Voodoo Business

Voodoo Business is a blog about technology and other things I consider magical such as carpentry and crafts, if you are looking for a different type of magic, I apologize, the name might be misleading.

And sometimes I cover some not so magical shit about not technical experiences that i sometimes go through (none yet but it is a possibility).

I understand that modern technology doesn’t provide all types of magic, (Getting your love life back, cursing someone, you know….) so I think it is appropriate to at least serve you a list of devices and tools to help you out…

• ouija boards
• Quality bakhour and sand
• Crystal balls
• Tarot cards

When it comes to MP3 players, there is definitely no shortage, but finding a good one is a task

Here are the most popular one, each with it’s advantages and disadvantages

Retro Music Player

Open source: github
Available on google play and F-Droid
Elegant, plays music files and does not do much more
Appears to be written in Kotlin

Fossify Music Player

Open Source: Github
Available on Google Play and F-Droid
Elegant, plays music files and does not do much more
Appears to be written in Kotlin

id3 tags were meant to be a simple way to store metadata in MP3 files, slowly but steadily, things became a bit more complicated

Originally, ID3 tags were meta data near the end of a file, then ID3V2 came along, and meta tags were moved to the beginning (With an ID3V1 copy at the end added by most ID3 editors)

Album artwork is another complication, As it may be embedded in the file, An older method used to depend on keeping an image called “cover.jpg” in the folder where the file is stored.

You can also have “user-defined fields”, which can be helpful if you are developing a music player that has some novel ideas

ID3 tag information can be obtained from gnudb.org, MusicBrainz, Discogs, Amazon

Gnome

• EasyTAG: GIT = tag editor for MP3, Ogg Vorbis files and more
  Written in C,
  Dep: libid3-3.8.3v5 libid3tag0 libopusfile0 – Suggested: libid3-tools

KDE

• KID3

LINUX Command Line

• id3:
• id3edit: GIT = id3edit is a command line ID3v2 tag editor and debugger

Windows

• MP3TAG: Freeware (Not free as in freedom), But great software nonetheless 😉

I run windows in KVM, and the QEMU android Emulator that ships with Android studio crashes all the time, so the obvious solution, with all those android devices I have is to connect a phone to android studio, It is faster and spares me the hassle of finding out why nested virtualization is so terrible

But having a phone connected via USB is not optimal, as i have to pick it up every time i want to run my under development software on it !

The answer seems to be in the

1- install Android WiFi ADB : A plugin easy to install in Android studio

2- A phone with Android 11 and above

So let us do this step by step

1. Download SDK platform-tools and install it (Copy it somewhere and add that to your system path)
2. Enable developer options on the phone (Keep tapping build number)
3. From developer options, Enable wireless debugging
4. Select Pair device with pairing code. Take note of the pairing code, IP address, and port number displayed on the device (see the above image).
5. Open the command prompt and run the command adb pair ipaddr:port
   adb pair 192.168.7.101:45353
   Enter pairing code: xxxxxx
   daemon not running; starting now at tcp:5037
   daemon started successfully
   Successfully paired to 192.168.7.101:45353 [guid=adb-RF8M4xxxxxxx-xxxxxxx]
6. Now, to have it appear as a device in android studio… Go to wireless debugging and notice the port number, then using that IP and port, use the following command
   adb connect 192.168.7.101:35127
7. Recommended: Install the “Android WiFI ADB” plugin in android studio

Solution 1: Buy a license

Solution 2: Switch to MAC or linux

Solution 3: edit the registry key “Start” in the folder HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> SYSTEM -> CurrentControlSet -> Services – > svsvc | And modify the start entry from 3 to 4 then restart Windows

Solution 4: Through command line 😉

The official VSCODE extension for rust is called (rust-analyzer) by rust-lang.org

To install rust, All you need is the installer, you can get it from rustup.rs, it might fire up a visual studio installer for the builder if you are running windows…

So, to check that you have rust installed on your computer, You may want to run the following command

rustc --version

In my case, it responds with (rustc 1.77.0 (aedd173a2 2024-03-17))

To update rust, you will need to run the commadn

rustup update

If you want to create a new rust project you CD into a directory where you want the project to be, and issue the command

cargo new projectname

Now, you can open the projectname directory in VSCODE to start working on a project

If at any time you want to update the dependancies in your project, you can simply issue the command

cargo update

from within the project directory, this should update the cargo.lock file etc….

To add libraries to cargo, visit crates.io and you can get the names of the libraries you can add to Cargo.toml

As part of my paranoia when using windows (Fear of ransomware or spyware or otherwise), I allow my web browser to connect via proxy, and the rest of the machine’s apps have no internet access (Which is a KVM virtual machine, with USB and graphics passthrough)

Now, recently, Applications are no longer running on windows 10 ! Instead, I am getting a message that reads :

SmartScreen can't be reached right now. 

Check your internet connection. Microsoft defender SmartScreen is unreachable and can't help you decide if this app is okay to run.

Publisher: xxxx
App: xxxx

This seems to be something relevant to Microsoft security, where windows consults with Microsoft before running an app for the first time !

My solution is to disable it, why, because I have to pick one method or the other to protect my computer, and antivirus software, although works if you download torrents etc… doesn’t really detect the latest threats, when they say detects and removes 99% of viruses, this includes all viruses from 1981 onward, and very few of the most recent viruses and threats, so the question remains, if i am not downloading torrents and the like, what are the odds i would meet Michelangelo

So, the steps to disable this are as follows

The list of questions and information will probably continue to grow until i end up buying a new electric car, so i will keep updating this list as i find out more about this car.

I am thinking of getting the Toyota BZ4X, So I will be posting my findings here, the order of the questions is counter intuitive, because I always prefer to start at the place that branches most

– Is the Toyota BZ4x exactly the same as the Subaru Solterra ?

• All the research up to now says they are identical, but i have not been able to validate this conclusion yet

– Which diagnostics software does the car use ?

Why so early with this question ? because the upcoming questions need to adapt to answer this one which provides better questions down the line !

On the Toyota Techstream website, there is a claim that Version 18 works with the BZ4X, I will test this in person hopefully today.

– The BZ4X sold in china is made by GAC MOTOR (FAW no longer makes them), while the one sold in north america is made in Japan, are those cars exactly the same ?

My research up to this point says they should be, but I can’t seem to find any differences besides the battery size

– Cars sharing the e-TNGA platform share what exactly ?

Electric motor location, driver positioning, and battery width are fixed between all the models that will use this platform (Toyota, Subaru, Suzuki, Daihatsu, and possibly mazda)! Number of batteries, Wheelbase, and anything not mentioned in the fixed list can probably be different

– Maintenance and possible pitfalls

To begin with, I still drive a Nissan Leaf 2014, with over 100K Kilometers on it, and 10 bars of battery health, the car has paid for itself over the past few years (Before the most recent electricity hike in Jordan)

So, because one point leads to the other, going through the 3 points above in the counter intuitive direction (In reverse) makes more sense

The mnost common OBD2 adapter used with Toyota techstream is a $20 clone of the XHORSE brand adapter

This adapter is slow to say the least, So i will be comparing it to the Godiag adapter in terms of speed and functionality since they both can work on techstream, and they are priced almost the same.

In linux, the adapter has the IDs (0403:6001), which is naturally the UART side of the adapter, the complete lsusb line is

Bus 003 Device 003: ID 0403:6001 Future Technology Devices International, Ltd FT232 Serial (UART) IC

To pass this to virtual machines, a file needs to be made , so create the file ““/etc/libvirt/qemu/usb/xhorseclone.xml”

<hostdev mode='subsystem' type='usb' managed='yes'>
    <source>
        <vendor id='0x0403'/>
        <product id='0x6001'/>
    </source>
</hostdev>

This way, we can attach and detach this device to the virtual machine with the commands

virsh attach-device toyota --file /etc/libvirt/qemu/usb/xhorseclone.xml --current
virsh detach-device toyota --file /etc/libvirt/qemu/usb/xhorseclone.xml --current

This is much simpler than you’d expect (provided there are no hardware passthoughs, and there usually isn’t), All you need to do is copy both the Disk and the XML file (Typically in /etc/libvirt/qemu) then

1- edit the following in the XML file

Create a new virtual machine ID

uuidgen

Create new MAC addresses for every network adapter

https://olavmrk.github.io/html-macgen/

Change the path to the disks to point to where you put the new copy of the disks

Thats it, now you need to tell KVM about it so….

2- Tell KVM about the new definition with the define function

virsh define /etc/libvirt/qemu/newxmlfile.xml

My $25 GoDiag GD101 Nano showed up in the mail yesterday, Acording to the seller, it has functionality similar to Tactrix Openport 2.0, but we are yet to test this theory

Planning to test the tool with a bunch of software and post results here

Since the tool makes no claim about being compatible with Mercedes xentry passthrough, I will be starting there (Verified, Works well with Xentry/DAS, Speed is not bad, no special setup required besides installing the driver)

as soon as I plug in the godiag USB, windows 10 Added USB Serial Device (COM 3) at 9600bps, 8 data bits, and 1 stop bit, while Linux (lsusb) returned “Bus 003 Device 005: ID e327:2534 NATIONS N32G43x Port”, again, this is probably just the UART adapter, and has nothing to do with what to expect in terms of functionality

To begin with, I will be installing everything in a KVM machine, and passing the godiag device to it with the following file “/etc/libvirt/qemu/usb/godiag.xml”

<hostdev mode='subsystem' type='usb' managed='yes'>
    <source>
        <vendor id='0xe327'/>
        <product id='0x2534'/>
    </source>
</hostdev>

Then, I can attach/detach the device with

virsh attach-device mercedes --file /etc/libvirt/qemu/usb/godiag.xml --current
virsh detach-device mercedes --file /etc/libvirt/qemu/usb/godiag.xml --current