f-log

You know what I hate? Legal parasitism, that is, things that are not illegal but are so close that they should be.

A good example is the "Star registry" where you can "Name a star" but, of course you cannot, in any meaningful way.

Today I got a "Domain Alert: ########## This is your Final Reminder of Domain - ##########.COM" email. Which is odd because I have not received any non-final reminders and my domain registrar takes care of these things.

Sadly this is not the first time I have had any email worded in this way. I almost admire the effort that has gone into this spam.

1. My name and my Domain name with the urgency of a "Final" reminder.
2. The first 18 lines then reinforce the urgency and the official nature of the email by quoting my domain registration details, name, address. There is also a deadline of two days after the email was sent.
3. Line 19 uses the term "PART I: REVIEW SOLICITATION" which is their first legal "get-out".
4. The next 8 lines claim to be saving you from losing your domain and again attempt to appear genuine.
5. Another casual "get-out" line "Privatization allows the consumer a choice when registering."
6. Finally a line that makes sense "You are under no obligation to pay the amounts stated below unless you accept this proposal. Do not discard, this notice is not an invoice it is a courtesy reminder to register your domain name search engine registration so your customers can locate you on the web."
7. Followed by "This Notice for: WWW.###########.COM will be terminated on May 29, 2017 Act today!", which can be read in two ways.
8. Then a price list and how to make payments.
9. At the very end is the juicy "small text".

By accepting this proposal, you agree not to hold DS liable for any part. Note that THIS IS NOT A BILL. This is a solicitation. You are under no obligation to pay the amounts stated unless you accept this proposal. The information in this letter contains confidential and/or legally privileged information from the notification processing department of the DS 3501 Jack Northrop Ave. Suite #F9238 Hawthorne, CA 90250 USA, This information is intended only for the use of the individual(s) named above. There is no pre-existing relationship between DS and the domain mentioned above. This notice is not in any part associated with a continuation of services for domain registration. Search engine submission is an optional service that you can use as a part of your website optimization and alone may not increase the traffic to your site. If you do not wish to receive further updates from DS reply with Remove to unsubscribe. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that disclosure, copying, distribution or the taking of any action in reliance on the contents of this letter is strictly prohibited.


Where to start?

This email is very clearly laid out to deliberately deceive the reader while offering enough legal "get-outs" that the company cannot get sued. When first glancing through the email the clear intention is to appear official, in-fact the only place this point is clarified is the small text "There is no pre-existing relationship between DS and the domain mentioned above. This notice is not in any part associated with a continuation of services for domain registration." But the small text is never referenced and looks like standard email disclaimer text and even appears after a row of dashes separating it from the main email body.

As we already know this is spam, note 7 above reads that the email is the notice referred to and not the domain. But, when the email is taken at face value then the termination mentioned appears to be your domain !!

"Do not discard, this notice is not an invoice" Except every part of the mail does appear to be an invoice.

Always read the small print!

Of course this is all my personal opinion and nothing illegal is taking place. This has been going on for years so people must be a)falling for it or b)accepting the solicited services in complete knowledge of what it is. All emphasise has been added by me for clarity.

I feel so much better after that rant.

No Raspberry Pi Hi-Res updates for a bit. I have "Joe's Robot Challenge" and work thing to "work" on. Not to mention catching up on "Game of Thrones" and "Futurama". Life is very busy!

That said, something today infuriated me so I guess I will blog on that, such is internet tradition.

Raspberry Pi 3 HiRes
(slow but steady)

[X]Board in Blender
-[X]Measure board
-[X]Model
-[X]Texture
-[X]Components on the bottom
-[ ]Components on the top
--[X]GPIO pins
--[X]Camera connector
--[X]Display connector (identical to the camera connector)
--[X]Broadcom chip
--[X]Other chip (networking and USB, I think)
--[X]USB power connector
--[ ]HDMI connector
--[ ]Headphone jack
--[ ]Ethernet connector
--[ ]USB connector pair x2 (making four)
--[ ]Micro components, like capacitors (loads of these)

Both the chips are done. Because they are just cuboids it is very straightforward to create the correct UV(making sure scaling is applied). As I had already separated the chip images I just copy and pasted them onto the exported UV image and then used the GIMP fill from pattern-clipboard to do the sides and bottom.

USB Power connector took about 1.5hrs. Started with a plane and Mirror Modifier and then just went to town extruding edges. Once the flat shape was complete I added a Solidify Modifier and the metal sheets had some depth. The Mirror Modifier is my new best friend after using it for the CSI connectors. It really is the best way to deal with symmetrical models.

Another neat trick I found was to create a Cube on the main circuit board model position and scale it then set it to display only as wire-frame. Move it to another layer, do all my modelling within the box and then when I switched back to the main model it fitted perfectly.

How I killed sudo, but first, what the hell I was trying to do.

I had three VMs in VirtualBox and needed to network them together. The documentation is a bit vague on this but the answer is quite simple.

In the VM network settings add a new adaptor and set is as Host. Then in the the VirtualBox network settings for the Host adaptors make sure DHCP is disabled.

Now when you look at the network adaptors in the VMs they will have another interface that is missing the IP address, netmask etc.
You can either manually set this, but lose it on reboot or set a permanent static address.

This is easy. Edit /etc/network/interfaces and add the static entry. For me this was

#virtual host network static IP address
auto enp0s8
iface enp0s8 inet static
address 10.0.3.1
network 10.0.3.0
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 10.0.2.2
dns-nameservers 8.8.8.8 10.0.2.2
(do not use this example unless you know what you are doing, it caused more problems, read the whole post to fix)

Where 10.0.3.1 is your machines IP address. 10.0.3.n is favoured as VirtualBoxs interfaces e.g. 10.0.2.X for interface 1 then 10.0.3.X for interface 2 and so on.

Hang on, I thought this post was about killing sudo.

So on the first machine I made this change rebooted and everything looked good but on the second one, after making the change and rebooting I tried sudo ifconfig and got nothing
It just sat there CTRL+c would get me back to the bash prompt but nothing else.

Tried lots of commands with sudo and got nowhere
...snip
...found lots and lots of posts about sudo not working but ALL of the them displayed error messages, none just "hung".
...time passes..

I think to myself I only changed the /etc/network/interfaces file maybe I should start there.
Low and behold there was my mistake.


#virtual host network static IP address
auto enp0s8
iface enp0s8 inet dhcp
address 10.0.3.2
network 10.0.3.0
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 10.0.2.2
dns-nameservers 8.8.8.8 10.0.2.2

AGHhhh! It was set to dhcp not static.

The sudo command was stuck trying something network-ish and taking ages to timeout.

I tested this and that was what it was. sudo had not hung but was waiting for a network timeout.

Edited the /etc/network/interfaces entry to be static and everything started working again.

Phew

P.s. I could then get each VM to ping 10.0.3.1 ,2,3 without issue.

--HALT--

AGHhhh now I cannot get to any external addresses!

Needed to remove the default gateway from the second network adaptor.
route -n
Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
0.0.0.0         10.0.2.2        0.0.0.0         UG    0     0        0 enp0s8
10.0.2.0        0.0.0.0         255.255.255.0 U     0     0        0 enp0s3
10.0.3.0        0.0.0.0         255.255.255.0 U     0     0        0 enp0s8


sudo route del default


Comment out the


#network 10.0.3.0
#gateway 10.0.2.2
#dns-nameservers 8.8.8.8 10.0.2.2


Lines in /etc/network/interfaces

sudo service networking restart

So it becomes

Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
0.0.0.0         10.0.2.2        0.0.0.0         UG    0     0        0 enp0s3
10.0.2.0        0.0.0.0         255.255.255.0 U     0     0        0 enp0s3
10.0.3.0        0.0.0.0         255.255.255.0 U     0     0        0 enp0s8

Last quick check.

[X] Can ping other VMs
[ ] Can ping google com (but does DNS)
[X] Can curl google com

Not quite sure why I cannot ping google com. But it does resolve and actual TCP/IP calls works(curl).

Now its sorted.

Raspberry Pi 3 HiRes
(lots to do but, lots done!)

[X]Board in Blender
-[X]Measure board
-[X]Model
-[X]Texture
-[X]Components on the bottom
-[ ]Components on the top
--[X]GPIO pins
--[X]Camera connector
--[X]Display connector (identical to the camera connector)
--[ ]Broadcom chip
--[ ]Other chip (networking and USB, I think)
--[ ]USB power connector
--[ ]HDMI connector
--[ ]Headphone jack
--[ ]Ethernet connector
--[ ]USB connector pair x2 (making four)
--[ ]Micro components, like capacitors (loads of these)

It is quite difficult getting the exact details at this scale and I have already made some cosmetic alterations. I might revisit these at the end, they are not obvious.
The first one is the pins in the SD card slot are shifted over by the slight misalignment of the window hole that you can see the spring in. The second is the shifting of the GPIO pins to match the solder points on the underside of the board. The top and bottom textures are not quite the same size :( If it affects any of the other components with obvious solder points on the underside of the board I will have to fix the texture.

The ReMesh modifier on the SD card slot was a bit more expensive than I first thought. 120k faces created! But looked pretty. Applying the Decimate modifier over and over again got it down to a very reasonable 600 faces.

The display connector caused some concern. None of the photos are looking at the board from the outside, meaning the current perspective hides all the detail on the outer side of the connector. I had to do some gimping to restore the white box that holds the connector before I could start work on the 3D object.