Adventures in Craigslist

29. October 2011 · Write a comment · Categories: Apple, Hardware, Non-Tech, Rants · Tags: , ,

Recently, after a friend of mine showed off his nice new HP Touchpad (running an early alpha of CyanogenMOD) I decided it was time to make the jump and get a tablet as well. The only problem was, being a broke bloke, it was hard to justify the purchase of one when I really didn’t need it. To solve this dilemma, I decided to sell my laptop, a Late 2009 Unibody Macbook (the 6,1 model) and purchase an Asus Eee Pad Transformer (and the dock).

After checking with friends (who laughed at the prospect of owning a Mac), and spamming the global distribution list at work (no bites there), I restored to posting ads on Craigslist and Kijiji (the latter of which brought in zero perspective buyers). The Craigslist ad, though, prompted a number of replies.

The problem, however, was out of all of the replies I received, only four of them were people who were genuinely interested. I won’t post those replies, but instead, the ones that were almost certainly scams.

So a little background information – when I posted the ad, under all of the specs I very clearly wrote “Cash only – must agree to meet me in person, in a public place that we both agree on”. The ensures that not only do I not have to worry about shipping the thing, but it assures me that I won’t get any fraudulent cheques, money orders, etc…. Unfortunately, the people who tend to perpetrate these scams tend to ignore these warns, as outlined below:

This first example was actually “Sarah”‘s second email to me – the first one was a generic “Do you still have the item for sale?” inquiry.

Hello,

Thanks for getting back to me on time,i will like to buy this item and

Am quite comfortable with the condition of the item since i wont be

making any repairs on it,and i will be very more than happy if you can

help me get this item shipped, and am willing to offer $770 to include

the shipping fees through the USPS Express mail service,and i will be

paying you through my PayPal account so send me your PayPal email

address so i can make instant payment get back to me

…….ASAP….Thanks and GOD bless

Note the “GOD bless” at the bottom – I would imagine they were thinking “If I put that in, they’ll think I’m a god-fearing Christian and they’ll be sure to make the deal!”.

  1. So what was wrong with this offer? Several things:
  2. They ignored my Cash Only – Local Only warning. Never a good sign when they don’t even say “Hey, could you make an exception?”
  3. The sentence structure/grammar are…well…horrible and far too formal. Definitely someone trying to sound on the up-and-up a little too hard.
  4. Offering to pay more than the listed price. I listed the laptop for less than that. All four of the legit, local enquiries first offered less (in one case, far less) than my asking price. By offering to pay more, the scammer is hoping that you’ll be greedy and jump on the offer.

So why wouldn’t I try, take the money, and send it anyway? Well, the problem is that most of these involve stolen Paypal accounts. The person will get the account, not use it, and wait for something like this to come along (a relatively high-value item). They’ll then use that account to pay for it take the item, which they’ll then sell themselves. Meanwhile, the rightful owner of the Paypal account discovers the new unauthorized charge and files a dispute with Paypal. The money gets pulled from my account, and now I’m short both the money and the laptop. Pretty sneaky.

Another “Sarah” (which seems to be a commonly used name for the scammers) contacted me, asking a few more questions (“Do you still have the box”, and “What condition is it in”), before inevitably asking for my Paypal details to send the Payment. I politely replied that as the ad stated, I would only deal in cash and locally because of the chance of a stolen account being used. To this, she replied (in full):

my account is not stolen

Really? Well in that case, sure! I mean, I wasn’t positive, but you’ve managed to convince me!…Not.

Another one (again, the second email after the first “Is it available, what condition, etc…”):

Hello, thanks for your reply. I’m glad you still have the item for sale. Your asking price sounds OK to me. Payment will be make via money order with the shipping fee included. Payment will be deliver to you within 3 to 5 working days. Then pick up will commence immediate by my shipping agent once you have clear the payment in your bank. I will add extra 50$ to your last asking price if you agree to sell this item and hold it for me till you receive my payment. Kindly fill the below data for payment to be mail out tomorrow morning.

FULL NAME :
PHYSICAL ADDRESS :
CITY, PROVINCE :
ZIP/POSTAL CODE :
PHONE/MOBILE NUMBER :
ITEM AGREED PRICE :

I hope to hearing from you soon with the payment information in order to complete the sales asap. Thanks.

Regards,
Edward Parker.

Nope. Sorry.

There were a bunch more, but all were basically the same. In each instance, my typical reply is this:

As you appear to be illiterate, I well try to phrase my payment requirements in a simpler manner – a haiku:

Cash. Only. I mean it.
Must. Meet. In. Person. Okay?
No Exceptions. Thanks.

So that’s about it. I ended up getting a little less than I asked for it, and now I’m the proud owner of an Asus Eee Pad Transformer. Hopefully it’ll be a long time before I decide to sell anything online again.

Apple Offers Re-Download Feature, But Only to Americans

08. June 2011 · Write a comment · Categories: "It's a Feature", Apple, Rants · Tags: , , , ,

Being a Canadian citizen, I’m used to getting the short end of the stick when it comes to companies holding give-aways and the like. Apple is, of course, no exception.

I was excited to hear that, starting with iTunes 10.3.1, Apple would be allowing customers to download music that they had perviously purchased (before, if you bought a track/album and lost it, you would have to buy it again). In case it changes, the feature is described as:

Now you can download music you’ve previously purchased to all your devices. When you buy music from iTunes, iCloud stores your purchase history. So you can see the music you’ve bought — no matter which device you bought it on. You can access your purchase history from the iTunes Store on your Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. And since you already own that music, you can tap to download your songs or albums to any of your devices.1

Note the (1) footnote indicator. That footnote reads as follows:

Available in beta now in the U.S. only and requires iOS 4.3.3 on iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 (GSM model), iPod touch (3rd and 4th generation), iPad, or iPad 2, or a Mac or PC with iTunes 10.3. Previous purchases may be unavailable if they are no longer in the iTunes Store.

Emphasis mine. With any luck, once “iCloud” leaves “beta” (why are you push Beta software through the official update channel, Apple? Google should sue.) the functionality will be expanded to beyond the U.S. and let the rest of us poor suckers get back our copies of ‘Plastic Beach – Deluxe Edition’.

Apple Needs to Attend (to) Bootcamp

15. September 2010 · Write a comment · Categories: Apple, Hardware, Software, Windows · Tags: , ,

My primary workstation at work is an Apple iMac 9,1 (in Apple terms, an ‘early-2009′ model), and spends 99% of its uptime running Windows 7 x64 (which actually isn’t supported on this model – you need to manually run the x64 Bootcamp .msi on the disk to install, as the setup.exe reports that 64-bit Windows isn’t supported).

During the installation of Bootcamp, though I noticed something — Apple although Apple appears to check which model of computer you’re using for compatibility purposes, it doesn’t do the same when determining which drivers to install. As such, the installation take approximately eight-billion times longer to complete than it should (sorry, I’m no good with numbers), and leaves Programs and Features looking like this:

Apple's Leftovers

I mean, really Apple? Is it really that hard to add a simple WMI call (WMIC BIOS Get SMBIOSBIOSVersion, perhaps?) and compare it to a simple CSV-file and only install the drivers required for that system?

It’s a good thing they stopped making the I’m a Mac commercials, or Justin Long would need to put on fifty pounds to account for Apple’s bloat.

Non-Tech: Unintentional Humour from Valve

14. June 2010 · 1 comment · Categories: Apple, Gaming, Microsoft, Non-Tech, OS X, Windows · Tags: , , , , ,

When Valve was first leaking details about Steam for Mac, they released a series of images parodying ‘classic’ Apple ads. This was one:

Turrets

I get what they’re trying to say – the PC is boxy and old-fashioned while the Mac is shiny and new. The unintentional humour is that while the Portal turret does it’s job adequately in its game, it’s easily defeated. The PC (or Team Fortress 2 turret) on the other hand starts out small and meek, but can be easily upgraded in to a massive powerhouse. That said, which would you rather have? Effective but locked down, or less-than-pretty but easily customizable?

Of course, I could just be reading too much in to things again.

After 5000 Tweets: A Review/HowTo of Twitter

11. June 2010 · 1 comment · Categories: Android, Apple, howto, Rants, Twitter · Tags: , , , ,

I recently hit the 5,000 tweet mark on Twitter, and figured that it’s as good a time as any to write something about my experience on the abbreviated social networking site. It also seems appropriate as I permanently deleted my Facebook account (well, I’m in the process, anyway).

Click ‘Continue Reading’ below for the wall-of-text review.

More »

Rogers Wireless Hijacks Wildcard DNS Records

07. June 2010 · 2 comments · Categories: "It's a Feature", Android, Apple, Hack, howto, iPhone, Linux, Rants · Tags: , , , , , ,

Rogers LogoAlthough I can’t confirm when this happened (it may have happened a while ago and I just never noticed), I was browsing the internet last night on my Google Nexus One and noticed that, when I mistyped http://imdb.com, I was redirected to http://www20.search.rogers.com (which doesn’t work outside of Rogers’ network) instead of receiving a normal Not Found error. This all smacks of the infamous VeriSign Site Finder fiasco.

I’m no fan of browser redirects in any form, and I’m even less of a fan of Yahoo which Rogers partners with to, among other things, provide results on their hijacked landing page. But what can you do? It’s their service, and there’s no opt-out link on the page.

Well, the answer is to manually opt-out. Unfortunately, you need to have a rooted/jail-broken phone to do this. As stated above, I have a Google Nexus One which runs CyanogenMod, but this should work with any other rooted Android phone and even jail-broken iPhones (although the paths are different — you’ll need to alter them as applicable).

To manually opt-out, do the following (assumes Android phone):

  1. Open a shell on your phone. You can use ConnectBot, Terminal Emulator, or adb shell.
  2. Assume root (su command).
  3. Remount the system partition in to read/write mode —  mount -o rw,remount /system
  4. Browse to /system/etc.
  5. Use your favourite text editor to open hosts.
  6. Add the following to the bottom of the hosts file — 127.0.0.1 www20.search.rogers.com
  7. Save and quit!

You’re done! You’ve just manually opt’ed-out of Rogers Wildcard DNS hijack. Now you’ll just get the normal ‘Not Found’ errors, as when Rogers see that the domain you’ve entered doesn’t exist and tried to redirect you to their search page, your phone will point that domain to itself and fail as it isn’t running a webserver.

TL;DR Version: To prevent getting directed to Rogers’ Search Page when you mistype an address, edit your hosts file to point www20.search.rogers.com to the 127.0.0.1 loopback address.

Update (05/01/2011): You can now officially opt-out using this link: http://searchassist.teoma.com/templates/rogers/optout

Weighing in on the iPad

27. January 2010 · Write a comment · Categories: Apple · Tags: ,

This is a first here, really. I’m not really an Apple guy (I used to have an iPhone, and I use an iMac at work that runs Windows most of the time), and I rarely comment on products that I don’t own, but really, this is just dying for picking apart.

Steve Jobs has reportedly been quoted to say, “This [the iPad] will be the most important thing I’ve ever done” – I really hope that this is just a misquote, or wrongfully attributed. Why? Well, let’s start with what we now know.

–How it looks. If you haven’t seen it, it looks basically like a huge iPod Touch with a massive bezel.

–What it runs. Apparently Apple has licensed the rights to make another ARM processor, dubbing it the “Apple A4“. Do we really need another ARM processor varient? What’s wrong with the Snapdragon?

–What it doesn’t do. Flash. Yes, really. I don’t particularly like Flash, but if they’re touting it to be ‘better than a laptop’, why are they blocking access to a large chunk of the content that’s out there?

–What it doesn’t change. It apparently going to run the iPhone OS (speculated at version 4), so you’re still locked in to the App Store and Apple’s draconian approval process. I wonder how long it will take before it’s jailbroken?

–What it lacks. Supposedly, it won’t come with 3G. Reports say that you’ll be able to tether it with a mobile device (although I wouldn’t be surprised if they only let you tether it with an iPhone), but really, if they’re saying people should use this instead of an e-book reader, why leave that out? And on the subject of e-books, who really wants to ready a 1000+ page book on an LCD screen, when you can get a Kindle 2 with an easy-on-the-eyes e-ink screen instead?

–What they screwed up on. Really, why name it the iPad? I see where they might want to leverage the branding from the iPod, but all that makes me think of is another type of product.

All and all, I think that a lot of people who bought in to the hype of this are probably pretty disappointed. The iPad? What a joke.

Update: Unconfirmed tweets are saying that it will be priced at $499, or $629 with 3G.

Update #2: Apparently you’ll be able to use connect a standard keyboard to the iPad as well. So why bother making it a tablet at all? Why not just give it a slide-out keyboard and be done with it?

Sony and Apple Will Be the Death of Me

20. October 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Apple, howto, OS X, Rants, Troubleshooting · Tags: , , ,

Argh. One of my recent tasks at work has been taking video recorded on a Sony Handycam HDR-XR200V (and HD Digital Video camera) and making the footage web-ready. Normally, the camera is a joy to work with. It’s easy to get the recordings off of it, and the software provided with it converts it in to WMV and MPEG2 quite easily. In terms of web-readiness, though….

Normally we just convert everything to WMV format, as the video is only used in-house for a short period of time and then deleted. Files are stored on our local server, so size isn’t really an issue. In this case, though, I need to put the final versions up our website so a few external people can access and download the clips. That means that 2GB+ files are completely impractical.

Digging around, I found that we had a Quicktime 7 Pro license, so I thought my problems were solved. Take the raw .MTS files, convert them to MPEG format using Sony’s utility, then use Quicktime to export them to smaller, more web-ready MP4 format. But do things ever really work out that easily?

The first problem is that although Quicktime will play .MPG files, it doesn’t have a built-in MPEG2 codec, which is the codec the Sony utility uses. Quicktime doesn’t support WMV at all. If you want support for MPEG2, you need to buy the codec from Apple. That wouldn’t be so bad (it’s less than $30 CAD), however it doesn’t recognize the audio track in the Sony-converted files. Crap.

After a few hours of near-hopeless searching through page after page of shareware and crap-ware, I finally found a solution. Take the Sony-converted MPEG2 files and convert them to .MOV format using MediaCoder, a truly free audio/video conversion suite (with a 64-bit Windows version). From there, I booted into OS X and fired them in to iMove to quickly splice a few segments together, and iMove spat out the .M4V files I needed. After that, it was a simple matter of using Quicktime Pro to make a few different versions of .MP4 files in varying levels of quality.

The system works, however it relies a lot on Apple products (not ideal if you don’t have a license, a Mac, or just hate Apple products), and takes a lot of time. The result is that my bacon has been saved, and I’ll be able to get the web-ready videos out to those who need them on time.

iPhone OS 3.1.2 and Blackra1n

13. October 2009 · 1 comment · Categories: Apple, howto, iPhone, Troubleshooting · Tags: , ,

So the other week, Apple released the latest version of the firmware for the iPhone, OS 3.1.2. Not really a lot in the way of fixes:

  • Resolves sporadic issue that may cause iPhone to not wake from sleep
  • Resolves intermittent issue that may interrupt cellular network services until restart
  • Fixes bug that could cause occasional crash during video streaming

However, always the optimist and hoping that maybe this update would fix the ever-present crashing Mobile Safari, and not needing to worry about needing to unlock (ever), I updated my 3G as soon as a jailbreak was available.

The update itself went smoothly, or rather, the restore did. Your best bet, with any new release of the iPhone, is to do a full Restore, and never an upgrade. This will help with performance and battery life, whereas you’re likely to have problems with an upgrade.

As soon as the Restore was finished, and after iTunes happily activated my phone, I downloaded Blackra1n, a jailbreak app by Geohot. The instructions are simple:

  1. Upgrade your phone to 3.1.2 – Note: THIS WILL UPGRADE YOUR BASEBAND! As such, you loose, possibly permanently, the ability to use Ultrasn0w, the Carrier Unlock.
  2. Run Blackra1n.
  3. Connect your iPhone
  4. Click “Make it ra1n”.

Simple, right? Well, sort of.

After you click “Make it ra1n”, your phone restarts in Recovery Mode (not DFU mode!) and you should see a picture of Geohot. However, if you have an iPhone 3G, that isn’t likely to happen. Instead, you’ll most likely see the iPhone Recovery Mode logo and Blackra1n stuck on the “Running” message. If you disconnect you’re iPhone Blackra1n will say it completed successfully, however the phone will remain in Recovery Mode. To exit, simply hold Power+Home until the screen goes black, then turn it back on.

If you check the log file Blackra1n creates in the same folder it’s run from, you’ll notice lines like:

ERROR: usb open failed while sending command

ERROR: usb open failed while sending payload

This means that no, you’re phone isn’t jailbroken. Fortunately, it’s not bricked – just reboot it and all will be well.

So, how do you fix this problem? Unfortunately you don’t. There are sites that tell you to put Blackra1n in the root of the C drive, and others that remind you to Run as Administrator, and some that say to use XP vs. Windows 7, or the other way around. The short of it is, though, it’s all crap.

I eventually got Blackra1n to work simply by running it over-and-over.

  1. Try it.
  2. It fails.
  3. Reboot phone in to normal mode (hold Power+Home until screen goes black, then turn back on normally)
  4. Repeat.

After around the 20th try, it finally completed and jailbroke the phone. Lesson learned? When all else fails, keep trying.

Meta: Radio Silence

12. October 2009 · 2 comments · Categories: Apple, iPhone, Meta, Non-Tech, Tomfoolery · Tags: , , , ,

It’s been quiet here for the last week or so, for a few reasons:

  1. Halo 3: ODST came out a few weeks ago, and as an avid Halo fan (single-player, as I was never really in to multi-player) I’ve been working on beating the game in all difficulty modes. I recently just finished it in Heroic, and now I’m about half done Legendary. Proof? Right here (look under the Recent Games section).
  2. A conference! Last week, the company I work for hosted a conference that I provided technical support for (read: queuing up Power Point presentations and making sure the PA system worked). In other words, four 12+ hour days, followed by two days of catching up on my usual work.
  3. Left 4 Dead. Valve Software had a sale through Steam were you could grab Left 4 Dead for $15 USD, which sure beat the $45 CAD that the local Electronics Boutique wanted. I’ve been hammering away at that as well.
  4. Being social! I’ve actually been out with friends  a few times in the last few days, which has slightly limited the amount of time I’ve put in to screwing with random shit on the computer.

However, I’ll have a post up at some point later tonight with a note about Apple’s latest update to the iPhone OS, 3.1.2, and the jailbreak for it released by Geohot.

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