Posted by jpluimers on 2026/06/16
A few years ago, Twitter basically killed API access by making it cost prohibitive for anything but very large organisations.
Here are some links I archived back then that might be able to replace some automation behaviour by using Selenium to drive a web browser.
Posted in SocialMedia, Twitter | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/06/08
[Wayback/Archive] Mastodon Flock
Welcome to the Mastodon Flock installation wizard.
This program will guide you through finding your Twitter contacts on the Fediverse, provided they have added their external contact information on their profile name, description, URL or pinned Tweet.
It is open source in the repository [Wayback/Archive] WesSouza/mastodon-flock: Let the birds flock to Mastodon.
I love the retro Windows 95 Installer look which is even continued in the [Wayback/Archive] About (“how this software works”), and [Wayback/Archive] Privacy Policy:
Posted in Fediverse, Mastodon, Power User, SocialMedia, Twitter | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/05/13
[Wayback/Archive] Beeper — All your chats in one app
Via a friend that mentioned Beeper to me.
On the list to try out somewhere during the year.
It is open source; some more links:
Posted in Chat, Development, Discord, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, Facebook, git, GoogleChat, IRC, LinkedIn, Power User, Signal messenger, SocialMedia, Software Development, Source Code Management, Telegram, Twitter, WhatsApp | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/07
Windows had its own aCropalypse in the Snipping tool, but other UWP based applications are vulnerable of that too because of this:
[Wayback/Archive] Steven Murdoch on Twitter: “However, the new “more secure” Universal Windows Platform (UWP) sandboxes the file picker in a separate process, allowing neat features like capability-based access control. It returns a file handle which, if the selected file exists, will not overwrite the existing content! 3/9”
It is part of this interesting [Wayback/Archive] Thread by @sjmurdoch on Thread Reader App with these two parts just after the above Tweet:
The old Win32 API for saving a file was (roughly) to show a file picker, get the filename the user selected, and then open the file. To open a file, the programmer must specify whether to overwrite the file or not, and example code usually does overwrite the file.
However, the new “more secure” Universal Windows Platform (UWP) sandboxes the file picker in a separate process, allowing neat features like capability-based access control. It returns a file handle which, if the selected file exists, will not overwrite the existing content!
The tread continued supporting this statement, that in the new situation you need to manually truncated the file, and referenced these links:
Posted in .NET, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, SocialMedia, Software Development, Twitter, UWP (Universal Windows Platform), Windows Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/02
Last month I wrote about CELL function looks interesting but beware: language nightmares coming up….
There I mentioned both formulas from [Wayback/Archive] Get sheet name only – Excel formula | Exceljet and [Wayback/Archive] Insert the current Excel file name, path, or worksheet in a cell – Microsoft Support failing to deliver the expected results
an official Microsoft example of obtaining the Worksheet name which I suspected would not work on systems allowing ] in path names. And indeed it is true: that case fails on both MacOS and Windows in the same way.
Here you see the failures of both the ExcelJet function and the ones from Microsoft Support on two operating systems:
Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Excel, Office, Power User, Scripting, SocialMedia, Software Development, Twitter | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/30
I could not find a way to add many accounts at once to a Twitter list using the normal App or Web UI, so I did a [Wayback/Archive] twitter mass add accounts to list – Google Search
The only way to do this seems to be to use Google Chrome and install [Wayback/Archive] Better TweetDeck – Chrome Web Store combined with the old TweetDeck UI (or use and install it on any of the other supported browsers).
Note that it is basically a project shelved early 2023, so it will likely have stopped functioning before you read this.
Posted in Chrome, Google, Power User, SocialMedia, Twitter, Web Browsers | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/11/21
There is this German joke about “WLAN-Kabel” (WiFi-cable) ** that goes with #Neuland (Germans mocking about Internet and technology still being uncharted territory*).
Yes, they do!
There is [Wayback/Archive] IWLAN RCoax Cable | Industrial Wireless LAN | Siemens Global:
See:
Posted in Hardware, LifeHacker, Mastodon, Power User, SocialMedia, Twitter, Uncategorized, WiFi | Tagged: Neuland, Polizeiakademie, proudof, schulenansnetz | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/10/17
It looks like I missed that Google has added a new URL parameter to its search engine quite a while ago.
In the past, you could turn on image search using the tbm=isch URL parameter (“to be matched” and “image search”).
That still works, but there is a new parameter on the block that is officially undocumented, and can be used to switch into various search modes including image search but also AI-less search.
This drastically lowers the carbon footprint and also gets you far less speculative information.
Edit 20251023: I forgot to save the below part before the scheduled post got published. So here we go
Posted in AI and ML; Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Chrome, Chrome, Chromium, Development, Edge, Firefox, Google, Google AI, GoogleSearch, LLM, Mastodon, Power User, Reddit, SocialMedia, Software Development, Twitter, URL Encoding, Web Browsers | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/25
[Wayback/Archive] XBlock Screenshot Labeller (@xblock.aendra.dev) — Bluesky
Hopefully documentation will be expanded beyond these two thin pages:
Via [Wayback/Archive] Post by @henkbulder.nl — Bluesky
--jeroen
Posted in BlueSky, SocialMedia, Twitter | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/06
Sometimes I need [Wayback/Archive] Redirect Checker | Check your Statuscode 301 vs 302 on the command-line, so cURL to the rescue: [Wayback/Archive] linux – Get final URL after curl is redirected – Stack Overflow. The relevant portions of answers and comments further below.
TL;DR:
Since I prefer verbose command-line arguments (you can find them at the [Wayback/Archive] curl – How To Use on-line man page) especially in scripts this HTTP GET request is what works with Twitter:
% curl --location --silent --output /dev/null --write-out "%{url_effective}\n" https://twitter.com/anyuser/status/20https://x.com/anyuser/status/20
This failed (twitter dislikes HTTP HEAD requests):
% curl --head --location --silent --output /dev/null --write-out "%{url_effective}\n" https://twitter.com/anyuser/status/20https://twitter.com/anyuser/status/20
Given so many of my scripts now run on zsh, I added the new-line because of command line – Why does a cURL request return a percent sign (%) with every request in ZSH? – Stack Overflow. You can strip that bit.
Note that these do not perform client side redirects, so they do not return the ultimate originating URL https://x.com/jack/status/20 (which was the first ever Tweet on what was back then called twttr) as Twitter on the client-side overwrites window.location.href with the final URL. Similar behaviour for getting the Twitter user handle of a Twitter user ID, more on Twitter tricks below.
Tweet by TweetID trick via [Wayback/Archive] Accessing a tweet using only its ID (and without the Twitter API) – Bram.us.
Further reading (thanks [Wayback/Archive] vise, [Wayback/Archive] Daniel Stenberg, [Wayback/Archive] Ivan, [Wayback/Archive] AndrewF, [Wayback/Archive] Roger Campanera, and [Wayback/Archive] Dave Baird):
Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, bash, Batch-Files, Bookmarklet, Communications Development, Conference Topics, Conferences, CSS, cURL, Development, Event, HTTP, Internet protocol suite, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Power User, Scripting, SocialMedia, Software Development, TCP, Twitter, Web Browsers, Web Development | Tagged: 76 | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 