The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

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For a long time there has been Alice and Bob, but since a week there is Hegseth and Waltz!

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/05

For a long time there has been Alice and Bob, but since the end of March 2025 there is Hegseth and Waltz!

Nah, the last Wikipedia link does not show history, as it does not really exist.

But someone made the first Wikipedia page into the below picture where Hegseth replaced Alice, Waltz replaced Bob, and Goldberg replaced Mallory.

I found it in these places, but likely it proliferated more:

The Facebook image (see further below) has less JPEG artefacts, so is more original than the Twitter image.

Since [Wayback/Archive] Some URLs Are Immortal, Most Are Ephemeral (a highly recommended reading by the way), I archived the image in the links below the blog signature and had Google OCR the text.

OPSEC is easy if you are clueless.

--jeroen

[Wayback/Archive] 427522053-438a2589-f781-45e5-b94e-92fce4c17314.png (766×504)

Hegseth and Waltz

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hegseth and Waltz are fictional characters commonly used as placeholders in discussions about cryptographic systems and protocols, [1] and in other science and engineering literature where there are several participants in a thought experiment. The Hegseth and Waltz characters were created by Jeffrey Goldberg in his 2025 article “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans”. [2] Subsequently, they have become common archetypes in many scientific and engineering fields, such as

Hegseth
Waltz
Goldberg
Example scenario where communication between Hegseth and Waltz is intercepted by Goldberg

A similar pun was [Wayback/Archive] 487203204_10238119445586263_7274268486470714839_n.jpg (700×433)

Alice, Bob and The Atlantic

Alice, Bob and The Atlantic

Likely all actual images have long been expired from their caches.

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

How to use two or more monitors to M1, M2 or M3 MacBooks | Macworld

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/04

[Wayback/Archive] How to use two or more monitors to M1, M2 or M3 MacBooks | Macworld will likely hold for M4 based ones as well:

  • higher-end MacBooks with M1/M2/M3 Pro and Max chips support multiple external displays
  • get around Apple’s annoying M1/M2/M3 Mac single-display limitation via software and adapters

The solutions we explain here will also help M2 Pro and M3 Pro MacBook users extend to three external displays.

Recommended reading, despite the extra hardware and software you will likely need.

--jeroen

Posted in Apple Silicon, ARM Mac, M1 Mac, Mac, MacBook, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Happy 50th birthday Microsoft!

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/04

Some beautiful old Microsoft logo material posted on their Twitter profile in 2021 on its 46 birthday and a few of their tweets:

B&W logo

B&W logo

Colour logo

Colour logo

Looking at the Wayback Machine Archivals of the banner logo, I saw two things:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in History, Power User, Retrocomputing | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Online Delphi manuals

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/03

When you look at the History of Delphi (software) – Wikipedia, the real innovation – including Borland Kylix – was during the Early Borland Years fading later with three temporary surges, the first being the Delphi .NET support introduced in Delphi 7 and Delphi 8 happening too late during the Later Borland Years, then during the Embarcadero Years support for Unicode and Generics both in Delphi 2009 and followed by a the struggle of their cross platform compilers and (externally bought) FireMonkey vector-based GUI support independent from the Windows API in the XE series of Delphi versions. The Idera Years did not bring any real innovation: just minor updates presented as major ones.

This went hand-in hand with their then flagship relational database InterBase dwindling down after first open sourcing InterBase version 6 in 2000, then closed sourcing it again (sparking the Firebird database development ) with latest versions were years apart: 2020, 2017 and XE7.

This more or less stalled innovation means that older Delphi manuals and books stay relevant despite their physical copies having been long out of print, and made their way as PDF files on the internet.

So, for my link archive:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Delphi, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Tribal Knowledge? Getting the public keys from github and gitlab users from their username

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/03

Learned a while ago: if you have the username from a GitHub or GitLab user, you can download interesting that sometimes can make life easier (but not necessarily more secure):

  • github.com/username.keys gives you their public SSH keys
  • gitlab.com/username.keys gives you their public SSH keys
  • github.com/username.png gives you their profile image

And that there are tools like gh, glab and age that can make direct use of them.

I love Twitter, so thanks for these for teaching me these little tricks:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, ArchiveTeamWarrior, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, GitHub, GitLab, Internet, InternetArchive, OpenSSH, Power User, Software Development, Source Code Management, SSH, ssh/sshd, WayBack machine | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

Installing Chocolatey on Windows 10 and up

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/02

Steps for installing Chocolatey on Windows 11 and up or 10 version 1803 and up.

Since I often install Windows on machines where it is not easy to copy/paste longer install commands my steps are slightly different than the ones on [Wayback/Archive] Chocolatey Software | Installing Chocolatey:

  1. Start a regular command prompt
  2. Either these two (the options are equivalent, see [Wayback/Archive] curl: transfer a URL | curl Commands | Man Pages | ManKier for --remote-name and -O):
    • curl --remote-name https://community.chocolatey.org/install.ps1
    • curl -O https://community.chocolatey.org/install.ps1

    Note the cURL pre-installed on Windows 10 since at least 6 years*: release 1803 or insider build 17063 is good enough to download the Chocolatey install script

  3. Inspect the downloaded install.ps1 to check if you spot anything you dislike
  4. Start an elevated (administrator) command prompt
  5. Start PowerShell
  6. Execute this command
    • Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force
  7. Execute this command in the folder where you downloaded install.ps1
    • .\install.ps1
  • Yup, a custom build of cURL has been pre-installed on Windows 10 and up since more than 6 years:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Chocolatey, cURL, Development, Power User, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »

Some HTTP redirect checking sites compared

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/02

 

Every now and then I want to check how a URL redirect, for instance when checking out why a domain failed loading in browsers a while ago because of certificate problems:

The thing was that back then, the site officially did not have a security certificate, but somehow the provider had installed a self-signed one. Most web-browsers then auto-redirect from http to https. Luckily the archival sites can archive without redirecting:

When querying [Wayback/Archive] redirect check – Google Search, you get quite some results. These are the ones I use most in descending order of preference and why they are at that position:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, archive.is / archive.today, Communications Development, Development, Encryption, HTTP, https, HTTPS/TLS security, Internet, Internet protocol suite, ISP, Power User, Security, Software Development, TCP, WayBack machine, Web Development, wget, xs4all | Leave a Comment »

Welcome to #AprilApples! Apple II Computer event celebrated in the month of April

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/01

AprilApples Apple II Computer Event LogoLast year, #Appril][ got rebranded into #AprilApples, so I wish you a happy retro-month filled with April Apples!

[Wayback/Archive] Welcome to #AprilApples! Apple II Computer event celebrated in the month of April

Consider using the [Wayback/Archive] #AprilApples Style Guide with logon on the right, plus Garamond and/or Motter Tektura typeface when possible to really give tribute to the Apple ][ era.

Last year, a big surprise was that Apple Computer put a PDF version of the famous Apple Pascal Poster on the Internet Archive.

So today is a great day to give that more traction and link to it:

A year before, during April][, a remake of that poster got done on AppleFritter: Home[Wayback/Archive] Apple pascal poster, remade | Applefritter

Via [Wayback/Archive] Javmaster@bsky.social: “http://appril2.com/ ” – Mastodon

Fonts:

Images (I used a solid CSS brown background so you can see the difference between the regular logo and the outlined logo):

--jeroen

Posted in //e, 6502, Apple, Apple ///, Apple Lisa, Apple ][, Classic Macintosh, History, Power User | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

Ryan Els on X: “Center-aligned code just looks better 🥰 https://t.co/AP2l22jHRG” / X

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/01

[Wayback/Archive] Ryan Els on X: “Center-aligned code just looks better 🥰 …”

[Wayback/Archive] Tweet JSON

[Wayback/Archive] Gel3nsxWUAALM77.jpg:orig (617×776)

--jeroen

Posted in Development, Fun, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Personalised audio cards and video books with your own video or audio file

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/01

For Whamageddon or Rickrolling: [Wayback/Archive] Personalised audio cards and video books with your own video or audio file (UK) /

[Wayback/Archive] Wenskaart met ingesproken boodschap of eigen muziek – Geluidkaartje (Dutch).

Or build your own with chips like these: [Wayback/Archive] 30S Sound Voice Music Recorder Board Voice Chip Module for Greeting Card DIY | eBay

Or buy blank cards:

Via [Wayback/Archive] sound record your own postcard – Google Search

--jeroen

Posted in Development, Fun, Hardware Development, Hardware Interfacing, Power User | Leave a Comment »

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