The beaver is a proud and noble animal
Notes from a bemused canuck
I tend to keep my phone in my back pocket. My ass is highly skilled at doing unwanted things with my phone, even when locked. So far in the last week, it has whatsapped a neighbour from our building chat, downloaded pictures from Facebook and changed my default search engine from Google to ebay search….what’s impressive is that it does this even the screen is off and supposedly locked!
Should you ever get a random, garbled message from me, I swear it’s probably from my ass.
My phone has been iffy for the last few weeks, with random freezes or reboots. Yesterday, I got a notification for an official OTA software update. I hoped that it might fix the situation. I did, but in the most f’you way possible. The update caused the phone to get stuck in a perpetual reboot cycle. The only way out of it was a full, hard, reset.
Now this was something that I’d been thinking of for a while, but still, really bad timing. Although I had a full backup of my phone and most of it was already synced to Google, it’s still annoying as fuck to have to re-download and restore everything. The devil is in the details – how your app screens were setup to the point where muscle memory could open a particular app – which isn’t 100% back to normal.
I have all my music, but all my playlists got borked.
I have all my photos, but the timestamps didn’t restore properly so now they’re all mishmashed.
I have to get a new activation code for my online banking, because Switzerland.
The most annoying thing – one of my go-to stress-reliever/time-waster games got removed from the Google play store!! Happily, Katy still had it on her phone, so with a bit of ingenuity and USB debugging, I was able to extract it from her phone and sideload it on mine. Note to self in case of future need, the magic mantra is this:
Determine the package name of the app, e.g. “com.example.someapp”.
adb shell pm list packages
Get the full path name of the APK file for the desired package.
adb shell pm path com.example.someapp
The output will look something like
package:/data/app/com.example.someapp-2.apk
or
package:/data/app/com.example.someapp-nfFSVxn_CTafgra3Fr_rXQ==/base.apk
Using the full path name from the previous step, pull the APK file from the Android device to the development box.
adb pull /data/app/com.example.someapp-2.apk path/to/desired/destination
Last week, the IT department switched our corporate Adobe Creative Cloud logins over to Active Directory (AD) Single Sign On (SSO). This is managed by an AD group, containing close to 4000 employees worldwide. During the switchover, one account seemed to develop a problem. The IT department opened a service ticket and in a move they’re probably regretting now, added the AD group email alias to the ticket. Every action on the ticket sends an email to 4000 people.
One person had the bright idea to reply-all asking to be removed from the email thread.
Then all hell broke loose.
People started replying-all with “me too” emails, asking to be removed from the list. (As a side note, being removed from the AD group will also immediately remove your access to the Adobe cloud, as you would no longer be in the authorized users list, so no one from IT is going to do this)
Then other people started replying-all, telling people to stop spamming the list with reply-all emails.
This would ebb and flow, until someone saw their mailbox full of spam and send an angry email about it (replying-all), which would kickstart the process all over again.
Then someone created a 2nd mail thread (consciously adding the AD group in CC) to complain about all the spam. This now meant that people were replying-all, complaining about 2 different mail threads and asking to be removed from the distribution list. Some people started commenting on the hilarity of all of this, again, generating more spam and adding more fuel to the fire. Others were writing about how to create automated filtering rules in Outlook.
Then things really got meta, when one person spammed the list with all of the emails that had been sent, as attachments. Remember, this is an email with several dozen attachments, going to 4000 people. I was openly weeping at the absurdity of all of this. It was beautiful.
That poor exchange server.
Now I am sad. It seems that saner minds have prevailed, and the emails have stopped. At last count, there were close to 100 emails send in this little saga. Zone AMS has just started working and AOA is going to sleep, so maybe there will be more fun tomorrow morning. We can only hope….
The oldies called me earlier tonight asking me about a weird email I sent them, asking them to do an urgent Western Union transfer to my friend in Mumbai.
Yeah….
I logged into their email and I was, against my better judgement, impressed.
Their account has to have been compromised, because the scam is using an actual email I wrote to them, and the reply email is rglcote@gmall.com (spot the error). It’s also using the same form of address that I use.
I changed their password, flushed all active sessions, and did a quick scan of settings and sent/deleted emails. Nothing obviously wrong, but I’ll be keeping a close eye on things until I can check out their laptop myself.
Here are the two crap emails they received:
From: Richard Cote <rglcotegmall.com>
Sent: 01 December 2022 15:54
To: Mel And Pam
Subject: Re: Your Google Store shipment is hereHi Mel and Pam
My apologies to bother you again.
Actually, a colleague of mine is supporting his wife who is in a bit of a medical mess right now and receiving treatment in Mumbai. They’re experiencing issues to meet up with their deadline and requested me to help them with Western Union Transfer.Please would you be able to settle this on my behalf as it’s a time sensitive matter. I will reimburse you back the equivalent amount. I will forward email trail to you now,
Cheers and thanks,
RichardFrom: Richard Cote <rglcotegmail.com>
Sent: 01 December 2022 13:05
To: Mel And Pam Grogan
Subject: Re: Your Google Store shipment is here<Great, thank you!
On Thu, 1 Dec 2022, 14:00 Mel And Pam Grogan, wrote:
Yes and we have put it with the other envelope, so we can bring them with us xxFrom: Richard Cote <rglcotegmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, December 1, 2022 12:37:53 PM
To: ICE – Mel and Pam
Subject: Fwd: Your Google Store shipment is hereHi Mel and Pam
Did you get a parcel for me today?
Cheers and thanks,
Richard
And here’s the sob story between myself and my friends Brenton and Sandra:
Sent: Thursday, December 1, 2022, at 2:49 PM
From: “Richard Cote”
To: “Brenton Cobb”
Subject: Re: Hi RichardBrenton,
I can send by transfer to your account and not Western Union. I will check and get back to you soon if I can make other arrangement.
Sending my love to you both.
Cheers and thanks,
RichardOn Thursday, December 1, 2022, at 04:52:53 PM PST, Brenton Cobb wrote:
Richard,
Thank you for getting back to me and thanks for your concern on this matter.
I need it ASAP, the surgery is scheduled for Monday.Please send it to my Name and present location via Western Union transfer.
My details are:
Name: Brenton Cobb
Address: No. 15, Mansarovar Building, 24, S. N. Road, Andheri (East), Mumbai 400069, Maharashtra, IndiaPlease send me the necessary details on the receipt including the details you use in sending it, it’s important.
Kindly let me know how much I will receive here in rupees.Looking forward to your reply.
Thanks BrentonSent: Thursday, December 1, 2022 at 1:49 PM
From: “Richard Cote”
To: “Brenton Cobb”
Subject: Re: Hi RichardBrenton,
When do you need it and how can I get the funds to you?Cheers and thanks,
RichardOn Thursday, December 1, 2022 at 03:52:53 PM PST, Brenton Cobb wrote:
Richard,
Thank you for getting back to me.
Please I wanted to ask if you could help me with a loan of $1,500. I will make arrangement to refund you when we return. Could you please let me know just so I can advise on what to do to help.
Please forgive me for the short notice and I hope you can understand I will like to keep this between us, which is why I have asked via Email for your record.
Looking forward to your reply.
Thanks Brenton
Sent: Monday, November 28, 2022 at 8:44 PM
From: “Richard Cote”
To: “Brenton Cobb”
Subject: Re: Hi RichardBrenton,
Sending my love to you both. You are in good hands and I wish quick recovery.Please let me know if you need my help in anyway.
Cheers and thanks,
RichardOn Monday, November 28, 2022 at 05:28:14 PM PST, Brenton Cobb wrote:
Good Evening Richard,
Hope you’re well. I and Sandra are fine. We arrived this morning in Mumbai and Sandra is trying to relax as she did few test and scan.
She’s dealing with shingles, and have pain. Scrambling to get her potassium levels up before her scheduled surgery for Monday.
I’m experiencing issues with our account from here while I was trying to pay for deposit. It should be alright by midnite I guess.
Thanks Brenton
It happens more frequently than I’d like it to. I felt my phone being unusually warm in my back pocket on the walk home. I had my hands full of shopping bags, so I didn’t really want to stop and check. I probably should have.
When I finally had a chance to properly look, even though I would have sworn my phone was locked when I put it away when getting off the train, my ass had managed to navigate deep into my SIM network settings, open two YouTube videos, seven help/info tabs from my password manager app, turned on my WiFi and turned my location settings off, and had a Guardian story on voice-read. I’m kinda impressed and scared, at the same time.
Ben inadvertently clicked to install a security update no his macbook – which turned out to be a full Big Sur upgrade. Even though it can, theoretically run it, in practice he keeps the HDD so full of crap that there isn’t any room to update properly and then everything falls over. I’ve already had to do one full reinstall, and even though I was kinda-sorta more clued in to what I needed to do, the damn thing fought me all along the way. I ended up staying up until 1am this morning, trying to get it fixed. Booting from USB barfed just near the end because of corrupted media. Recovery-over-the-internet gave an alphabet soup of error codes. I managed to recover an old TimeMachine backup from my old mac – but then realized that I didn’t remember my account password.
I started again this morning with a clearer head. I managed to download Catalina and create new boot media during the night last night. This morning, I tried to force reinstall, and that sort of worked, except it upgraded the version I couldn’t log into. I nuked that installation and then started the installation from USB.
IT. TOOK. FOREVER.
The time estimation is a joke.
It stayed at “3 minutes remaining” for just under an hour.
And then just like that, it started to do something again. Ben’s screen is a toxic waste dump.
And again, it got stuck at “3 minutes remaining” for about 30-40 minutes again.
And huzzah, I got it working. The 1st thing I did was to take a full TimeMachine backup so that if/when he borks it again, I have a stable restore point – because if I have to go through this shit again, the macbook will take a flying leap out the patio door.
Original unmarked template here:
With all the meetings I’m in remotely these days, I take a lot of handwritten notes and I go over them a posteriori to make sense of everything I capture.
Except in cases like this, where even I couldn’t make sense of my own chicken scratchings.
Incredibly, Katy is fluent in gibberish and deciphered enough of it so that I could remember that I wrote “send positive aspects of tool”.
Well fuck.
I’m one fell swoop, I managed to delete 1.7TB of data from my media streaming PC. I was trying to do something that would save me a few MB, if that, and fix a minor source of irritation. It ended up biting me quite stupendously in the ass.
Note to future self. When using Linux 1-liners,please be wary of positional arguments and always RTFM!
find /multimedia -name *.txt -delete
: removes all text files found under path /multimedia
find -delete /multimedia -name *.txt
: removes 1.7 TB of data
From the find(1) man:
Warnings: Don’t forget that the find command line is evaluated as an expression, so putting -delete first will make find try to delete everything below the starting points you specified.
And then you cry.
But what about your backup, you ask? Well, I do have one, but it’s 6-month out of date, which is not a major thing, and it’s also currently in a location that is difficult to access. Alternative measures are being taken to restore the data.
It’s not a critical loss. I’ll get most, if not all, the data back. Its just incredibly frustrating and involved a serious sphincter-clench, followed by an Oh-shit-I’m-stupid moment I could have done without.
This is me. If I ever lose my phone, I’m screwed.
This is also me. I send myself emails all the time (though I don’t mark them as spam).
