Skye's Blog of Doom

If you're going to take the trouble to sending out a phishing email, at least check your English spelling and grammar, people. Here's a classic that recently appeared in my inbox:

Dear customer,

It occures here to us that you or a wrong person is unusually trying to log into his your account because it has being trying to login by unknow person who provides to us your accurate ussername with wrong password, of which by what we are seeing here, the person might log into this account if nothing is done, since he's missing only one letter from what we have here as yourpassword.

Besides, five more wrong login into this account might couse you service suspenssion that will require your coming to the bank for clearification. So the earlier you get this account updated the better for you. So click on this below link to re-proccess your onling banking to update to avoid service suspension.

Does anyone actually fall for that?

# posted by Skye Poier Nott : 10:48 AM  0 comments

For quite a long time I'd been happily using my girlfriend's Mac formatted iPod with iTunes 6 on my Windows PC by using the great and wonderful MacDrive HFS driver. After upgraded to iTunes 7 though, for some reason it stopped working. About a week later the MacDrive 6.1.5 update was released, promising compatibility with iTunes 7 but iTunes still wouldn't recognize the iPod and insisted it needed to be reformatted for Windows.

I decided to try uninstalling and reinstalling MacDrive which pointed to the real problem. Apparently Daemon Tools (which I use to mount ISO images on drive letters, saves having to burn them) uses a "SCSI Passthrough Device" to fake its drive letters and that interferes with MacDrive operation, detailed in this knowledgebase article. I uninstalled Daemon Tools, rebooted, deleted SPTD*.sys from WINDOWS\System32\Drivers, rebooted again, and reinstalled MacDrive.

Success! iTunes 7 now recognizes the Mac formatted iPod again. Apparently more recent versions of Daemon Tools don't use the SPTD driver, but I haven't tried installing a newer version to see if it will coexist better with MacDrive. I'm just glad we both have lots of podcasts to listen to on the long bus ride back from Vancouver next week.

# posted by Skye Poier Nott : 11:02 PM  0 comments

I got sick of not being able to listen to my favourite CBC podcasts so I did some Googling and found this article at Apple:

Fifth Generation iPod resets when playing some mono MP3 songs and podcasts

Basically, you just have to turn off the EQ and lo, no more iPod crash when I try to play "Best of As It Happens" or "C'est la Vie: Word of the Week". I'm surprised Apple hasn't released a new revision of the iPod firmware to fix it.

# posted by Skye Poier Nott : 11:41 PM  1 comments