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 ‘Windows’ Category

Some notes on testing locally modified chocolatey packages

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/01

A few notes after I helped updating [Wayback/Archive] Chocolatey Software | SetACL (Portable) 3.0.6.0 to version 3.1.2.0 and [Wayback/Archive] Updates glab from 1.22.0 to 1.24.1; fixes #2 by jpluimers · Pull Request #3 · corbob/ChocoPackages.

As the burden on maintainers (not just Chocolatey ones) is high, not all packages get updated soon after new underlying software versions arrive.

Which means the maintainers are often very happy when an occasional user helps and preferably sends in a pull request.

That brings me to the an important point IN DOCUMENTATION DO NOT LIMIT EXAMPELS TO ONLY ABBREVIATED PARAMETERS OR VERBS as that scares away occasional and novice users of your software.

Chocolatey documentation is no exception on this, hence this blog post meant for people other than maintaining chocolatey packages on a day to day base.

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Posted in CertUtil, Chocolatey, CommandLine, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

PowerShell: playing around with Get-PnpDevice filtering with -Class and -Status

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/07/29

I while ago I was playing around in PowerShell with Get-PnpDevice (which got introduced in Windows 10 and Windows Server 2019):

[Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers: “@jilles_com … this is the difference between only connected disks versus including ones that had been connected in the past.Output difference between Get-PnpDevice -Class DiskDrive -Status OK Get-PnpDevice -Class DiskDrive …” – Mastodon

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Posted in .NET, Batch-Files, CommandLine, Development, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11 | Leave a Comment »

Overlay of commands / shortcuts / keys pressed – Screencast Mode · Issue #981 · microsoft/PowerToys · GitHub

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/07/23

This is a reminder to check if this below late 2019 proposal inspired by Visual Studio Code Screencast mode¹ already made it: [Wayback/Archive] Overlay of commands / shortcuts / keys pressed – Screencast Mode · Issue #981 · microsoft/PowerToys · GitHub which mentions some tools that can already do this

Here is a list of FOSS apps that currently do this (sorted by stars):

To add to this list (unsorted):

In the meantime, I am using Key-n-Stroke as it is the only still supported one I found that is easily turned off/on when typing sensitive content like passwords:

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Posted in .NET, Development, Keyboards and Keyboard Shortcuts, KVM keyboard/video/mouse, Power User, PowerToys, Software Development, vscode Visual Studio Code, Windows | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

The CAT files that prove Windows driver files are signed: some links on decoding them

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/07/23

Maybe in the future I have enough energy to play around more with the Windows .CAT files that are catalog files with digital signatures for Windows driver files (.sys) that can be installed via Windows information files (.inf).

Some links for that:

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Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11 | Leave a Comment »

Disabling the ever returning screens after Windows install/upgrade, and advertisements/feeds

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/07/21

This started out ad a post to make things easier for my mentally brother, but then I figured it makes it so much easier for myself as well: getting rid of the evern returning Windows nag screens. Not just the ones after logon during initial Windows install that get back about every other Windows 20H update (thank god they stepped away from 19## version numbering that felt so, ehm, last millennium), but also the various “suggestions” in start menu, on the taskbar and elsewhere.

I understand that basically giving Windows 10 and 11 for free to many Windows 7/8 licensed machines or Windows-preinstalled machines induces Microsoft to see Windows as an advertising environment, but hey: many users can do without these distractions.

It is hard to solve, as even the underlying registry settings seem to be reset every once in a while, and solving it globally is not an option: the settings are a per-user one. Which means you need to run script early during every Windows logon to overwrite these settings.

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Posted in Batch-Files, CommandLine, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Registry Files, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows Development | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

The queste on figuring out why iqvw64e.sys is considered unsafe in Windows 11 22H2 after upgrading from Windows 10 on a Dell Optiplex 3060 Micro system

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/07/18

It started with this tweet [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers @wiert@mastodon.social on Twitter: “Does anyone know why this iqvw64e.sys file from @Dell is considered unsafe? It is signed by @IntelSoftware and resides in C:\Program Files\Dell\SupportAssistAgent\PCDr\SupportAssist\6.0.7033.2285\iqvw64e.sys iqvw64e.inf in the same directory: 04/06/2018,1.3.2.17 @IntelSupport? “

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Posted in Dell Optiplex 3060/5060/7060 Micro, Hardware, Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11 | Leave a Comment »

Scoop buckets by Github score | scoop-directory

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/06/27

Interesting gamification of the Scoop installer buckets: [Wayback/Archive] Scoop buckets by Github score | scoop-directory

It is an overview of various buckets you could add to [Wayback/Archive] ScoopInstaller/Scoop: A command-line installer for Windows. sorted by GitHub stars.

–jeroen

Posted in Power User, Scoop, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11 | Leave a Comment »

URL File Extension – What is a .url file and how do I open it?

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/06/20

I thought I had long gone blogged about the .URL file extension as it has been in Windows for some 25 years now to point to URLs, but I didn’t.

So here are two links on them:

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Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, 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 »

zxcvbn: Low-Budget Password Strength Estimation | USENIX

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/06/19

Many web-sites and password managers have a strength indicator built-in.

This is a really good example (with open source JavaScript code!) of one: [Wayback/Archive] zxcvbn: Low-Budget Password Strength Estimation | USENIX

Be aware though that it stores a plain text file named passwords.txt on your system (this seems to confuse some users, especially when their password is in it).

Homans password behaviour does not change much over time, so this half hour 2016 presentation on it is still current: [Wayback/Archive] USENIX Security ’16 – zxcvbn: Low-Budget Password Strength Estimation – YouTube for which you can download:

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Posted in Chrome, Development, Edge, Firefox, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Power User, Safari, Scripting, Software Development, Web Browsers, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11 | 2 Comments »

On my list of tools to check out RustDesk (as replacement for TeamViewer, Remote Desktop and similar)

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/06/05

For non-Windows systems, I have used TeamViewer in the past and when they started being obnoxious reverted mostly to VNC derived alternatives. For Windows, I’d usually combined VPN with Remote Desktop.

Recently, I found out that during my first rectum cancer year (and for others, the first COVID-19 year), the development of RustDesk – which can be self-hosted – started as an open source project on [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – rustdesk/rustdesk: An open-source remote desktop application designed for self-hosting, as an alternative to TeamViewer. with their first commit being [Wayback/Archive] Initial commit · wabarc/wayback@650ea87 · GitHub.

I got pointed to this in [Wayback/Archive] Your Remote Desktop SUCKS!! Try this instead (FREE + Open Source) – YouTube.

One of the main things to figure out is how reliably RustDesk does firewall hole punching*.

Another personal interest is to learn more about Rust and Dart, the main programming languages in which RustDesk is written.

Here are some links:

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Posted in Development, Power User, Remote Desktop Protocol/MSTSC/Terminal Services, Rust, Screen sharing, Software Development, TeamViewer, VNC/Virtual_Network_Computing, Windows | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »