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Stolen phone – ideas?

Okay, as a few people know, my phone was stolen a few weeks ago when I was in London. Not long after, I emailed O2 to let them know what had happened – O2 then put a restriction on my phone and sim to stop it being used – not that I thought for a minute that a thief would be stupid enough to use the phone to call their friends or anything. I was wrong.

My new sim card arrived this morning, and had no credit whatsoever on it – it had around £10 when I lost it, so another email to O2 was in order… maybe they temporarily removed the credit to stop anybody else using it as part of their ‘restrictions’. No. My phone went missing out of my pocket on 3rd April, and 10 calls were made on 4th April.

However, O2 have been nice enough to provide me with the 3 numbers that were called the day after it was stolen. I know I was drunk, but I highly doubt I would have phoned 2 random mobiles that I didn’t know, and somebody in Algeria. Since I now have this information – anybody got any suggestions of what I should do with it?

The options I can see are:

Phone the numbers, shout at people, tell them how much of a cunt their friend is. This will cost me more money, and probably not make me feel a great deal better.
Phone the police and tell them what I know, although it’s unlikely they will bother doing anything about one stolen phone… they are the police, after all. The Metropolitan police, at that.
SMS bomb the numbers involved, informing them that their friend is an arsehole.

Anybody else got any ideas?

O2 – More guff

Okay, to explain – O2 emailed me back with some totally unrelated gibberish about Philip not getting his O2 topup surprises. In other words, they just sent me an email meant for someone else… I would have thought their system would just let you hit ‘reply’, but seemingly not. Anyway, I then got this fairly standard email about 20 minutes later, which was in a way helpful, but still ignored the whole credit thing (it’s not really worth reading):

Continue reading O2 – More guff

O2 – Please stop fucking me around.

So since O2 are being useless, I decided to email them using the “Customer Service” part of their website.

Since messages are limited to 1500 characters, and my email went slightly over that (2622 chars) I will just post it here to save the trouble of re-writing it. Maybe if half of my problems had been resolved in the past 2 emails I sent, we wouldn’t have this problem.

Hello,

I did have a long email typed out here, but it was apparently too long for your shoddy website, so I have posted it on mine instead. Please see my blog post at http://www.warmonkey.net/2010/03/14/o2-email/ and contact me at ******@********.co.uk

Please also note that If I receive a pre-written templated response to this, I will be leaving your network, and ensure that nobody I know ever deals with O2 in the future.

Kind regards,

Mark

Perhaps you would rather I sent you a tweet next time, O2?

Continue reading O2 – Please stop fucking me around.

Amin Balti Takeaway

As someone who eats a lot of pizza, and someone who used to design fast food flyers for a living, I always pay a bit too much attention to the ones that drop through my letterbox on an almost daily basis. Sometimes I get a bit pissed off by the fact that some absolutely atrocious designers are in gainful employment, while I’m sat here being a bum. This, though, is just straight out fucking hilarious.

Click for bigger (and the best map I have ever seen)

HTC Unlocking

Well, it might have taken a while, but I can at last use my new phone.

First, the nav buttons were broken, so an RMA to HTC fixed that… (ha!)

Then I couldn’t sim unlock it, so I tried some guy on ebay – he couldn’t do it… but to be fair, he emailed me back within a few hours on a Saturday night, to say he couldn’t, and refunded me. Then I had Rach try it at the place down near Leicester market… he couldn’t do it, but gave her a URL that would do it for £20. Fuck that.

I emailed another site – IMEI check, and within a few hours, they’d unlocked it. Seems they can unlock any HTC phone, and are pretty efficient about it too. A nice backlink to IMEI-check’s HTC Unlocking.

My computer is shit. My router is shit. Everything is shit!

Over the past few weeks I’ve not been having much luck, as far as computers go. I got my RMA’d hard drive, after waiting about 2 months to send the old one off.

Something I have neglected to mention on here, is that just about the same time I started pissing about with Hard Drive RMA requests and such, my machine started crashing, and generally running like shit. This is nothing new really, so I just installed new a new anti-virus app, some other anti-malware shit, and thought nothing of it.

Then it started doing it specifically when I was doing something graphics intensive. Okay – I’m running an old card, but it’s normally alright for basic games. Anyway, out with the card – the fan has seized up and baked… to the point where the clear plastic has gone brown and cracked.

Fair enough, I retract the invitation for FIARRRR to visit my PC, and stick the only other GPU fan I have on it and not play any games until a replacement arrives. On goes the fan off an ancient GeForce 2 (after some persuading with a pair of pliers and some wire sheathing)… still fucked. Sod it, I’ll use my laptop (craptop).

Now we play the waiting game. 5 weeks… no fans have arrived – I complain, get a refund. 7 weeks… holy shit – they DID post them! In goes the new fan. Still slow as shit, but not crashing as much. I need to install Windows 7 anyway, so it all works out alright.

Speaking of Windows 7 – I’ve been running it on my laptop for a while now, it seems alright.

It seemed alright UNTIL MY FUCKING LAPTOP CHARGER DECIDED TO BLOW UP. The second charger I have had for that laptop is sadly no more. I now have no laptop, a slow as shit desktop, a server with no hard drive, and 2 other desktops that are hardly worth powering up.

I suppose in a way that sometimes things that are a bit of a burden can work out fairly well. For a while, I’ve had ChadWinkle’s laptop sat in the spare room, waiting for a new screen (and hasn’t been powering up for weeks). Reseated RAM and wifi card, and it works again. Thank fuck for that. External monitor… top banana. So that’s where we are today, computer wise. Until I get some jewgold next week, and buy a new machine.

Then there is my router.

For years, I’ve had absolutely no trouble from my router. Since I switched to PlusNet back in 2005, I’ve had 8 IP addresses… pretty good for assigning each machine a separate IP, and of course the VPN, VOiP phone, and other such devices I invented to justify having 8 static IPs. The router has had no problem mapping these IP addresses to local addresses using the web GUI.

Another thing my router is good for is Wireless range. That means I can get onto my network from anywhere in the house and garden. It also means every other fucker around here can see my SSID. If everyone can see it, why not make it something funny? Bwhahahaha.

Well, anyway… the other day I changed it a few times, and settled for ‘BITCHES DONT KNOW BOUT MY WIFI‘. Next morning I go to do something or other on the spare room PC, and the SSID has changed back to the default one. I hadn’t seen the default SSID since I set the fucking thing up in 2005, so this was a bit of a shock. Suppose I’d better secure up my network… hey, I might as well update the firmware too, right?

Wrong. Mistake number 1.

Well, right if you want to plug in your router, stick in your password, and go. The new firmware is essentially that of a fucking BT Home Hub. If you want to do anything else, keep the original firmware. No problem, it can’t have changed that much, and I still have a backup of the old config… I’ll load that up, and we’ll be back on track, right?

Wrong. Mistake number 2.

The router will now not boot, won’t reset factory settings, and I have no internet to find out how the fuck I am going to fix this mess. Luckily for me, there are plenty of Home Hubs around here, and people who own Home Hubs, although they don’t know it, are very generous with their bandwidth.

If anyone reading this has fucked the config on their Speedtouch router, and can’t get into it to reset the factory settings – do this:

Turn off the device
Plug the ethernet cable you’re using into port 1 on the router
Hold down the reset button on the back of the router with a pen or paperclip
Power the router up whilst still holding the reset button – hold it down for 15 seconds
Run the firmware update program within 1 minute (it will try to boot normally after this)

This should allow you to restore everything to factory settings.

Thank fuck for that. At least now I have some sort of interwebs access without having to ‘borrow’ someone else’s, but it still doesn’t solve my original problem. I’ve read the entire manual – it doesn’t look that difficult.

Until this happens… with no sodding explanation:

Thanks Thomson. I love it when you change stuff for no apparent reason to make things difficult.

After a fair bit of pissing about… in telnet… I’ve managed to get my IPs mapped. Again, for anyone who’s stumbled across this on the googles, here is how you do it:

Open a telnet client (upto and including XP, start > run > telnet
Assuming this is the IP for your router – the command
```
o 10.0.0.138
```
The default username and password are ‘admin’ ‘password’. Funny that.
Command (assuming 123.123.123.123 is the IP allocated by your ISP, and 10.0.0.50 is your local IP):

nat mapadd intf=Internet type=NAT outise_addr=123.123.123.123 inside_addr=10.0.0.50

That should have done the trick – you can check what you’ve just done by typing the command
```
nat maplist
```

Maybe I should invest in a new router. And stop writing very long, very dull articles.

New hellophone

Looks like I have a new telephone. A HTC s710.

£40 off the ebays. Winrar!

Seagate = winrar!

The other day I managed to break my external hdd (1 Tb Seagate Freeagent), which sucks pretty bad since I have about 20,000 mp3s on there, along with a whole load of strange pornography, and other stuff I wanted to keep.

I submitted an RMA ticket with Seagate, since I am only just over a year into a 5 year warranty, fully expecting to be told to send it back and get a replacement, but lose everything on the drive. Sure enough, they told me to do that, and if I wanted the data back, I could use their data recovery company of choice.

Since it was only the USB port that had snapped off, I pointed out that all it would take is them to ghost the info over to the new drive or let me open it and copy the data myself.

I was rather surprised when this arrived in my inbox:

Thank you for the additional information.

Your request has been approved to crack open your external drive, take it out of
the external enclosure and connect it internally to your system to retrieve your data.

It is not a guarantee that the data will be able to be retrieved but it is a great attempt. 

When you go on the website, it is recommended that you still process an
RMA and send me your RMA or order number. Please be sure to send me the RMA
number, since otherwise any drive return would be rejected. Usually when someone
opens their case, it voids the warranty, here we would like to make an exception
for you.

Awesome. But there’s more!

When you connect your drive internally you should be able to copy and paste the
data onto your computer so you can have your data, then send us the old
defective drive with all of its components (external enclosure etc). With the
Advanced option you'll be able to have the replacement drive right away so you
can place your data back on there. Or you can do the standard option and after
you are done copying and pasting your data you could return the drive and its
components and when we receive your drive you'll be issued another within 7-10
business days.

Now I just have to wait for my new SATA controller to arrive (hooray for living in the stone age) so I can get the data off.

Job hunting

Ha!

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