Hello beautiful peoples!
I hate Mondays… And any other days that name ends with Y… Sometimes… 😉
I woke up in a foul mood today… I bricked my MacMini3,1 last night while using DosDude1‘s “APFS Boot Rom” Patcher. Yes yes yes… I knew the risks and I don’t blame Collin. He is a good Dude and is not responsible for my bad luck… Does not change the fact that I was pissed off with myself for bricking this machine. I know… I know… I KNOW! It was a pain in the lower back for years. It would accept DosDude1’s High Sierra patcher but not the Mojave OR Catalina. It would fail to boot anything using the OpenCore… PITA…
Anyway. Last night I ran the software, it dumped the firmware, it patched the firmware, it wrote the firmware. I rebooted and now it beeps. 3 short, 3 long and 3 short again. SOS. Firmware is bricked. I am not sure if I can fix it. Firmware is not an operating system You can just reinstall. Firmware is a specific class of computer software that provides the low-level control for a device’s specific hardware. It can be thought of as the “permanent software” that is embedded into a piece of hardware, like the BIOS in a computer. Replacing it (or flashing it) once the machine is bricked can be difficult (if manufacturer created a way), very difficult IF You’re good with hardware hacking OR just straight impossible… It was 2:30 in the morning when it happened. I went to bed cranky and guess what? Woke up cranky and grumpy too.
Then the Irish An-Post delivered a package. Great! 3 minutes later ANOTHER person delivered a ESB (Electric) Bill. Two different people. Delivered 2 different items. Within 3 minutes of each other. And then my phone beeped and I looked at it…
WTF? I thought… Was there a third person trying to deliver third item here in the last 3 minutes? HOW did they failed to deliver the item? Both wife and myself are home. House is quiet. No doorbells. No knocking. No delivery notification letters… What the actual f…. I am guessing that the person that delivered my first package today had the other package in the car and forgot to give it to me so they never bothered coming back and they marked it as “Undeliverable” and will try delivering it later today… OR tomorrow. OR (and this thought pissed me off then the electric bill) they tried delivering it to the wrong house and left the delivery notice there… Not the first time… [Edit: Package finally delivered 24 hours later. Reasons for delivery hiccups? An-Post… More reasons unknown… but do we need one?]
And then it happened. I got a phone call from an Irish landline number. I didn’t know the number. I answered.
“Hi this is PERSON from COMPANY I am calling about BUSINESS, can you confirm your full name and address for the security purposes?”.
Recently (for a few years now) Ireland was discovered as a potential market for a phone call scammers. Missed calls from mobile numbers you do not know – if you call them back turns out You called a premium hotline number in Cat knows where… People calling pretending to work for Microsoft or Amazon or Revolut. Trying to get your details, card numbers etc. I don’t like giving away my personal data but I HATE giving away my personal data to people pretending this is for my safety… and I immediately approached the conversation like a dog approaches the hedgehog. Curiously. Cautiously. Baring fangs…
“You rang me. Why would I confirm anything to you?” I asked…
“Its because of the data protection…” PERSON replied.
“Yes yes yes… You’re calling me. You know my phone number from somewhere. You CLAIM you know my name and address but You want ME to CONFIRM it to you… Because You’re worried it may leak into WRONG HANDS?… How am I suppose to know that You’re not scamming me?”
Eventually this PERSON turns out to be legit. I apologized for not being the most polite person in the world. We worked out all the details of the BUSINESS… but they were not very happy with me. Yes I behaved like a scallywag. Because it sounded like such an obvious scam… and we should not be polite to scammers.
Believe it or not – more than two years after I quit smoking and I still miss cigarettes sometimes. I am glad I dumped the nasty habbit… BUT I do miss them. On a day like today I would smoke “one” just to calm the nerves down. This his how dangerous nicotine addiction is.
What would you do? Are you nice to all the callers? Are you getting a lot of scam callers where you live? Drop me a comment.
Catch you on the flip side,
AndrzejL
