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Citicard and Stupidity…

Published at: 08:02 am - Friday February 08 2013

So the other day I got the itch to finally correct some ancient passwords of mine to secure single use passwords. Citicard was among those needing to be updated. I go and set the new password (20 alphanumeric chars) and the page kicks back at me stating my password doesn’t meet the requirements! Needless to say I tried many variants and insuring my password chosen does in fact meet the guidelines before I go digging in the page source javascript. Low and behold I find this in a return value:

passwordPatternValidation(myForm.currentPassword) &&
passwordPatternValidation(myForm.password));

They are CHECKING THE OLD PASSWORD AND THE NEW ONE! So I could do a few things here, I could try to jailbreak the javascript prison since that’s run on the user side, or I could take the time to try and inform them of their error. As should be guessed by now I tried to do the right thing and inform them and get the issue fixed and the solution to them was to delete my entire profile and have me re-register! Shame.

Posted in: News by Shadowmite Comments Off , , , ,

Windows Tablets – Terrible?!

Published at: 01:12 am - Saturday December 22 2012

So I finally picked up a Windows tablet to try one out. I refused to even consider a RT device as what good is a windows computer that can’t run backwards compatible windows applications without source to port to a new cpu!? As a result I got a Acer W510 32gb tablet with Windows 8 full version. I can’t fault the hardware, the tablet is decent and runs quite quickly.

The software however is another story. Yes it’s true, this is a real windows computer that can essentially run any windows app ever. However the tablet functionality is horrid at best. Even with the start menu and windows tablet native apps it’s just a horrible experience compared to any other tablet I’ve ever used. I have to honestly wonder, did Microsoft developers on this project ever actually USE a iPad or Android tablet? The usefulness is just terrible. From buggy and glitchy software scrolling to almost nagging procedures needed to accomplish basic tasks for a tablet this is just less useful as a tablet while being more useful as a notebook. If only it had a keyboard. Essentially I would rate this as a excellent travel computer if you plan to use a dock and keyboard and mouse. If you need a tablet, look elsewhere and you’ll be much happier.

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Buying digital music still is basically not possible…

Published at: 09:05 pm - Wednesday May 09 2012

So before I get started on my rant I’m sure someone will argue “Why not just buy MP3′s?” Honestly, because I CARE about sound quality and I want the lossless music a CD would have.

I’ve been looking for several weeks now to purchase a copy of The Birthday Massacre’s Pins and Needles album. If you add “flac” into the search instead of finding ANY vendor at all willing to sell you a copy of the digital lossless album you find nothing but piracy links… It’s so difficult to actually pay for music in the media formats we want yet the piracy is easy to find… No wonder the music industry is failing as they know it…

Would anyone like to offer to sell FLAC formatted music besides Bandcamp (excellent organization, too bad they don’t have the music I’m after)…

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Rosen Navigation systems

Published at: 05:07 pm - Wednesday July 27 2011

So for the Toyota Highlander I bought a few months back my wife wanted a navigation system. We agreed that OEM would be best but toyota pretty much doesn’t even offer the stereo as a supported upgrade once a car is delivered and piecing together a system was going to cost me over $3000 it appeared. So I looked into other options to keep the OEM look. It came down to known chinese units on eBay that ran $500 to $800 or this other 3rd party companies product “Rosen”.

Rosen appeared to be better (if solely due to marketing) as it integrated with the factory steering wheel controls and amp etc. I decided I’d buy the unit (DSTY0830H11) and ordered from the lowest price vendor I could find (toolfetch). All in all it was a little over $1000 to get a OEM look navigation system. If only I knew then what I know now.

The system “ok” if you really just want a CD/DVD player with Nav and radio. The software is nothing well done for those options but not terrible either. However if you want to use MP3 playback, oh man it gets bad! Apparently the software allows only up to 2gb non-sdhc microsd cards and if you have a bunch of folders of music… Well… It plays tracks one at a time, in alphabetical order. You can’t choose tracks in anyway shape or form other than choosing next or previous tracks. When you finish the LAST song in a folder you get a menu to choose a new folder. Once that’s done you have no way to choose again until you finish THAT folder too. Needless to say this is un-usable and I decided to look into what could be done.

Upgrading the stereo appears to be offered only if you send the system in and there is no way to tell if they might have better software now or not. Upon thinking about the poor functionality in the software it becomes quite obvious the system IS a $500 chinese player that’s been tooled up to have a really nice install and integration. So knowing this I would have preferred to get the cheap one to start and work on software. Since I already have this we’re going to have to modify it.

The system appears to have 2 distinct sides. The GPS/WinCE side (with 1 SDHC enabled slot), and a Radio/DVD side (with DVD, bluetooth, radio, and 1 non-sdhc slot) which I currently know little about.

The SD card has the map software on it. Looking briefly into how it works we can see it’s got iGo 2006 software and calls it via a maplaunch.ini file specifying \nng\nngnavi.exe to run. With a quick attempt at tossing in total commander’s .exe as this file we get into total commander for wince and can launch up explorer. We now can see we are actually running WinCE 5.0 with 100mb ram. I intend to later test if we can run mp3′s from the wince enviroment and possibly find some better software like TomTom etc. From the explorer I can see there is a second memory slot/unit of some kind called Nand Flash2 which appears to have nothing in it. I will have to spend some time looking into the options from here and will post back when I find something more.

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Why Apple and the iPhone are still second in the smartphone market…

Published at: 03:06 pm - Saturday June 18 2011

So I got a little bored with Android lately and decided to play with a iPhone 4 on verizon since I haven’t seen it yet. First impressions, I liked it, though it’s quite small. Thats not really a problem, I’m just ready for a 4 or 4.3″ screen since I’ve had a 3.7 for over a year now.

But now that I’ve had a few days and tried to customize it a bit let me just put this out there:

HOW THE HECK DOES APPLE NOT REALIZE AFTER OVER 3 YEARS THAT PEOPLE JUST MIGHT WANT TO BE ABLE TO CHANGE THE DARN NOTIFICATION SOUNDS FOR SMS/EMAIL!???!! I mean this is NOT rocket science. It’s the most common thing imaginable and they STILL don’t support it. How do they expect to be able to conquer the market when they can’t even get a BASIC feature taken care of? More to come later…

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Trend Micro is TERRIBLE

Published at: 01:06 pm - Friday June 03 2011

So recently it appears Trend Micro has rated this website as “hacking” which I don’t argue with. And a sub-rating of “dangerous” thus blocking it in their AV program. This is needless to say quite annoying. Lets see. Have we ever in the history of this site tried to trick and/or hack a user? No. We provide information only. And recently not much is even active hacks!

It seems to me if you want a good AV that actually looks into the information they are trying to protect/block then you should stay away from Trend Micro. Any recommendations on “good” products which do their research first?

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HTC Announces Open Bootloader Policy

Published at: 09:05 am - Friday May 27 2011

As of last night HTC posted on twitter and facebook that they intend to open up the bootloader for all future devices. It remains to be seen if this will be retroactive to current new devices and/or soon to be released (already designed) devices. Unrevoked may soon be obsoleted with respect to HTC at least and we are thankful to them. Everyone let them know, this is the RIGHT thing to do!

Of course this makes the current poll obsolete, I will replace it when I decide what to put up next…

Posted in: News by Shadowmite Comments Off , , ,

Lenovo Q100 memory upgrade

Published at: 07:05 am - Monday May 16 2011

So over the weekend I finally got around to looking at upgrading my Lenovo Q100 nettop. Yea, it’s a old little tiny computer with not a whole lotta power and a trashy GPU. But it’s a excellent extremely low power server to run 24×7 and only for only 105kwh a year, or about $10! Regardless Lenovo claims it can’t have a memory upgrade but since I’ve had it running over a year it was time to clean out the dust and prep it for another couple years. I popped the case and there IS a socketed ddr2-667 (pc5300) SO-DIMM slot. Tossed in a 2gb chip for now, maybe in the future I’ll try a 4gb just to see if bios will take it.

Q100 Internals

Posted in: News by Shadowmite 3 Comments

John Eagle’s Sport City Toyota and the “Hard Add” scam…

Published at: 05:04 pm - Tuesday April 05 2011

So I bought a new Toyota Highlander Hybrid for my wife this past weekend from a local Toyota dealership in the area. Sport City Toyota. I had bought from them once before and thought they were a reasonable dealer.

I thought I’d write up a article about a pricing scam they ran on me (apparently BOTH times!) and I imagine run on others as well. Buyer beware in dealing with places like this. Anyway, on with the scam…

So I work out a pretty decent deal on the SUV, $40,500. According to the vehicle sticker the MSRP was $45,223 or so. Needless to say according to the truecar.com website (a EXCELLENT resource) I find this is a great deal and accept to buy at this price. Only problem is, they have a finance guy who’s sole intent is to mislead you into paying more. Willing or not.

So in the finance office they as normal suggest after market warranties. However they don’t show costs for these, instead they opt to show monthly payments for the vehicle loan. Figuring this is part of a scam I did the math to compare the base number to the package numbers and calculate real cost… Little did I know they must intend you to do this and the real scam will still fly by you! But lets move on, the numbers show the silver package (the cheapest plan) to cost about $23 more a month. Across a 60 month loan this is $1400. And to help seal the deal they tell you this “allows” you to get a better interest rate then otherwise possible (Obviously I didn’t catch this at the time, but I believe the interest rate would have really applied with or without the agreed plan. Another Scam!). Regardless I accepted as I wanted the lifetime oil changes they offered with this. The $1400 worked out to only be $250 roughly at the lower interest rate paid if I keep the loan the entire term due to the decrease interest.

They work out the papers and the numbers seem to match up. However there is a problem I didn’t catch until driving home afterward. It started to really bother me until I did all the numbers and couldn’t work out where $1086 of the price I paid went… It simply was not supported by any document. In fact the vehicle purchase price went up exactly that amount but they hide it in a number with tax’s included to mask the change.

Quite simply, Line 1 of the finance contract minus tax should be the agreed price of the $40,500. But it’s $1086 too high! I turn around and go back and ask about this “issue”. They explain that it’s the cost of the lifetime oil changes and windshield package that are “bundled” into the warranty. Yet their price is most certainly not part of the bundle. In fact the original numbers they showed as a base monthly cost already included this $1086 BEFORE I agreed to it. Such that it would seem to cost significantly less then it did. Of course pointing this out and requesting to decline these they ended up lowering the price to a measly $156 over. I begrudgingly accepted since I did want the aftermarket warranty despite my knowledge it’s most likely worthless in reality. They re-did the paperwork and I went on my way.

After thinking about this for several days I decided I most certainly want to make this public, it’s very sad they are resorting to tactics like this and I encourage you all to VERIFY the numbers on the contract. Even with my normal level of watching these numbers closely I missed it until after the fact.

I dug out the contract paperwork from the truck I bought from them 1.5 years ago… Guess what, they did it to me on that one also! Of course I can’t do anything about that sale after this long a time but I most certainly can tell my peers about what happened to me. They might not consider this a scam, but I ask you what else could you call adding a number into a pre-agreed upon price without saying anything about it, or placing it anywhere on paper to be accounted for?

Posted in: News by Shadowmite 2 Comments , , ,

There’s a storm in my pants….

Published at: 07:03 am - Sunday March 20 2011

its just a thunderbolt you sick minded people! :) . Well i raced down to the verizon store to be 1 minute before closing this past Thursday. boy was I pissed! I then raced down to one open an hour later and after lines and heachaches of people i got myself the HTC Thunderbolt with LTE! Sadly i paid full price with taxes ($653), but my inner phone junkie was itching hardcore for the first LTE phone.

So far i love it! The speeds of LTE that is, as far as the phone itself .. meh its just an EVO a year late. I am mad at myself for spending $653 on it when surely i can get one around $500 or so on criagslist already but I just couldn’t resist. Its your regular android phone but with BLAZING FAST speeds. I am sure its because the LTE network is empty at the moments but i am hitting 30Mb PLUS and that was on a tethered file download test not relying on speedtest app.

Will i return it? possibly, just because its too darn expensive for a phone with a year old CPU and tech (besides LTE). I really would like a bionic, however i must see if they goto tiered data before the bionic.

Anyone else grab one?

Posted in: News by ihtc Comments Off
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