The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

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ASCII Art Archive, my own ASCII signature, plus many FIGlet and TOIlet ASCII font art links

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/11/11

Earlier this year I bumped into [Wayback/Archive] ASCII Art Archive

This brought back instant memories about ASCII art, so in the future expect af few unfinished blog-posts that were in my “if I ever get to it archive” about it.

Let me start with my very limited ASCII art I used in late 1980s and early 1990s newsgroup and LISTSERV mailing list signature I reconstructed from a comp.virus post¹ having some very old contact data²:

    o  _   _  _   _   _            voice: +31-2522-20908 (18:00-24:00 UTC)
   /  (_' |  (_) (_' | |           snail: P.S.O.
__/                                       attn. Jeroen W. Pluimers
                                          P.O. Box 266
jeroenp@rulfc1.LeidenUniv.nl              2170 AG Sassenheim
jeroen_pluimers@f521.n281.z2.fidonet.org  The Netherlands

Shortly after that, my main source of income moved from the command-line to GUI based tools, so I temporarily kind of lost interest in command-line tools and customs. In that period FIGlet (see below) got created, which I totally missed (though I vaguely remember the 1.0 version being named newban).

The link at the start of this blog post not only pointed me to FIGlet, but also has a lot of examples (like some [Wayback/Archive] ASCII Art Logos – asciiart.eu) of which many by ASCII artist Joan Stark, and also links to JavaScript based tools:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in ASCII art / AsciiArt, Development, Encoding, Fun, History, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Retrocomputing, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

LinuxCND: The Raspberry Pi that ships other Raspberry Pis – Pi Australia

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/11/11

Cool practical application of LinuxCNC: [Wayback/Archive] The Raspberry Pi that ships other Raspberry Pis – Pi Australia

[Wayback/Archive] LinuxCNC

LinuxCNC controls CNC machines. It can drive milling machines, lathes, 3D printers, laser cutters, plasma cutters, robot arms, hexapods, and more.

Via [Wayback/Archive] Frans van Berckel on Twitter: “@geerlingguy So, there is a Raspberry Pi, that ships other Raspberry Pis?”

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Development, Hardware Development, Linux, Power User, Raspberry Pi | Leave a Comment »

Thomas Fuchs: “For the love of Eliza, stop using AI-generated images for blog posts and articles …” – Hachyderm.io

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/11/10

[Wayback/Archive] Thomas 🔭🕹️: “For the love of Eliza, stop using AI-generated images for blog posts and articles. It’s like serving some nice vomit as a side dish with your lovingly prepared homemade dinner.…” – Hachyderm.io

--jeroen

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

How to monitor USB power consumption? – Ask Different

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/11/10

TL;DR: it is impossible on a Mac to accurately measure power usage by attached USB devices. Only a general indication is possible, but it is unreliable.

[Wayback/Archive] How to monitor USB power consumption? – Ask Different

  • System Profiler needs manual refresh and is a very rough indication
  • iStatMenus is a graph, but not very accurate
  • Activity Monitor is even rougher than the above

Related: [Wayback/Archive] View energy consumption in Activity Monitor on Mac – Apple Support (UK)

Via: [Wayback/Archive] macos view usb power usage – Google Search

–jeroen

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

When Spotlight fails to find some files: mdutil revisited

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/11/07

On my M1 MacBook, somehow Spotlight started to fail returning some indexed files (especially recently added ones would not show up or it would take a very long while for some of them to show up).

So I revisited mdutil and related commands while writing a comment on the YouTube movie [Wayback/Archive] How To Rebuild the Spotlight Index on Your Mac – YouTube which since then vanished, but luckily I saved it and here I amended it with formatting:

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

Forrest Brazeal on Twitter: ‘Not all “utilization” is created equal…’

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/11/07

From a long time ago, but still fun: [Wayback/Archive] Forrest Brazeal on Twitter: ‘Not all “utilization” is created equal…’

–jeroen

Posted in Cloud, Infrastructure, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Video that depicts why I dislike the LLM outcomes so much (author sofia named it “A shitpost that’s been brewing…”)

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/11/06

Phrased as [Wayback/Archive] sofia: “A shitpost that’s been brewing…” – unstable.systems Mastodon (Glitch Edition) I like this video a lot:

If WordPress killed the video, it has that habit, then you can watch it here: [Wayback/Archive] 30dd92563fd33de3.mp4 or [Wayback/Archive] 41cbd023913c0fd6.mp4

Read the rest of this entry »

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

Merging Git repositories without losing history – The Continuous Improver

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/11/06

For my link archive: [Wayback/Archive] Merging Git repositories without losing history – The Continuous Improver

Via:

–jeroen

Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, Event, git, Software Development, Source Code Management | Leave a Comment »

GitHub – louislam/uptime-kuma: A fancy self-hosted monitoring tool

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/11/05

As promised yesterday¹ because “what’s an open source project without its status page” (and some commercial vendors cough Embarcadero cough could highly benefit from this):

[Wayback/Archive] GitHub – louislam/uptime-kuma: A fancy self-hosted monitoring tool.

Some links (so you can try it for yourself):

--jeroen

¹ GitHub – cryptpad/cryptpad: Collaborative office suite, end-to-end encrypted and open-source.

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Development, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Monitoring, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, TypeScript, Vue.js | Leave a Comment »

Infinite loops and the True Meaning of DevOps (Forrest Brazeal on Twitter)

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/11/05

[Wayback/Archive] Forrest Brazeal on Twitter: “Multiple people on LinkedIn have commented on this to swear they’ve seen people DELIBERATELY SHIP INFINITE LOOPS to justify their infra footprint That, my friends, is the true meaning of DevOps”

which was sparked because of comments on his [Wayback/Archive] Forrest Brazeal on Twitter: “Not all “utilization” is created equal…” cartoon:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, DevOps, Infrastructure, Software Development | Leave a Comment »