The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

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Kenteken Font | dafont.com

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/07

This is cool when one needs a temporary 1-day Dutch license plate (for instance when importing a car): [Wayback/Archive] Kenteken Font | dafont.com

Download:

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Posted in cars, Font, LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Weather info in plain text or JSON

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/06

Two sites that can help you out getting weather info on the console:

wttr.in

wttr.in is developed by [Wayback/Archive] Igor Chubin (@igor_chubin) / X and looks at the request header to figure out what kind of output it sends.

It supports various output formats, so on my TODO list is to see how they do their mapping: always an opportunity to learn (it’s based on Python and Go so I am curious what libraries they use as well).

From the documentation:

wttr.in currently supports five output formats:

  • ANSI for the terminal;
  • Plain-text for the terminal and scripts;
  • HTML for the browser;
  • PNG for the graphical viewers;
  • JSON for scripts and APIs;
  • Prometheus metrics for scripts and APIs.

The ANSI and HTML formats are selected based on the User-Agent string.

There are more parameters in the documentation on the main page of the repository and through this command:

curl wttr.in/:help

The idea is derived from [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – schachmat/wego: weather app for the terminal.

Oh: Igor has more repositories at [Wayback/Archive] chubin (Igor Chubin) · GitHub (including [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – chubin/cheat.sh: the only cheat sheet you need which is hosted at [Wayback/Archive] cheat.sh; I thought I had blogged about that before, but found it only in a draft note mentioning that I got it via [WaybackSave/Archive] Nicolas Krassas on X: “The only cheat sheet you need cheat.sh)

7timer

A 7 timer JSON usage example is at [Wayback/Archive] Get Weather from 7Timer! · GitHub

It has documentation at

Output formats can be chosen from HTML, PNG, XML and JSON.

Via

[Wayback/Archive] Hacker Public Radio – hpr4266 :: What’s the weather?
Lee writes a script to check what the weather is like ~ The Technology Community Podcast

HPR is a great podcast series!

--jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, ash/dash, bash, bash, Development, Go (golang), JavaScript/ECMAScript, JSON, Power User, Python, Scripting, Software Development, Web Development, XML/XSD | Leave a Comment »

Miguel de Icaza on Twitter: “This is so beautiful – SQL Injection attacks but for GPT-3 and other AI text models.” / Twitter

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/06

2.5 years after Miguel summarised the state of AI text models, and given SQL Injection (because of mixing control and data channels) still is a thing in the 2020’s, I wonder both how much improvement there has been on the AI side of things and how much it is used in pen testing.

So I archived the below tweets to be able to read back and figure out on the current state.

[Wayback/Archive] Miguel de Icaza on Twitter: “This is so beautiful – SQL Injection attacks but for GPT-3 and other AI text models.”:

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Posted in AI and ML; Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Blue team, Database Development, Development, Pen Testing, Power User, Red team, Security, Software Development, SQL | Leave a Comment »

Unicode subscripts and superscripts: Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and IPA tables; Source: Small caps: Unicode – Wikipedia

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/05

I originally searched for the tables below to see if I could get the visualisations of TeX and LaTeX right for infinite loop in “LaTeX: A Document Preparation System” by Leslie Lamport, printed in 1994..

Didn’t work, neither did using plain html super and subscript. The only thing that worked was using CSS styles (I chose to embed them, as separate CSS files are a huge premium over the WordPress plan), which also preserves actual meaning for screen readers:

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Posted in accessibility (a11y), CSS, Development, HTML, Power User, Software Development, Unicode, URL Encoding, User Experience (ux), Web Development | Leave a Comment »

On my list of thigs to play around with: ISSUE_TEMPLATE and other GitHub templates/settings

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/05

Somehow I never consciously thought through how on many GitHub repositories, some of the issue reporting steps started with nice templates.

That is, until I bumped into [Wayback/Archive] alfred-my-mind/.github at master · nikitavoloboev/alfred-my-mind which has:

  1. a folder [Wayback/Archive] alfred-my-mind/.github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE at master · nikitavoloboev/alfred-my-mind with Markdown files for different kinds of issues (bug report, feature request and question).
  2. a file [Wayback/Archive] alfred-my-mind/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md at master · nikitavoloboev/alfred-my-mind

So from [Wayback/Archive] ISSUE_TEMPLATE – Google Search a few results for me to get started:

--jeroen

Posted in Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, git, GitHub, Software Development, Source Code Management | Leave a Comment »

Reminder to self: re-check the Dotpe API Security Breach — bool.dev

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/04

Still public merchant information

Still public merchant information

It looks like some store and merchang APIs were not protected back when [Wayback/Archive] Dotpe API Security Breach — bool.dev was published.

Reminder to self: check their status now as I can’t believe their “human error” got fixed properly.

History (reverse chronological order):

  1. [Wayback/Archive] How DotPe’s ‘Human Error’ Exposed Confidential Customer API Data
  2. [Wayback/Archive] Deedy on X: “Today, Google-backed DotPe locked down their APIs by rate-limiting by IP on /external/merchant and blocking others. They sent a legal notice to the author before fixing it and haven’t publicly acknowledged the issue at all. Companies must be held accountable for poor security.…”

    [Wayback/Archive] Tweet JSON: [Wayback/Archive] GYSlTthakAEoojp.png:orig (2346×1838)

  3. Now protected private API

    Now protected private API

    [Wayback/Archive] Deedy on X: “6 hours later, the API is still very much public! …”

    [Wayback/Archive] Tweet JSON: [Wayback/Archive] GYK38dXbkAEEEs_.jpg:orig (1358×1798)

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Posted in Communications Development, Development, HTTP, Infosec (Information Security), Internet protocol suite, REST, Software Development, TCP, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

Writing a tool that restarts the Google Chat desktop app Window (and hopefully the Google Duo desktop app Window too)

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/04

In the past, the Google Hangouts desktop app on Windows would integrate with the system “tray” (actually the notification area) and show you missed chats and calls.

The [Wayback/Archive] Google Chat desktop app does not. It shows missed messages only as a number on the taskbar icon. Even worse: when you close the Window, the taskbar application icon does not show that number any more.

The odd thing is that the Google Duo desktop app does stay active and shows a notification popup on incoming calls. The Google Chat desktop app does not.

So I wanted to restart the Google Chat desktop app automatically when the Window was closed. But there is a catch:

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Posted in .NET, C#, CommandLine, Delphi, Development, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Use an iPad as a second display for a Mac – Apple Support

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/03

While recovering from cancer treatments and moving, I heavily cut down on spending money for my IT infrastructure as you can only spend money once.

Now that I have recovered quite a bit, and also gaining more income, I got more recent Apple hardware and could start to use this: [Wayback/Archive] Use an iPad as a second display for a Mac – Apple Support

It’s called Sidecar in Apple terminology and actually quite neat, though you need extra software to use the iPad in portrait mode (it is hard coded to landscape though a 10-inch iPad Pro fits very nicely in portrait position next to a 16-inch M1 MacBook Pro).

If I persist, I need to look at solutions like [Wayback/Archive] Rotated Sidecar · waydabber/BetterDisplay Wiki · GitHub ([Wayback/Archive] GitHub – waydabber/BetterDisplay: Unlock your displays on your Mac! Flexible HiDPI scaling, XDR/HDR extra brightness, virtual screens, DDC control, extra dimming, PIP/streaming, EDID override and lots more!)

Sidecar is part of Handoff, so these preconditions apply: [Wayback/Archive] Use Handoff to continue tasks on your other devices – Apple Support.

In the end, I think it is all based on AirDrop, especially because of the first Apple Support link above mentioning these “Additional requirements”:

Via:

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Posted in Apple, iOS, iPad, Mac, MacBook, MacBook-Pro, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Forrest Brazeal on Twitter about their your process for learning a new technology or framework on the job

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/03

Interesting responses to [Wayback/Archive] Forrest Brazeal on Twitter: “People who’ve been software engineers for awhile: what’s your process for learning a new technology or framework on the job? (I want the beginners who follow me to read the replies carefully)”.

Not just interesting for beginners to read, but for any developer: understanding how other people acquire new technology helps you to compare your own way of learning to others.

Forrest keeps these simple steps as “[Wayback/Archive] For me:

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Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Learning/Teaching, LifeHacker, Power User, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Ook voor de overheid is de (ook aangetekende) postbezorging van PostNL slecht: NOS.nl – Zorgen van ombudsman over onbetrouwbare bezorging post van overheid

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/02

Ook voor de overheid is de (ook aangetekende) postbezorging van PostNL slecht: [Wayback/Archive] Zorgen van ombudsman over onbetrouwbare bezorging post van overheid

De bezorging van post van de overheid door PostNL is onbetrouwbaar, stelt de Nationale ombudsman.

De ombudsman zegt dat de overheid verantwoordelijk blijft voor het bezorgen van de post, ook als die het door PostNL laat doen. “Dus of de overheid zorgt dat de post goed aankomt, of de overheid helpt de burger die hierdoor in de knel komt. Zo simpel is het.”
Kassa vroeg verschillende overheidsinstanties om een reactie op de brief van de ombudsman. Tien instanties reageerden, waaronder de Raad voor de rechtspraak. “Vanuit de Rechtspraak zijn er diverse overleggen geweest met PostNL om PostNL tot verbetering van de (aangetekende) postbezorging te bewegen. Dit lijkt tot op heden helaas tot onvoldoende resultaat te hebben geleid.”

--jeroen

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »