Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

I did a bit more research today on Bluetooth headphones, since I seem to be using my new phone as a media player more (and this will only increase when I get the 1Gb MMC card for it). The Nokia wired 'phones have the soul of an epileptic octopus - they seem to tangle themselves up at the slightest provocation and their slightly rubbery cord, while more pleasing than hard plastic, makes them much more difficult to untangle. So wireless 'phones it is.

I found the BlueTake BT-420ex Bluetooth Sports Headphones a while back. They come with the BT430 'audio out to bluetooth' converter dongle that would make these ideal for listening to my Rio Karma or the TV without wires. If they were comfortable then this would be great for Kate. But according to IpDepot, the sole distributor of BlueTake gear in Australia, they're not available in Australia despite being listed on their website. Bummer.

A bit more prodding turned up the BlueAnt X5 stereo headphones. These seem to come with the same type of converter dongle, and function as a headset to boot. Getting a good, comfortable set of earphones that I can use for my home computer, my phone, and to talk on both my phone and on Skype (Linux version of course!) would be excellent. So naturally I'm hesitant at buying a pair from some internet company, trying them on, finding them uncomfortable or difficult to use and then finding that in fact I can't send them back and get a refund. Being forced to join the ranks of dodgy people selling badly-designed half-working things on eBay in order to get a bit of value back on the $200 or more I fork out on these things is not my idea of fun.

So I send off a few emails to a few suppliers asking what their return and refund policies are. I get automated responses from them, but one simply contains the text "RGVhciBWYWx1ZWQgQ3VzdG9tZXINCg0KVGhpcyBpcyBhbiBBVVRPTUFURUQgUkVQTFkgdG8gdGhhbmsgeW91IGZvciB0YWtpbmcgdGhlIHRpbWUgb3V0IHRvIHByb3ZpZGUgdXMgd2l0aCB5b3VyIGVucXVpcnkuICBXZSB2YWx1ZSB5b3VyIGJ1c2luZXNzIGFuZCB3aWxsIGdldCBiYWNrIHRvIHlvdSB3aXRoIGEgcGVyc29uYWwgcmVzcG9uc2Ugd2l0aGluIDI0IGhvdXJzLiANCg0KVGhhbmtzIGZvciB2aXNpdGluZyB3d3cubXJnYWRnZXQuY29tLmF1DQoNCkJlc3QgUmVnYXJkcw0KTXIgR2FkZ2V0IEF1c3RyYWxpYQ0KDQpQaDogMTgwMCA4MzMgMzE1`". Hmmm. The fact that it has '[Auto-Reply] <the original subject of my email to them>' as a subject line indicates to me that it's just an automated reply and something's borked out in it. I send off a quick note to their feedback line telling them that something's wrong.

But the Hacker Button has been pressed, and the desire to know exactly what was in that email and what format it's in has diverted me from doing anything else. A quick play around with Perl's unpack() function (the Camel book includes a miniature Base64 decoder as an example) reveals it to be Base64. The MIME headers on the document say that it was supposed to be Content-type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 and Content-transfer-encoding: 8bit, so obviously it's been mislabelled. The Base64 decoding, however, doesn't elucidate the entire content, however - something's broken in the decoding that causes it to lose sync about a quarter of the way through.

A bit more coding and I have a command-line Base64 encoder in Perl. I recode the start of their message; it looks like they've missed out a character. Paste that in and it makes the next bit come out in plain text but a bit before is now broken. At this stage I've read enough of the message to know that it is an automated reply, so I can at least give up on trying to fix it for now. But at least I'm armed if their actual reply comes out in this format too.

(Later I realised that I could possibly play around with the message content in Thunderbird's mail store, making it look like Base64 encoding, and see what Thunderbird does. But I'll save it for the real message. And besides, it's much more important to blog about it now...)