It keeps happening to me and I’m getting annoyed. I buy a lot of things on eBay and have very rarely had any problems, but more than half of the flash memory I’ve bought has been fake and I think I’d never buy flash from eBay again because of this. Basically the memory stick or card will appear normal. Sometimes the case will look very convincing (like Kingston or Sandisk etc.) You can copy a couple of files onto the memory fine….. BUT it is not the size it pretends to be. Recently bought a 16GB micoSD card that turned out to be a cheap 2GB card. If your files are randomly getting corrupted, here’s how to check:

1. Download H2testw here.
2. Format the memory stick / card so that it has maximum free space and the whole memory can be scanned.
3. Run H2testw which will tell you how much memory really exists.

The following is an example of a 16GB card that only has 1.9GB and is fake:

• The media is likely to be defective.
• 1.9 GByte OK (4028416 sectors)
• 13.6 GByte DATA LOST (28696576 sectors)Details:0 KByte overwritten (0 sectors)
• 0 KByte slightly changed (< 8 bit/sector, 0 sectors)
• 13.6 GByte corrupted (28696576 sectors)
• 0 KByte aliased memory (0 sectors)
• First error at offset: 0x000000007a0fe000
• Expected: 0x000000007a0fe000
• Found: 0×0000000000000000
• H2testw version 1.3
• Writing speed: 4.41 MByte/s
• Reading speed: 7.56 MByte/s
• H2testw v1.4

You can see above that only 13.6GB has DATA LOST. Basically they’ve used a cheap, rejected chip and modified the controller to make it look bigger and sell it for more. Rip off. You may also find the following links helpful:

SOSFakeFlash, Fight flash fraud on eBay

Go to http://www.realtek.com and search for:

RTL8192SE

Scroll down to the software link and then it will give you a list of different drivers. Avoid the one at the top as this is for SU. You want the SE one.

Jupiter works on all laptops and despite being designed for Aurora OS (originally eeebuntu) works fine in Ubuntu to. To install, follow the steps below:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/jupiter
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install jupiter-support-eee jupiter

This will set you up nicely for controlling your EeePC.

Hotkeys don’t work out of the box, you have to add a kernel parameter to the grub config:

Run ‘sudo gedit /etc/default/grub’

Edit the line with GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT and add ” acpi_osi=Linux”.

The line should then look like -> GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash acpi_osi=Linux”

Save and then run ‘sudo update-grub’

Reboot

Little things like receiving texts when you order is going through and being able to check the status online made all the difference. They checked that I was on the right package and genuinely seemed to care. This is a commodity that is becoming all too scarce in this country. People just simply don’t take pride in their jobs any more and don’t care about customer service.

Sure, everybody wants cheap, but at what cost? Having being conned into a terrible deal with Tiscali where by my 10 days cancellation period expired before my service was even connected (it took 2 weeks) I can safely say that I will never get involved in another year long contract with a company that doesn’t take customers seriously.

Which brings me ironically back to O2. Has anyone else noticed that at around 9am and 5pm, despite having great signal strength in the London Bridge area, it is simply impossible to use the 3G network? I mean yesterday it took me over half an hour to send a text. Checking train timetables on my iPhone just didn’t work. I’m not alone here and it is definitely not a handset issue as everywhere else is no problem.

Clearly O2 have overstretched their network. I’m n0t sure if they can do anything about it because of the limit in spectrum available, but I would seriously consider changing networks (when Orange and Vodafone become available) based on this. There’s no point in having a phone that you can’t use. Have emailed them and will await the reply. I look forward to posting it here.

Another thing I hate is that because of this lack of any real standard, it has become necessary for a while to either have a number of different players installed or as the case usually is now, for them to be packaged up inside a flash interface, each with a different UI, none with the easy ability to access the underlying file to download or manipulate and all relying on having flash installed.

I love Flash when it’s doing its Flash thing, but I hate not being allowed it on my iPhone and I really think that Flash is not what videos should be. There is a reason why all websites are not just large Flash files. There is a reason why all website images are not Flash files. Flash has been used to get round the inconvenience of not having a decent standard for video, but really is second best to an ideal solution where all browsers have the inbuilt capacity to play, download, even edit, tag and scan a universal video format.

So along comes HTML 5. Everyone’s happy, we are on the verge of reaching a consensus about OGG Theora and Vorbis for our standards. And Apple and Nokia ruin it. They moan about the fact that the company who created OGG Xiph.org being able to patent it. Yeah, but it is still an open standard. It is still open for people to implement in the way they want. It is still free to adapt and use in every possible device without licensing issues. It is pretty good as far as quality is concerned. What else currently offers such greatness?

I’m convinced the companies who are blocking it’s adoption are doing so merely to srve their own self interest. Apple wants you to use quicktime, they control quicktime. You have to pay them to use it and download their software with their annoying ‘lets install Safari’ crap. But why should I use quicktime on my settopbox, on my Linux desktop. Why should I pay to use restricted software when a perfectly good open and free standard is available? Sure it might be organised by one organisation but it’s a hell of a lot better than what I’d have to live under were I to try and use MP3 or Windows media format.

I think it’s really sad that we’ve lost a great opportunity to move the internet forward to a universal standard that would mean people don’t have to install a whole load of crapware applications designed to peddle other paid services. An opportunity to have all internet videos to work on the iPhone instead of proprietary YouTube only. An opportunity for a thousand developers to make a thousand embedded devices that would all play the same videos. There are people who are simply not skilled enough to deal with the mess that internet video gives us right now. How many grannies understand that you need to download RealPlayer to play real videos and that won’t work in Windows Media Player which they need to play Windows Media files which won’t play on their DVD player. This is unnecessary!

The process involves changing the Library Persistent ID so that both iTunes copies believe they are in fact running from the same library. You’ll need to get down and dirty, hacking the library.itl file using  hex editor, but as long as you take a back up, there will be no danger involved and I found the process quite enjoyable.

Full details can be found over at ismashphone.com

Aside from my view on the monitoring and controlling, I really don’t think this makes technical sense. First because people already have access to iPhones that have been imported from other countries and there is no sign that these will become illegal. Secondly, access will still remain from other devices to the the WiFi hotspots that iPhone users will be denied. These hotspots will be connected to the internet through a normal Chinese ISP which will surely be running the same great firewall software that the authorities will want to run on the mobile network’s servers.

If you are the kind of person who needs to avoid this or don’t want to be tracked, surely you will opt for an imported iPhone without the WiFi disabled, or some of the numerous other mobiles that do have it and you can buy in China. Also, what extra do they really get from restricting people to the 3G internet? Will there be extra monitoring or restricted access? If so, won’t people just wait to go home or pop into a web cafe to post or access the data they cannot on their iPhone. Surely in this kind of restricted regime, you have to block all access or none. The people who need it, will always know of the easiest method to get access and use that anyway. In the mean time, the majority of normal users will suffer significant loss of functionality just to try and prevent what is ultimately impossible to restrict.

Things to remember -

• Run SignSIS in XP compatibility mode, otherwise you can’t output signed files in Vista.
• Wait for HelloOX to do it’s thing. It can take a long time.
• I tested successfully with HelloOX 1.04
• I’m using SignSIS 1.1

I got HelloOX 1.04 from here.

I got SignSIS 1.1 from here.

I got my certificate by following the links in my previous post.

Please do not use this method for running pirate software on the Nokia E63. This should be used for testing purposes only or to run stuff that needs to be released without waiting to be signed or software Nokia don’t like. Software piracy is possibly illegal.