The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

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“To protect your privacy” this invisible app automatically scans all your images: Google System APK Transparency  |  Android Binary Transparency  |  Google for Developers

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/02/10

Remember [Wayback/Archive] Apple Provides Further Clarity on Why It Abandoned Plan to Detect CSAM in iCloud Photos | MacRumors Forums?

Google now forces a similar thing.

Uninstall this as soon as it appears on your Android phone: [Wayback/Archive] Google System APK Transparency  |  Android Binary Transparency  |  Google for Developers

Via [Wayback/Archive] jack: “You remember #Apple scanning a…” – Mastodon @ SDF:

You remember #Apple scanning all images on your #mobile device?
If you have an #Android #phone, a new app that doesn’t appear in your menu has been automatically and silently installed (or soon will be) by #Google. It is called #AndroidSystemSafetyCore and does exactly the same – scan all images on your device as well as all incoming ones (via messaging). The new spin is that it does so “to protect your #privacy“.
You can uninstall this app safely via System -> Apps.
For more information, see:

Query: [Wayback/Archive] “Android System Safety Core” – Google Search

--jeroen

Posted in Android Devices, Power User | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Refrain from hacking all the things (:

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/02/10

It’s hard to not hack all the things…

–jeroen

Posted in LifeHacker, Power User, Red team, Security | Leave a Comment »

Dr. Nadia Drake has discovered both her dads Golden Record pulsar map, and the sketches for the Arecibo message

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/02/07

Ain’t history extra lovely when someone discovers the original drawings of what her dad had sent to space?

Back in the 1970s, Frank Drake did two memorable things: he helped design the Pioneer plaque (sent to space in 1972 on Pioneer 11) containing among other things pulsar map, and later helped design the 1977 Voyager Golden Record (sent to space in 1977 on both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2) again containing the pulsar map. In between, he helped designed Arecibo message broadcasted to space in 1974.

And guess what: today is the 50th anniversary of that message being broadcasted.

Almost 10 years ago, in 2016 his daughter Nadia Drake found back the original drawing of the pulsar map: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in History, LifeHacker, Power User, science | Leave a Comment »

If you thought you found cheap directional WiFi antennas (2.4GHz or 5Ghz), then think twice

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/02/07

Nice [Wayback/Archive] Thread by @jhewitt_net on Thread Reader App that started with [Wayback/Archive] Joseph Hewitt on Twitter: “I bought some cheap aliexpress directional 2.4GHz antennas. As expected, they aren’t very good. (A small thread)”:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Hardware, Power User, WiFi | Leave a Comment »

Mailen en communiceren zonder Musk en Trump: Cloud Kootwijk – Bert Hubert’s writings

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/02/06

Hopelijk lukt dit iemand van de grond te krijgen, maar het zal wel stranden in regelgeving (net als GPT-NL wat tegen licentieproblemen aan loopt¹ en GEITje – wat vanwege licentieproblemen uit de lucht gehaald is ²) [Wayback/Archive] Mailen en communiceren zonder Musk en Trump: Cloud Kootwijk – Bert Hubert’s writings.

Via onder meer:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Cloud, Communications Development, Development, eMail, Infrastructure, SocialMedia, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Stable Diffusion – a Hugging Face Space by stabilityai

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/02/06

I’m anxious to see how some 2.5 years after the introduction, Stable Diffusion has evolved.

By then, you could run it either on-line at for instance [Wayback/Archive] Stable Diffusion – a Hugging Face Space by stabilityai:

Stable Diffusion DemoStable Diffusion is a state of the art text-to-image model that generates images from text.

or run it yourself if your GPU was powerful enough by using the base repository [Wayback/Archive] CompVis/stable-diffusion or one of the many forks: [Wayback/Archive] Forks · CompVis/stable-diffusion (back then some 1.4k!)

The original announcement was [Wayback/Archive] Stable Diffusion Public Release — Stability.Ai.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in AI and ML; Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Development, Python, Scripting, Software Development | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

On Twitter, Apple Mis-Intelligence (@singhalrishi27) found out you can now order Mac Mini M4 upgrade SSD parts on Apple Self Service Repair: part numbers and prices below

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/02/05

TL;DR: the [Wayback/Archive] Self Service Repair – Apple Support parts are very expensive; having an expert solder them is way more affordable

Last year, [Wayback/Archive] Official (by_APPLE): Mac mini (2024) Repair Manual : r/macmini already had the part numbers for Mac Mini M4 SSD upgrades which I put in this table (staggered staggered to emphasise the M4 and M4 Pro differences) with prices for the M4 upgrades after receiving back the return credit (which I still need to figure out what you need to return):

Mac Mini M4 SSD upgrade part numbers
Mac mini (2024 with M4) Mac mini (2024 with M4 Pro)
661-43668, 256GB
 USD 263.12
661-43669, 512GB
 USD 251.12
661-43672, 512GB
661-43670, 1TB
 USD 439.12
661-43673, 1TB
661-43671, 2TB USD 748.00
661-43674, 2TB
661-43675, 4TB
661-43676, 8TB

NB: If anyone can provide a Mac Mini M4 Pro serial, I can amend the table with those part prices as well.

It also had these links:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Apple, Apple Silicon, Mac, MacMini, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Jürgen Schmidhuber on X: “DeepSeek [1] uses elements of the 2015 reinforcement learning prompt engineer [2] and its 2018 refinement [3] which collapses the RL machine and world model of [2] into a single net through the neural net distillation procedure of 1991 [4]: a distilled chain of thought system. …”

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/02/05

[WaybackSave/Archive] Jürgen Schmidhuber on X: “DeepSeek [1] uses elements of the 2015 reinforcement learning prompt engineer [2] and its 2018 refinement [3] which collapses the RL machine and world model of [2] into a single net through the neural net distillation procedure of 1991 [4]: a distilled chain of thought system. …”

followed by a list of references and this graph:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in AI and ML; Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, DeepSeek, Development, LLM, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

If you need to learn ASP.NET core or looking for specific examples, then try GitHub dodyg/practical-aspnetcore repository

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/02/05

[Wayback/Archive] dodyg/practical-aspnetcore: Practical samples of ASP.NET Core 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 5.0, 6.0 and 7.0 projects you can use. Readme contains explanations on all projects.

By the time you read this, all examples should have been rewritten to use minimal API footprint so it easier to get just the essentials from each example.

Via [Wayback/Archive] dodyg on Twitter: “I just realized this repo has about around 1500 samples in total because for each version of ASP.NET Core the samples get modified in some ways beyond project increment, e.g for .NET 6, all samples gets rewritten to use minimal API.”

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, ASP.NET, ASP.NET core, C#, Development, Software Development, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

Prevent a Mac laptop from turning on when opening its lid or connecting to power – Apple Support

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/02/04

For cleaning an Apple Silicon MacBook there were already solutions to either disable the keyboard or to blacken the screen:

For keeping a Mac turned off however, there hadn’t been a solution for a long time.

Now there is, but you need to have the most recent update of macOS Sequoia 15 by adding a nvram BootPreference setting: [Wayback/Archive] Prevent a Mac laptop from turning on when opening its lid or connecting to power – Apple Support

Via

  1. [Wayback/Archive] Fefes Blog: [l] Satire und Realität sind nicht mehr unterscheidbar. Heute: Apple.
  2. [Wayback/Archive] Für Tastaturhygieniker: So bleibt das MacBook beim Öffnen aus | heise online
  3. [Wayback/Archive] Created a Keyboard Lock App for Safe Cleaning—Seeking Your Thoughts and Feedback! 🚀🔧 : macapps

--jeroen

Posted in Apple, Apple Silicon, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, MacBook, MacBook-Pro, Power User | Leave a Comment »

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