoming ones.
I wrote more about the latter part in Some notes on OpenSSL, S/MIME, email, various RFC standards and their relations.
Now finally the post about what I wanted to schedule for posting back then as well: my question looking for a [Wayback/Archive] MIME decoder for Windows – Super User:
Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, base64, Development, Encoding, Linux, MIME, Power User, Software Development, Windows, WSL Windows Subsystem for Linux | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/09
Some links on the [Wayback/Archive] FILTERXML function – Microsoft Support.
It is only available on Windows (because of the underlying XPath libraries used, I think it is MSXML), and “only” as of Excel 2013, but still can be useful.
Some links below on FILTERXML and related XPath information so I can more easily find their content back.
Notes:
FILTERXML only supports XPath 1.0The links and quotes starting with the question that sparked my interest:
Posted in Development, Excel, Office, Office 2013, Office 2016, Office VBA, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, XML, XML/XSD, XPath | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/08
I could not find a reliable per-user setting that works with just logoff/logon for Windows 11 like I found for Windows 10 in Disabling the Windows 10 and Windows 11 news (and weather) feeds.
So (for now?) there is only a global Globally which needs admin rights and a logoff/logon sequence:
:: requires admin
reg add "HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Dsh" /v "AllowNewsAndInterests" /t REG_DWORD /d "0" /f
echo logoff/logon to apply the change, or restart Explorer
Via:
Posted in Batch-Files, Development, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/31
Forgot to schedule this one when I saw it two weeks ago: [Wayback/Archive] Sweep the Strait.
Apart from demonstrating that Trump never had a plan, does not and will not have a plan, it is cool to see Minesweeper developed in JavaScript, HTML and CSS mapped with some geodata onto a real map of the Strait of Hormuz.
Cool idea!
It has a function Windows 3.x UI with functional menu (Game -> New Game; Help -> How to Play)
At first, I thought the original developer is this:
German #geographer and #demographer in #Melbourne. I curate #maps and #data that explain how the #world works. Obviously all opinions are my own…
However, in fact the developer is:
Posted in CSS, Development, HTML, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Opinions, OS/2, Power User, Retrocomputing, Scripting, Software Development, Web Development, Windows, Windows 3.11 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/13
The notes are based on the NanoKVM PCIe as that is what I wanted to set-up on a Windows 11 compatible PC that could be remotely managed for someone not savvy enough to do that themselves. They had an old Supermicro based PC with IPMI which kind of does IPKVM when using the embedded video hardware, but back when I wrote this early 2025 – the year Windows 10 would become end-of-life – it was:
Since none of the modern remote KVM hardware tooling seems to be able to do passthrough video, the solution I researched for was to split the outgoing video signal (either Displayport or HDMI), then optionally convert Displayport to HDMI and finally route that HDMI into the remote KVM hardware.
Posted in Displays, Hardware, IPMI, KVM keyboard/video/mouse, Power User, SuperMicro, Windows, Windows 11 | Tagged: 339 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/10
TL;DR: There is no simple character that works on both MacOS and Windows.
[Wayback/Archive] sorting – Simple to enter Unicode character that would sort after Z in most cases? – Stack Overflow (thanks [Wayback/Archive] sorin and [Wayback/Archive] degenerate):
A
On Windows, none of these options work because they all sort before
A.A solution I ended up using is an Arabic character:
ٴ This folder comes after
zin windows
According to [Wayback/Archive] What Unicode character is this ?, the above mentioned character is U+0674 : ARABIC LETTER HIGH HAMZA.
Note that on Windows the ٴ character displays at the start of the filename, but on MacOS in Finder it ends up behind the extension (as Arabic script is right-to-left) and is very hard to remove. On the MacOS Terminal it ends up on the left and is easy to modify.
Posted in Encoding, Power User, Unicode, Apple, Windows, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/09
At the time of writing there was an almost 3 year old [Wayback/Archive] Chocolatey Software | Poppler 0.89.0 version so I filed the issue [Wayback/Archive] poppler 23.03 has been out for a few weeks, can you please update the build? · Issue #88 · chtof/chocolatey-packages mentioning [Wayback/Archive] Pull requests · oschwartz10612/poppler-windows
Poppler 23.03.0
Since that did not get really solved, I finally found out that after installing scoop, then scoop install poppler did work and installed version 23.08.0 (which I documented in [Wayback/Archive] Poppler version out of date · Issue #75 · chtof/chocolatey-packages installs from the most recent [Wayback/Archive] Releases · oschwartz10612/poppler-windows).
A very different approach is to install Poppler inside Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) as explained in [Wayback/Archive] Poppler On Windows. Python, PDFs, and Window’s Subsytem for… | by Matthew Earl Miller | Towards Data Science.
I needed Poppler (or actually the Windows equivalent of poppler-utils) of two reasons:
pdftotext as it has these very compelling command-line switches.pdfimages is the poppler tool to go.Let’s start with qoutes from [Wayback/Archive] pdftotext: Portable Document Format (PDF) to text converter (version 3.03) | poppler-utils Commands | Man Pages | ManKier:
Posted in Power User, *nix, Windows, PDF, *nix-tools, Chocolatey, man/manual pages, mankier | Tagged: 75, 88 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/06
I might need this: [Wayback/Archive] Solved: CPU Xeon E5-1620 v.4 does not allow Windows 11 upgrade – HP Support Community – 8645349
You don’t download the ISO file to a USB stick.
You download it to your PC and use the free Rufus utility that I zipped up and attached in that discussion link I posted to transfer the ISO file to a DVD so that it is bootable.
You have to use the version I attached 3.18 because the newer Rufus versions removed the W11 hardware check bypass hack.
Try it again in the morning when you are ‘bright eyed and bushy tailed’ as we say in the USA.:
Related:
Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/25
Often I need to generate passwords or uuids (on some systems called guids). I usually try to do that in a relatively platform agnostic way as I use MacOS, Windows and Linux in various mixes for many reasons (for instance that I have had developed quite hefty RSI in the early 1990s of the and the best keyboard/pointing-device combination for is the MacBook built in keyboard/touchpad combination so basically MacBooks are my window to all other operating systems).
Generating randomly with a good random number generator them makes sense as for most usage, it is important that both passwords and uuids are hard to guess which means having an entropy that is as high as possible.
A cool thing about OpenSSL is that:
hex (hexadecimal) and base64 (next to the default of octet – or by today’s naming convention byte – output)The easiest to generate are passwords. Yes I know that password managers can do this too, but there are some systems I cannot use them on or sync between them (don’t you love the corporate world) so my aim is to use a random password generator in a platform agnostic way which usage is easy to remember. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Apple, base64, bash, bash, Batch-Files, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Encoding, Event, HEX encoding, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, MacBook, OpenSSL, Power User, Python, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/24
I needed to document how to install sed on Windows (which I did a long time ago after writing Plastic SCM: show the current changeset abstract (without files) on the commandline) and recently for some more scripting work(which I will blog on that later this week).
At the time of writing it was [Wayback/Archive] Chocolatey Software | GNU sed 4.8, but this Chocolatey command will install or upgrade to the most recent available version:
choco upgrade --yes sed
Of course, like yesterday’s post Installing OpenSSL on Windows, you could use winget or scoop for this as well. Finding out the commands is left as an exercise to the reader (;
Query: [Wayback/Archive] chocolatey sed – Google Search
–jeroen
Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Chocolatey, Development, Power User, Scoop, Scripting, sed, Software Development, Windows, Windows Development, winget | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 