Important Reminder:

Dear amanda chemist,

Incase you haven’t received our previous emails, we wanted to reming you that we would like to publish your essay on our website. By having your essay published, you will have a personal page on CollegeInquirer.com with your name, your full essay, and a line at the top of the page that says “This essay was selected for publication by the Chief Editor of The College Inquirer.”
(Your page will look like this: www.collegeinquirer.com/YourNameHere).

We’ve already published several of our selected essays, and we can’t wait to publish yours! Here are a few links you can look at to see exactly what your essay will look like once published:

- http://www.collegeinquirer.com/barryhale
- http://www.collegeinquirer.com/chaylaervin

By accepting this invitation to have your essay published, you join an exclusive group of students whose written works have been published on the College Inquirer. You can use this to your advantage in college applications, scholarship applications, job resumes, etc. Any time you need to “get ahead” of your competition, you can simply include your link and show them that you have a published, writeen essay on a major editorial website. This will increase your chances of receiving scholarships or getting accepted to schools you may want to attend!

To have your essay published, there is a $15 administrative fee that is intended to cover the expenses of editing, publishing, and hosting your essay on our website. Whenever you are ready to publish your essay, just click the link below to start the process:

Click Here To Pay The $15 Administrative Fee ->

Thanks again, and if you have any questions, please feel free to email us at help@collegeinquirer-usadmin.com

Sincerely,
The College Inquirer Editorial Staff

I initially ignored this, as it is a well-known scam. However, later that day I received  a second email from the same site:

To all applicants for the College Inquirer $750 Scholarship Contest whose essays have been selected for publication:

Good evening. We have received several complaints and confused emails throughout the day from students who feel that they may be getting “scammed”. We wanted to make an important clarification about our offer to publish your essay.

1) FAQ #1: “Did you select a winner, and am I the winner?”

The short answer is: NO. We did not state in any way, shape or form that we had selected a winner for our scholarship, nor did we lead anyone to believe that it meant you were a winner if we were offering to publish your scholarship. We made it very clear on our website and in all of our email communications that the scholarship deadline is August 14th, 2011. At that time, a winner will be selected. No one has won the scholarship or has been told they won the scholarship yet. So for all of you who are complaining or posting in online-blogs that you were told you were a scholarship winner, you are lying, and we respectfully ask you to stop attempting to deceive others and slander our organization.

See liink2) FAQ #2: “I thought I was special because they wanted to publish my essay but everyone is getting this email!”

The short answer is: You are special. And no, we did NOT send everyone this email offering to publish their essay. You and several hundred other students have been selected to have your essay published, but it is 100% your choice and you are not required to do so. We have received over 6,000 applications for this scholarship. Only a select number of you wrote essays that were good enough to be published. You were one of them.

3) FAQ #3: “They are making me pay $15 and ripping me off so this is a scam!!”

The short answer is: No we are not “making” you do anything. Because we know the value of having your work published on a major editorial website, we are offering to publish your essay. If you choose to publish your essay, it will be to your advantage in many different areas. We are just one of thousands of companies who publish students essays in our major journal for a small fee. It is very simple: If you would like us to publish your essay, we will do so for a $15 administrative fee to cover our operating expenses. If you do not want to have your essay published, you may ignore the offer, and go on with your business. When you see an advertisement on TV for Health Insurance, do you consider it a scam simply because they are advertising their service (insurance) and telling you the price? Then why would you consider this a scam simply because we are advertising our service (essay publication) and telling you the price? Simply put, that is pure nonsense.

No one is required to pay the admin fee to publish their essay. That is your choice, because you have the ability to make your own decision. We are not coersing or twisting your arm into anything. The fewer essays that are published, the better it is for the people who have theirs published. We would PREFER to only publish a few of the essays, and the administrative fee is just that: a fee to cover the expenses of publication. Nothing more, nothing less.

We trust now that as educated and intelligent students, you are able to understand the simple principles of business, and will cease the practice of foolishly calling this a “scam”.

Respectfully yours,

Olivia Martin
——————-
President & CEO
The College Inquirer

You are receiving this email because you applied for The College Inquirer “CollegeTalk” Scholarship. To unsubscribe at any time, simply follow the “Unsubscribe” link in this email.

The College Inquirer

6652 Overland Drive

Colorado Springs, CO 80919

This blatant and rude attempt at convincing  marks that this website is indeed legitimate, persuaded me to do some more digging.

Looking more closely at the second email comments, the scammer initially states that he has never lead anyone to believe that they were the winner (which looking at their site, seems to be correct). He, then attempts to clarify that not everyone is receiving this email and  that *you* are special, one of only hundreds. At $15 per essay (admin costs, you know) and assuming a worst-case of only 100 essays, he will receive $1500 — double the value of the scholarship.

I am not sure what the admin fees pay for. The site is hosted for free on WordPress and a lack of editing (and quality) is clear in the essays posted (See sample here, sorry Shakia).

He then posts that this is NOT a scam, but in fact “a major editorial website”. I have no record of this site existing before the 24th of March, 2011.  How he was able to establish a major editorial website in two months, is a little stretch. In today’s world of blogs, Facebook and other social networking means, my dog, who likes to climb out of moving vehicles, can be published online. So make sure that “major editorial websites” are reputable, have a long and good standing in the media, have actual content, hosted on their own infrastructure, and do not use free email services like gmail. (You can also check out this blog, which talks about the collegeinquirer scam as well)

Another problem about the email: Legitimate businesses never need to convince customers/users that they are indeed legitimate. As soon as one writes “this is not a scam”,  a little warning signal should flash in the back of your head. When does Amazon, eBay, your online banking service ever tell you “this offer/service is not a scam”? Never.

Also, the attitude towards his potential marks, is particularly rude, not a strategy any legitimate business normally uses. Accusing your customer of being ignorant or in the wrong is never a good business model. When a person get offended by somone’s accusation, normally it’s because they (the accuser)  are telling the truth.

With some more research, we came across another one of his websites,  and then a couple more. You can see how they are related on the diagram below.

I do not want to give away details of the scammer, but it was clear to me that he made a lot of obvious mistakes protecting his own privacy. He also seemed confused as the email indicates a Colorado headquarters whereas the site lists the headquarters in Texas.

Addresses, phone numbers and other personal data are easy enough to obtain on the internet. If you are a scammer, you should be a little more conscientious of this fact. (That bike for sale did seem a little pricey).

So if someone on the internet is ever asking you for personal information or money, check around and see if it is for real.

And to all those who don’t know their own email address (especially if you think it is mine), please stop falling for these scams! Even in today’s modern world,  that old saying still applies  ‘if it seems like it’s too good to be true, it probably is’.

The link leads here:

http://nycompsonline.com/_vti_logs/_vti_logs/onlineest/onlineest/bankofamerica/onlinebankingsitekey/

which lead me to this search, which reveals all sites compromised by this toolkit:

http://www.google.ca/search?q=%22Please+complete+all+of+the+information%22+%22(it+is+the+last+3+or+4+digits+AFTER+the+credit+card+number+in+the+signature+area+of+the+card+)%22&hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&hs=i43&filter=0

Whats wrong here

AAA
BBB
CCC
DDD
EEE
FFF
GGG
HHH
III
JJJ
KKK
LLL
MMM
NNN
OOO
PPP
QQQ
RRR
SSS
TTT
UUU
VVV
WWW
XXX
YYY
ZZZ

Did you know that 80% of UCSD students could not find the error above? Repost this with the title “what’s wrong here”, and when you click “post “, the answer will be really obvious.

Letters are represented by different numbers in a computer;  Not normal numbers but hexadecimal representation. The letters start with A being represented by 65 in decimal, or 41 in hex. Knowing this, we know that if there is any trickery such as using the number zero for the letter O, or using \ / instead of the letter V, it will come up in the hex dump. Any nonsequential number signifies a deviation from the pattern, and the trick.The following is the AAA->ZZZ part of the hex dump. Note the following:

• 0a is the newline character
• When reading, remember to read from right to left for each chunk below. If you wanted the combination ABCD, you would read it BA DC
• Since this is hex, 49 is not followed by 50, but rather 4a (then 4b, 4c, up to 4f, then 50). Use the google calculator above if you need help

0000010 0a0a 4141 0a41 4242 0a42 4343 0a43 4444
0000020 0a44 4545 0a45 4646 0a46 4747 0a47 4848
0000030 0a48 4949 0a49 4a4a 0a4a 4b4b 0a4b 4c4c
0000040 0a4c 4d4d 0a4d 4e4e 0a4e 4f4f 0a4f 5050
0000050 0a50 5151 0a51 5252 0a52 5353 0a53 5454
0000060 0a54 5555 0a55 5656 0a56 5757 0a57 5858
0000070 0a58 5959 0a59 5a5a 0a5a

The above has been clipped from the entire message. Here we can see without a doubt, that the letters are sequential right from 41 to 5a, or A to Z with no surprises such as \/ (5c 2f) instead of V.

Also note, the letter L in lower case is 6c. 6c does not appear where one would expect to see i, which is 49.

Other possibilities include finding things such as KKK. While the KKK is wrong, I don’t think this is the point of this exercise.

Please can we put the constant questions to rest?

For further information, have a look at this hex / character table.

openssl s_client -connect www.pcfinancial.ca:443 -state

This command takes place of telnet “www.google.ca 80″ in that openssl negotiates all the key junk for you, and allow you to hack test https webservers.

Step 1: Record the remote codes from the Extremeview. This proved to be the most difficult step, since I don’t normally use a remote with my myth machines. Configuring LIRC to use any of my hardware was a royal pain. Finally the codes have been recorded, and are available here

# Please make this file available to others
# by sending it to <lirc@bartelmus.de>
#
# this config file was automatically generated
# using lirc-0.8.2(default) on Sun Aug 26 16:14:43 2007
#
# contributed by Allen Chemist
#
# brand: ExtremeView xv3300 Satellite Receiver
# model no. of remote control: One with four coloured buttons below the up,down,left,right,ok area.
# devices being controlled by this remote: Satellite STB
#

begin remote

name extreme2
bits 16
flags SPACE_ENC|CONST_LENGTH
eps 30
aeps 100

header 8967 4466
one 512 1726
zero 512 593
ptrail 512
repeat 8969 2226
pre_data_bits 16
pre_data 0x807F
gap 107644
toggle_bit_mask 0×0

begin codes
MUTE 0xEA15
POWER 0xFA05
TV_RADIO 0xF807
CC 0x10EF
SAT_LIST 0xE817
TV_SAT 0xDA25
FAV 0×9867
CH_LIST 0×6897
MENU 0x38C7
GUIDE 0x58A7
INFO 0x28D7
EXIT 0x52AD
CH_UP 0x18E7
VOL_DN 0x827D
OK 0xA25D
VOL_UP 0x926D
CH_DN 0x629D
PAUSE 0x906F
ZOOM 0xB04F
AUDIO 0x00FF
SLEEP 0x30CF
1 0x6A95
2 0x5AA5
3 0x7A85
4 0xAA55
5 0x9A65
6 0xBA45
7 0x2AD5
8 0x1AE5
9 0x3AC5
0 0xD827
FIND 0xB847
TIMER 0x40BF
MOSAIC 0xA857
RECALL 0x42BD
CH_3_4 0x807F
SIGNAL 0×7887
end codes
end remote

Once this was recorded, I setup lirc to use lirc_serial and the irblaster (Yes this would have been easy to build, but given my history with LIRC I wanted something I knew would work). I put the above file in /etc/lirc/lircd.conf. You can test by issuing the command
irsend SEND_ONCE extreme2 POWER
which should cycle the power on the set top box.

Step 2 was to setup the channel changer shell script, so mythtv could say “Change to channel 321″, then the script splits the 321 into 3-2-1 and blinks the codes out. The script is below:

#!/bin/sh
REMOTE_NAME=extreme2
for digit in $(echo $1 | sed -e ‘s/./& /g’); do
/usr/bin/irsend SEND_ONCE $REMOTE_NAME $digit
sleep 0.6 # note, you may have to tweak this if it misses digits
done

/usr/bin/irsend SEND_ONCE $REMOTE_NAME OK
/usr/bin/irsend SEND_ONCE $REMOTE_NAME EXIT

The above script was copied from the internet, but I can’t locate the original author. I also added an “OK” and “Exit” to the end of the script, to force it to change channels faster, and get rid of the OSD so you don’t see it at the beginning of the recording.

I put this in /usr/bin/change_channel.sh.

Step 3: update my lineups at schedulesdirect. This will take a long time, since I don’t get all dish network channels, and picking and choosing what I receive from the 100s of channels dish offers.

Step 4: Configure mythtv to switch inputs. This was done inside mythtv-setup. Since I will be using my Hauppauge 350 capture card, this was already setup and recording cable tv. I plugged the satellite into the s-video input, then added the Satellite into ‘Video Sources’ screen using DataDirect. Under Input Connections, I linked S-Video with the Satellite defined in the Video Sources. On this screen I also specified the change_channel.sh script from above, as the external channel change command. Since I am using s-video, I don’t have to define a “Preset Tuner to Channel”, this is used if you needed to watch satellite on “channel 3″, using the TV Tuner input. During heavy rain, because I am so far north and have such a small dish, the satellite loses signal. I set the “Input Priority” on this screen to a negative number, then if there is a conflict between something on cable and something on satellite, Myth will choose cable (since it is more reliable).

From here everything worked nicely. Occasionally it tunes to the wrong channel (i.e. misses a digit from the IR blaster), but this is rare. A bit of tweaking on either the delay between digits or the position of the IR LED should fix this problem.

I had to get myself one of these machines! In Germany, they are relatively cheap and the cartridges of CO2 are refillable. This is not the case in Canada. The cartridges are expensive, and each company has their own style of doing cartridges. Clearly this wouldn’t do.

Then Chris found a solution online. Mr. Kinch’s instructions are very detailed, and overall the project looked quite simple to do. My experiences were pretty much the same, but with a few tweaks on the system.

Chris and I quickly headed for Princess Auto to get some parts

• 0-100 PSI Gauge: $2 (to monitor the bottle pressure)
• Valve, T, and various pipe bits: $10
• Quick-release ends: $10 (for the bottle and disconnect)
• Food-grade hose: $10
• Regulator: $50 (+ $35 shipping/duty…thanks UPS)
• CO2 Tank: $40/year on lease
• CO2: $35 / 20lbs (should last a few years, if things don’t leak)

Canada uses the CGA-320 for CO2 containers, which is handy. Regulators are difficult to find, and we had to order ours from the US. We decided on MicroMatic, because they had some of the best prices. Unfortunately they ship with UPS, and once again we had a bad UPS experience with their expensive brokerage fees.

Construction:
First we started with the caps. We knew these were going to be the most difficult part of the build, since it required modification of a pop lid ill-fit for the purpose of having a hole in it.

After drilling out the cap, inserting the nipple and a bolt to hold it tightly, we have a first version of the cap. It still leaks, so a new project will be re-designing the cap. We decided to use re-enforced tubing between the regulator and shutoff valve, and regular tubing between the shutoff valve and the bottle. This way, should something happen with the regulator, the tube after the valve should break first, rather than the bottle. The completed lid assembly can be seen here:

The valve assembly was essentially assembled by us in the store. Once home, we needed to undo each connection, add some Teflon tape, and tighten securely. Teflon tape comes in two types, one for gas and another for anything else. For the purposes of this project, either type will do. Since we have the garden-variety Teflon tape available, it is what we used. Regular Teflon tape shreds as you screw the pipes together, leaving bits of Teflon in the line. In a gas system, this can be problematic if a small chunk of tape gets lodged in an appliance. The final valve assembly can be seen below:

Note the reinforced tubing leading up to the valve. Since this side will always contain pressure, we decided to use reinforced tubing here. Below is the final project, hooked up to the CO2 tank and regulator assembly:

Overall this was a fun project. The instructions from http://www.truetex.com/carbonation.htm were great. When carbonating the water, I use 35PSI and I shake it for 40 seconds with the tap on and 40 seconds with the tap off. This provides for a bit more carbonation in the water when complete.

Still to do:

• Re-design the cap. The current cap leaks a little, and when shaking sometimes water flows back up the fill hose (may become problematic when carbonating apple juice or other sticky substances).
• Build a nice cabinet to hide the CO2 tank and extend the countertop
• Add a Reverse Osmosis system to purify the tap water and remove the odour.

http://www.muzik.ca/gpsdata/parse.php

The XML files were logged by the Sunset GPS Tracker (mentioned previously) running on my Windows Mobile (yuck!…well actually it works quite well) and a Hollux GPSlim bluetooth receiver. While in Germany, I had the receiver on my person very often, and I logged many of the trips I did. The log took a way-point every 5 seconds (so you can calculate how quickly I was going by the difference in the waypoints!). “Parse.php” takes the xml file (actually a .gpx file), and extracts the coordinates and puts them on a google map.

Unfortunately it will crash your browser if you have too many points (~300) on your current viewport. Some of my files have lots of way points (5000+), so you still need to choose which leg of the journey you wish to see (0-300 is the default starting position). On my list of todos is to discard “duplicate” points (that is a point within a short distance from its previous point). Also todo is to be able to name a journey (rather than 2007-05-14_…gpx, name it “Trip to Hann-Munden).

When time permits