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Building a Chinese Vehicle Database from MIIT Public Data

If you’ve ever tried to decode a Chinese VIN or look up vehicle specifications for a car manufactured in China, you’ll know the data is hard to come by. Commercial providers charge significant fees, the official sources are in Chinese, and the coverage is often incomplete. I recently spent several weeks solving this problem from first principles — scraping, parsing, and enriching the entire MIIT…

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The Static HttpClient That Wouldn't Rotate: A Tale of Pooled Connections

The symptom A production .NET service had been running fine for months. It made outbound HTTP calls through a rotating proxy provider — the kind that promises a new exit IP for each request. Then one day, requests started timing out. Not failing cleanly with a 4xx or 5xx. Timing out. Each one sat there for thirty seconds or more before giving up. The fix that worked, every time, was restarting…

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Indonesia Vehicle Registration Lookups #API

We’re delighted to announce that our vehicle registration lookup service now supports Indonesia. With over 150 million registered vehicles on its roads, Indonesia is one of the largest automotive markets in Southeast Asia, and adding it to our coverage has been a long-running priority. As of today, you can query Indonesian plates through the /CheckIndonesia endpoint. What you get back Every…

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The Misleading IndexOutOfRangeException That Means "Your List Isn't Thread-Safe"

If you’ve ever seen a stack trace like this in a .NET application: System.IndexOutOfRangeException: Index was outside the bounds of the array. at System.Collections.Generic.List`1.Enumerator.MoveNext() at System.Linq.Enumerable.WhereListIterator`1.MoveNext() at System.Collections.Generic.List`1..ctor(IEnumerable`1 collection) at System.Linq.Enumerable.ToList[TSource](IEnumerable`1 source) at…

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Thread Pool Exhaustion in ASP.NET: The Async Database Trap

If you’ve ever migrated a working ASP.NET application from synchronous database calls to async, and suddenly found yourself hitting connection pool timeouts under load, you’ve likely fallen into one of the most subtle and destructive traps in the .NET ecosystem: sync-over-async deadlock. The Symptom Everything works fine in development. You push to production, traffic picks up, and…

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The dangers of Parallel.ForEach(... , async (item)) in IIS

A single, trivial exception — one that your code already has a catch block for — shouldn’t be able to bring down your entire IIS web server. But it can, and it will, if you combine Parallel.ForEach with an async lambda. This post explains exactly why it happens, how to spot it in the Windows Event Log, and how to fix it permanently. The Setup You have a method that needs to perform the same…

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Taiwan motorcycle plate lookup via #API

Our vehicle API network expands into Taiwan with full motorcycle registration lookups — make, age, engine size, and emissions test history, all in one call. Taiwan has one of the highest motorcycle densities in the world, with over 14 million registered two-wheelers on its roads. Today, we’re pleased to announce that the /CheckTaiwan endpoint is live — bringing motorcycle registration data from…

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Batch AI Processing: Why Multithreading is the Wrong Instinct

When developers first encounter a large-scale AI classification job — say, two million records that each need to be sent to an LLM for analysis — the instinct is immediately familiar: spin up threads, parallelise the work, saturate the API. It’s the same pattern that works for database processing, file I/O, HTTP scraping. More threads, more throughput. With LLM APIs, that instinct leads you…

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Fixing Chrome's "Aw, Snap!" STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION in CDP Automation

How a race condition between page navigation and JavaScript execution causes STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION crashes — and how to fix it properly. C# · .NET·Puppeteer / CDP·Chrome Automation 💥 😬 Aw, Snap! Something went wrong displaying this page. Chrome’s infamous crash page — and the Windows error behind it: STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION (0xC0000005). If you’re automating Chrome via CDP and seeing this, a…

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Cracking the Code: Estimating a Car's Age from Its Argentine Licence Plate

Technical Deep-dive · Vehicle Data How sequential plate issuance, a little combinatorics, and 200,000 training records let you estimate a registration year from seven characters.By Infinite Loop Development  ·  March 2026 Try it live The techniques described in this post are implemented in ar.matriculaapi.com — an API that returns full vehicle details for any Argentine licence plate, including…

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The Hidden Cost of ORDER BY NEWID()

Fetching a random row from a table is a surprisingly common requirement — random banner ads, sample data, rotating API credentials. The instinctive solution in SQL Server is elegant-looking but conceals a serious performance trap. -- Looks innocent. Isn't.SELECT TOP 1 * FROM LARGE_TABLE ORDER BY NEWID() What SQL Server actually does NEWID() generates a fresh GUID for every single row in…

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Enrich Your Qualtrics Surveys with Real-Time Respondent Data Using AvatarAPI

Qualtrics is excellent at capturing what respondents tell you. But what if you could automatically fill in what you already know — or can discover — the moment they enter their email address? AvatarAPI resolves an email address into rich profile data in real time: a profile photo, full name, city, country, and the social network behind it. By embedding this lookup directly into your Qualtrics…

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Building a Wildcard Catch-All POP3 Mail Server on Ubuntu

Receive mail for any address on any subdomain — no per-account configuration required Introduction This guide walks through setting up a wildcard catch-all mail server on Ubuntu using Postfix and Dovecot. The goal is to receive email sent to any address on any subdomain of your domain — for example, [email protected] or [email protected] — without having to configure individual…

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How to Detect and Fix Squid Proxy Abuse

Running an open HTTP proxy on the internet, even temporarily for testing, can quickly attract unwanted attention. Within minutes of deploying an unsecured Squid proxy, malicious actors can discover and abuse it for scanning, attacks, or hiding their origin. Here’s how to spot the warning signs and lock down your proxy. Symptoms of Proxy Abuse 1. Proxy Stops Working The most obvious symptom is…

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Benchmarking reCAPTCHA v3 Solver Services: Speed vs Quality Analysis

When implementing automated systems that need to solve reCAPTCHA v3 challenges, choosing the right solver service can significantly impact both your success rate and operational costs. We conducted a comprehensive benchmark test of five popular reCAPTCHA v3 solving services to compare their performance in terms of both speed and quality scores. The Results We tested five major captcha solving…

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Migrating Google Cloud Run to Scaleway: Bringing Your Cloud Infrastructure Back to Europe

Introduction: Why European Cloud Sovereignty Matters Now More Than Ever In an era of increasing geopolitical tensions, data sovereignty concerns, and evolving international relations, European companies are reconsidering their dependence on US-based cloud providers. The EU’s growing emphasis on digital sovereignty, combined with uncertainties around US data access laws like the CLOUD Act and…

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Google Calendar Privacy Proxy

https://github.com/infiniteloopltd/Google-Calendar-Redactor-Proxy/ A lightweight Google Cloud Run service that creates privacy-protected calendar feeds from Google Calendar. Share your availability with colleagues without exposing personal appointment details. The Problem You want to share your calendar availability with work colleagues, but: You have multiple calendars (work, personal,…