The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

  • My badges

    Mastodon

  • Twitter Updates

  • My Flickr Stream

    20140508-Delphi-2007--Project-Options--Cannot-Edit-Application-Title-HelpFile-Icon-Theming20140430-Fiddler-Filter-Actions-Button-Run-Filterset-now20140424-VMware-Fusion-6.0.3.-no-reclaimable
    More Photos

  • Pages

  • All categories

  • Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 1,854 other subscribers

Avoid VirtualBox; use Hyper-V or VMware in stead

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/11/10

A while ago, Jilles found out why not to use VirtualBox: [Wayback/Archive] Jilles🏳️‍🌈 on Twitter: “@jpluimers Ik wil op basis van wat de Arch community schreeuwt; “Virtualbox is stom, als je geen hyper-v gebruikt vraag je om problemen”, HYPER-V maar gaan proberen.” / Twitter

The biggest problem is that VirtualBox seems to be developed ant tested for the happy path, not the failing path.

Which means that when you use it for less common scenarios, it will often fail in mysterious ways.

Back in Running ArchiveTeam Warrior version 3.2 on ESXi, I already mentioned this:

Totally agreeing with Kristian Kohntopp, I do not understand why people use VirtualBox at all: I just run in too much issues like [Archive.is] Kristian Köhntopp on Twitter: “Hint: Wenn die Installation einer Linux-Distro in Virtualbox mit wechselnden, unbekannten Fehlern scheitert, hilft es, stattdessen einmal VMware Workstation oder kvm zu probieren. In meinem Fall hat es dann *jedes* *einzelne* *Mal* mit *demselben* Iso geklappt.”.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, ArchiveTeamWarrior, Hyper-V, InternetArchive, Linux, Power User, VirtualBox, Virtualization, VMware, WayBack machine, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11 | 1 Comment »

Figured out why on fresh Chrome installs, iframe with embedded Google Calendar won’t work and show `(blocked:other)` in the Network Tab of Chrome Developer Tools

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/11/09

Wow, what a long title!

What happened is that I have a few dashboards for people that include various embedded Google Calendar widgets in <iframe>s.

These won’t show on fresh installs of Google Chrome that have the particular user signed on in the Chrome Settings so that settings will be synchronised, right?

Right?!

Wrong!!

Not all Chrome settings will be synchronised by Chrome. Things like [Wayback/Archive] “On startup” (with the pages shown after Chrome startup) and wich installed extensions are synchronised including the visibility of their icons. But the settings of the extensions themselves will not.

This means that odd things happen, for instance extensions like [Wayback/Archive] Privacy Badger and [Wayback/Archive] uBlock Origin being installed, but both reverting to their default settings.

That in turn leads to hard to see problems, in this case the embedded Google Calendar <iframe>s failing.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Chrome, Development, Google, GoogleCalendar, Power User, Privacy, Software Development, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

TWINT – Twitter Intelligence #OSINT: consider Toolwoluxwolu/twint

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/11/08

Edit: I scheduled this post a long time ago, but it likely won’t work any more because of Space Karen demolsing Twitter. So for now, view this post as a how historically we had nice things on Twitter.

When writing this, the fork [Wayback/Archive] woluxwolu/twint works and the original [Wayback/Archive] twintproject/twint: An advanced Twitter scraping & OSINT tool written in Python that doesn’t use Twitter’s API, allowing you to scrape a user’s followers, following, Tweets and more while evading most API limitations. does not.

See these tweets in Dutch (Google Translate on them works well):

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, LifeHacker, OSINT - Open Source Intelligence, Power User, Python, Scripting, SocialMedia, Software Development, Twitter | Leave a Comment »

A while ago it was “Kris is on a MySQL blogging spree” day (:

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/11/07

From quite a while ago, and still interesting:

Why are these interesting?

For me it is because tiny hick-ups can be just as hard for senior people as for novices.

–jeroen

Posted in Database Development, Development, MySQL | Leave a Comment »

Case insensitivity helps with accessibility and inclusivity in both software development and software use.

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/11/06

We should do more to increase the accessibility of both software developers and users of software.

[Wayback/Archive] Serge Lachapelle 🇺🇦🇸🇪 on Twitter: “Quote of the day from @Vintharas. Don’t think of it as accessibility in your product design. Think of it as inclusivity. #a11y #i9y“

which refers to both a11y – (computer) accessibility and i9y – inclusive design.

An important aspect there is to support case insensitive environments for both software developers and software users.

This sounds strange, as it makes systems less strict, but with the diversity of people not doing so makes it less accessible and decreases inclusivity.

It all started with reading [Wayback/Archive] /Fay-lee-nuh/ on Twitter: “Totally agree with this, case sensitivity does not add a lot apart from errors. Also note that some languages (Arabic, for example) do not have uppercase letters! So the whole idea of “case sensitive” to some people is new (and thus can make learning to program a lot harder)”.

Parts of the responses there and in the tweet Felienne quoted, were from people still insisting on case sensitivity or even limiting identifiers and filenames to US 7-bit ASCII.

I totally disagree, so I wrote a long thread in response, starting with [Wayback/Archive] “@Felienne @guido_leenders Sentence 2 in your first tweet should be an eye opener to everyone….” archived at the ThreadReaderApp as [Wayback/Archive] Thread by @jpluimers on Thread Reader App:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in accessibility (a11y), Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Formatting a USB stick larger than 32 gigabyte with FAT32 on Windows 10

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/11/03

Formatting USB sticks in Fat32 on Windows 10 can be a pain, especially when they are larger than 32 gigabyte.

Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.19043.1081]
(c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\bin>format D: /FS:FAT32
Insert new disk for drive D:
and press ENTER when ready...
The type of the file system is EXFAT.
The new file system is FAT32.
Verifying 239.0 GB
The volume is too big for FAT32.
Format failed.

C:\bin>

This works:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in FAT (8-bitFAT, FAT12, FAT16, FAT16B, FAT32), Power User, Windows, Windows 10 | Leave a Comment »

Smart idea by corbosman on Twitter: he wrote a home grown DynDNS for transIP DNS changes

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/11/02

[Wayback/Archive] corbosman on Twitter: “I created a container in my private kubernetes cluster that checks if my ziggo ip address changes and if so, notifies me and makes some DNS changes through the API of my DNS provider. Last night Ziggo changed my IP and it worked flawlessly. Win!” / Twitter

His ISP: [Wayback/Archive] corbosman on Twitter: “@jpluimers transip“.

The Domain API for his ISP TransIP is at [Wayback/Archive] TransIP API: Domains (via [Wayback/Archive] transip dns api – Google Search).

–jeroen

Posted in Development, DNS, Internet, Power User, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Memories of the Twitter Fail Whale that got discontinued 10 years ago (HT @YiyingLu, @failwhale).

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/11/01

From 2008 to fall 2013, Twitter used the Fail Whale, a 2006 artwork by Yiying Lu originally titled “Lifting A Dreamer”, to indicate problems on their site.

Now that it is about a year after Musk burned some 44 milliard USD buying Twitter, it is also 10 years ago they phased out the Fail Whale, so it is a good time to remember it and a reminder to check out how Twitter faired during Elon’s ownership.

With Twitter down, you’d see the image from [Wayback/Archive] Yiying Lu 🐳 🥟🧋 on Twitter: “It has been 10 years since my art piece “Lifting a Dreamer” became the Twitter Fail Whale, a symbol as @Twitter’s service outrage during 2008-2013. It has inspired hundreds, probably thousands, of funny, clever & amusing homages and take-offs from users globally. Here are a few: …”:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Delphi, Development, History, SocialMedia, Software Development, Twitter | Leave a Comment »

0x48piraj/fadblock: Friendly Adblock for YouTube: A fast, lightweight, and undetectable YouTube Ads Blocker for Chrome, Opera and Firefox.

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/10/31

[Wayback/Archive] 0x48piraj/fadblock: Friendly Adblock for YouTube: A fast, lightweight, and undetectable YouTube Ads Blocker for Chrome, Opera and Firefox.

At the time of writing, it was available in these web-browser extension/addon stores:

A 404 was returned at [Wayback/Archive] https://addons.opera.com/en-gb/extensions/details/fadblock/ which I reported in [Wayback/Archive] Extension vanished from the Opera Addons page · Issue #15 · 0x48piraj/fadblock.

Via:

–jeroen

Posted in Chrome, CSS, Development, Firefox, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Opera, Power User, Scripting, SocialMedia, Software Development, Web Browsers, Web Development, YouTube | Leave a Comment »

Working around Windows 10 upgrade 21H2 suddenly requiring 20+GBytes instead of 10+.

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/10/30

[Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers on Twitter: “Hey @MicrosoftHelps, in the past @Windows 10 upgrades required around ~10Gbytes of free disk space. It now has increased to over 20Gbytes. @WindowsUpdate Why? This is not fun when upgrading a bunch of regression VMs. “:

Read the rest of this entry »

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

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »